| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: too, though somewhat steep and narrow, were of polished
masonwork, and regular and solid underfoot. Minding my uncle's
word about the bannisters, I kept close to the tower side, and
felt my way in the pitch darkness with a beating heart.
The house of Shaws stood some five full storeys high, not
counting lofts. Well, as I advanced, it seemed to me the stair
grew airier and a thought more lightsome; and I was wondering
what might be the cause of this change, when a second blink of
the summer lightning came and went. If I did not cry out, it was
because fear had me by the throat; and if I did not fall, it was
more by Heaven's mercy than my own strength. It was not only
Kidnapped |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: States.
The same experience was repeated in the Philippines, which for
centuries had been governed by Spain. Finally the country was no
more than a vast jungle, the home of epidemics of every kind,
where a miserable population vegetated without commerce or
industry. After a few years of American rule the country was
entirely transformed: malaria, yellow fever, plague and cholera
had entirely disappeared. The swamps were drained; the country
was covered with railways, factories and schools. In thirteen
years the mortality was reduced by two-thirds.
It is to such examples that we must refer the theorist who has
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: understand how it is that a numerical parallelism has sometimes been
observed between the sub-groups in distinct classes. A naturalist, struck
by a parallelism of this nature in any one class, by arbitrarily raising or
sinking the value of the groups in other classes (and all our experience
shows that this valuation has hitherto been arbitrary), could easily extend
the parallelism over a wide range; and thus the septenary, quinary,
quaternary, and ternary classifications have probably arisen.
As the modified descendants of dominant species, belonging to the larger
genera, tend to inherit the advantages, which made the groups to which they
belong large and their parents dominant, they are almost sure to spread
widely, and to seize on more and more places in the economy of nature. The
On the Origin of Species |
