| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: arcanum, a secret remedy, and laudanum was its name. He boasted,
says one of his enemies, that he could raise the dead to life with
it; and so the event all but proved. Basle was then the university
where free thought and free creeds found their safest home; and
hither OEcolampadius the reformer invited young Paracelsus to
lecture on medicine and natural science.
It would have been well for him, perhaps, had he never opened his
lips. He might have done good enough to his fellow-creatures by his
own undoubted powers of healing. He cured John Frobenius, the
printer, Erasmus's friend, at Basle, when the doctors were going to
cut his leg off. His fame spread far and wide. Round Basle and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne: narrow cabin.
"Is the wind favourable?" my uncle asked.
"Excellent," replied Captain Bjarne; "a sou'-easter. We shall pass
down the Sound full speed, with all sails set."
In a few minutes the schooner, under her mizen, brigantine, topsail,
and topgallant sail, loosed from her moorings and made full sail
through the straits. In an hour the capital of Denmark seemed to sink
below the distant waves, and the _Valkyria_ was skirting the coast by
Elsinore. In my nervous frame of mind I expected to see the ghost of
Hamlet wandering on the legendary castle terrace.
"Sublime madman!" I said, "no doubt you would approve of our
Journey to the Center of the Earth |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Economist by Xenophon: lead me through the field of my own knowledge,[25] and then by
pointing out analogies[26] to what I know, persuade me that I really
know some things which hitherto, as I believed, I had no knowledge of.
[23] Or, "whose skill in farming is proverbial."
[24] Lit. "Is questioning after all a kind of teaching?" See Plat.
"Meno"; "Mem." IV. vi. 15.
[25] It appears, then, that the Xenophontean Socrates has {episteme}
of a sort.
[26] Or, "a series of resemblances," "close parallels," reading
{epideiknus}: or if with Breit. {apodeiknus}, transl. "by proving
such or such a thing is like some other thing known to me
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