| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: he then dissolved his enchantments, and was now
recognized and honored as the man who had by his
unaided might saved the globe from destruction and
its peoples from extinction. Now if you consider that
everybody believed that, and not only believed it, but
never even dreamed of doubting it, you will easily
understand that there was not a person in all Britain
that would not have walked fifty miles to get a sight of
me. Of course I was all the talk -- all other subjects
were dropped; even the king became suddenly a per-
son of minor interest and notoriety. Within twenty-
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: a relief to his own feelings; but he never abused him to his face,
because he said: "Riley is such a frail beast that half of his
loathsome conceit is due to pains in the chest."
Late one April, Riley went very sick indeed. The doctor punched him
and thumped him, and told him he would be better before long. Then
the doctor went to Reggie and said:--"Do you know how sick your
Accountant is?" "No!" said Reggie--"The worse the better, confound
him! He's a clacking nuisance when he's well. I'll let you take
away the Bank Safe if you can drug him silent for this hot-weather."
But the doctor did not laugh--"Man, I'm not joking," he said. "I'll
give him another three months in his bed and a week or so more to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: ideas has taken their place. The flowers of rhetoric and poetry have lost
their freshness and charm; and a technical language has begun to supersede
and overgrow them. But the power of thinking tends to increase with age,
and the experience of life to widen and deepen. The good is summed up
under categories which are not summa genera, but heads or gradations of
thought. The question of pleasure and the relation of bodily pleasures to
mental, which is hardly treated of elsewhere in Plato, is here analysed
with great subtlety. The mean or measure is now made the first principle
of good. Some of these questions reappear in Aristotle, as does also the
distinction between metaphysics and mathematics. But there are many things
in Plato which have been lost in Aristotle; and many things in Aristotle
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