| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Euthyphro by Plato: between us and them is, that they were slowly learning what we are in
process of forgetting. Greek mythology hardly admitted of the distinction
between accidental homicide and murder: that the pollution of blood was
the same in both cases is also the feeling of the Athenian diviner. He had
not as yet learned the lesson, which philosophy was teaching, that Homer
and Hesiod, if not banished from the state, or whipped out of the assembly,
as Heracleitus more rudely proposed, at any rate were not to be appealed to
as authorities in religion; and he is ready to defend his conduct by the
examples of the gods. These are the very tales which Socrates cannot
abide; and his dislike of them, as he suspects, has branded him with the
reputation of impiety. Here is one answer to the question, 'Why Socrates
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Europeans by Henry James: The tea-table offered an anomalous and picturesque repast;
and on leaving it they all sat and talked in the large piazza,
or wandered about the garden in the starlight, with their ears full
of those sounds of strange insects which, though they are supposed
to be, all over the world, a part of the magic of summer nights,
seemed to the Baroness to have beneath these western skies
an incomparable resonance.
Mr. Wentworth, though, as I say, he went punctiliously to call
upon her, was not able to feel that he was getting used to his niece.
It taxed his imagination to believe that she was really his
half-sister's child. His sister was a figure of his early years;
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: from its great preoccupation over its business of getting to the
sea. A difficult business, too; for the detours it had to make are
not to be counted. The geographers seem to have given up the
attempt; for I found no map represent the infinite contortion of
its course. A fact will say more than any of them. After we had
been some hours, three if I mistake not, flitting by the trees at
this smooth, break-neck gallop, when we came upon a hamlet and
asked where we were, we had got no farther than four kilometres
(say two miles and a half) from Origny. If it were not for the
honour of the thing (in the Scots saying), we might almost as well
have been standing still.
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