| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: organ-roll, the men stopped outside to listen: it heaved and
sobbed through the night, as if bearing up to God the wrong of
countless aching hearts, then was silent, and a single voice
swept over the moors in a long, lamentable cry:--"Thou that
takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us!"
The men stood silent, until the hush was broken by a low
murmur:--"For Thou only art holy." Holmes had taken off his hat,
unconscious that he did it; he put it on slowly, and walked on.
What was it that Knowles had said to him once about mean and
selfish taints on his divine soul? "For Thou only art holy:" if
there were truth in that!
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: a very difficult matter--but at any rate not to be too much
governed by them.
[1] His most subtle advisers, moreover, did not understand this
psychology any better. Talleyrand wrote him that "Spain would
receive his soldiers as liberators." It received them as beasts
of prey. A psychologist acquainted with the hereditary instincts
of the Spanish race would have easily foreseen this reception.
It is only by obtaining some sort of insight into the psychology
of crowds that it can be understood how slight is the action upon
them of laws and institutions, how powerless they are to hold any
opinions other than those which are imposed upon them, and that
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Records of a Family of Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson: him mutton and brandy from the ship. `The assistant's wife
having been this morning confined, there was sent ashore a
bottle of sherry and a few rusks - a practice which I have
always observed in this service,' he writes. They dwelt, many
of them, in uninhabited isles or desert forelands, totally cut
off from shops. Many of them were, besides, fallen into a
rustic dishabitude of life, so that even when they visited a
city they could scarce be trusted with their own affairs, as
(for example) he who carried home to his children, thinking
they were oranges, a bag of lemons. And my grandfather seems
to have acted, at least in his early years, as a kind of
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