| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Blix by Frank Norris: wits are turned on that subject. He WILL have it that the body
hasn't decomposed in all this time. Good seaman enough, and a
first-class navigator, but he's soft in that one spot."
Chapter IV
"Oh, but the STORY of it!" exclaimed Condy as he and Travis
regained the wharf--"the story of it! Isn't it a ripper. Isn't it
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: accidents, and not among the forms or natures of individuals of the same
species.
I will not hesitate, however, to avow my belief that it has been my
singular good fortune to have very early in life fallen in with certain
tracks which have conducted me to considerations and maxims, of which I
have formed a method that gives me the means, as I think, of gradually
augmenting my knowledge, and of raising it by little and little to the
highest point which the mediocrity of my talents and the brief duration of
my life will permit me to reach. For I have already reaped from it such
fruits that, although I have been accustomed to think lowly enough of
myself, and although when I look with the eye of a philosopher at the
Reason Discourse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate
over his reason who can regulate his attention wholly by his will,
and whose ideas will come and go at his command. No man will be
found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannise, and
force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.
All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity, but while
this power is such as we can control and repress it is not visible
to others, nor considered as any deprivation of the mental
faculties; it is not pronounced madness but when it becomes
ungovernable, and apparently influences speech or action.
"To indulge the power of fiction and send imagination out upon the
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