| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: the faculty of estimating pleasures and pains is here lost in an unmeaning
and transcendental conception. Yet several true intimations of the nature
of courage are allowed to appear: (1) That courage is moral as well as
physical: (2) That true courage is inseparable from knowledge, and yet (3)
is based on a natural instinct. Laches exhibits one aspect of courage;
Nicias the other. The perfect image and harmony of both is only realized
in Socrates himself.
The Dialogue offers one among many examples of the freedom with which Plato
treats facts. For the scene must be supposed to have occurred between B.C.
424, the year of the battle of Delium, and B.C. 418, the year of the battle
of Mantinea, at which Laches fell. But if Socrates was more than seventy
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: tremble with the streams of life you pour through them. You hold me
as the lodestar holds the iron: I cannot but cling to you. We are
lost, you and I: nothing can separate us now.
THE DARK LADY. We shall see that, false lying hound, you and your
filthy trull. _[With two vigorous cuffs, she knocks the pair asunder,
sending the man, who is unlucky enough to receive a righthanded blow,
sprawling an the flags]._ Take that, both of you!
THE CLOAKED LADY. _[in towering wrath, throwing off her cloak and
turning in outraged majesty on her assailant]_ High treason!
THE DARK LADY. _[recognizing her and falling on her knees in abject
terror]_ Will: I am lost: I have struck the Queen.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: had began to happen? Her dying, her death, his consequent
solitude--that was what he had figured as the Beast in the Jungle,
that was what had been in the lap of the gods. He had had her word
for it as he left her--what else on earth could she have meant? It
wasn't a thing of a monstrous order; not a fate rare and
distinguished; not a stroke of fortune that overwhelmed and
immortalised; it had only the stamp of the common doom. But poor
Marcher at this hour judged the common doom sufficient. It would
serve his turn, and even as the consummation of infinite waiting he
would bend his pride to accept it. He sat down on a bench in the
twilight. He hadn't been a fool. Something had BEEN, as she had
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