| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: pressed from nature, all charactered and notable, seizing the
eye. The style that befits either of these extremes, once
chosen, brings with it its necessary disabilities and
dangers. The immediate danger of the realist is to sacrifice
the beauty and significance of the whole to local dexterity,
or, in the insane pursuit of completion, to immolate his
readers under facts; but he comes in the last resort, and as
his energy declines, to discard all design, abjure all
choice, and, with scientific thoroughness, steadily to
communicate matter which is not worth learning. The danger
of the idealist is, of course, to become merely null and lose
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: love me!"
"Why, Dick," she cried, "would I be here?"
"Well, see ye here," continued Dick, "an we but escape whole we'll
marry; and an we're to die, we die, and there's an end on't. But
now that I think, how found ye my chamber?"
"I asked it of Dame Hatch," she answered.
"Well, the dame's staunch," he answered; "she'll not tell upon you.
We have time before us."
And just then, as if to contradict his words, feet came down the
corridor, and a fist beat roughly on the door.
"Here!" cried a voice. "Open, Master Dick; open!" Dick neither
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: is right opinion, accompanied by explanation or definition.' Explanation
may mean, (1) the reflection or expression of a man's thoughts--but every
man who is not deaf and dumb is able to express his thoughts--or (2) the
enumeration of the elements of which anything is composed. A man may have
a true opinion about a waggon, but then, and then only, has he knowledge of
a waggon when he is able to enumerate the hundred planks of Hesiod. Or he
may know the syllables of the name Theaetetus, but not the letters; yet not
until he knows both can he be said to have knowledge as well as opinion.
But on the other hand he may know the syllable 'The' in the name
Theaetetus, yet he may be mistaken about the same syllable in the name
Theodorus, and in learning to read we often make such mistakes. And even
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