| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: rules, to exercise a little common sense."
Dawling jumped at this. "I see--to stick to the pince-nez."
"To follow to the letter her oculist's prescription, whatever it is
and at whatever cost to her prettiness. It's not a thing to be
trifled with."
"Upon my honour it SHAN'T be!" he roundly declared; and he adjusted
himself to his position again as if we had quite settled the
business. After a considerable interval, while I botched away, he
suddenly said: "Did they make a great difference?"
"A great difference?"
"Those things she had put on."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: derive a sacredness from their association with the Divine Being. Yet they
are the poorest of the predicates under which we describe him--signifying
no more than this, that he is not finite, that he is not relative, and
tending to obscure his higher attributes of wisdom, goodness, truth.
The system of Hegel frees the mind from the dominion of abstract ideas. We
acknowledge his originality, and some of us delight to wander in the mazes
of thought which he has opened to us. For Hegel has found admirers in
England and Scotland when his popularity in Germany has departed, and he,
like the philosophers whom he criticizes, is of the past. No other thinker
has ever dissected the human mind with equal patience and minuteness. He
has lightened the burden of thought because he has shown us that the chains
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: of Regina's garden-parties; but this evening I go back
to rural life. The Blenkers, dear original beings, have
hired a primitive old farm-house at Portsmouth where
they gather about them representative people . . ." She
drooped slightly beneath her protecting brim, and added
with a faint blush: "This week Dr. Agathon Carver is
holding a series of Inner Thought meetings there. A
contrast indeed to this gay scene of worldly pleasure--
but then I have always lived on contrasts! To me the
only death is monotony. I always say to Ellen: Beware
of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins. But
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