| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Pierrette by Honore de Balzac: full. The Rogrons owned about sixty thousand francs' worth of
merchandise, forty thousand in a bank or in their cash-box, and the
value of their business. Sitting on a bench covered with striped-green
Utrecht velvet placed in a square recess just behind their private
counter (the counter of their forewoman being similar and directly
opposite) the brother and sister consulted as to what they should do.
All retail shopkeepers aspire to become members of the bourgeoisie. By
selling the good-will of their business, the pair would have over a
hundred and fifty thousand francs, not counting the inheritance from
their father. By placing their present available property in the
public Funds, they would each obtain about four thousand francs a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: explanation of false philosophies still hovering in the air as they appear
from the point of view of later experience or are comprehended in the
history of the human mind, as in a larger horizon: secondly, it might
furnish new forms of thought more adequate to the expression of all the
diversities and oppositions of knowledge which have grown up in these
latter days; it might also suggest new methods of enquiry derived from the
comparison of the sciences. Few will deny that the introduction of the
words 'subject' and 'object' and the Hegelian reconciliation of opposites
have been 'most gracious aids' to psychology, or that the methods of Bacon
and Mill have shed a light far and wide on the realms of knowledge. These
two great studies, the one destructive and corrective of error, the other
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Little Britain by Washington Irving: is much given to pore over alarming accounts of plots,
conspiracies, fires, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions; which
last phenomena he considers as signs of the times. He has
always some dismal tale of the kind to deal out to his customers,
with their doses; and thus at the same time puts both soul and
body into an uproar. He is a great believer in omens and
predictions; and has the prophecies of Robert Nixon and
Mother Shipton by heart. No man can make so much out of an
eclipse, or even an unusually dark day; and he shook the tail of
the last comet over the heads of his customers and disciples
until they were nearly frightened out of their wits. He has
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