| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson: Roman masonry, which shortly after branched in two. The count took
the turning to the right, and followed it, groping forward in the
dark, till he was brought up by a kind of fence, about elbow-high,
which extended quite across the passage. Sounding forward with his
foot, he found an edge of polished stone, and then vacancy. All
his curiosity was now awakened, and, getting some rotten sticks
that lay about the floor, he made a fire. In front of him was a
profound well; doubtless some neighbouring peasant had once used it
for his water, and it was he that had set up the fence. A long
while the count stood leaning on the rail and looking down into the
pit. It was of Roman foundation, and, like all that nation set
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: therefore virtue can be taught. But virtue is not taught, and therefore in
this higher and ideal sense there is no virtue and no knowledge. The
teaching of the Sophists is confessedly inadequate, and Meno, who is their
pupil, is ignorant of the very nature of general terms. He can only
produce out of their armoury the sophism, 'that you can neither enquire
into what you know nor into what you do not know;' to which Socrates
replies by his theory of reminiscence.
To the doctrine that virtue is knowledge, Plato has been constantly tending
in the previous Dialogues. But the new truth is no sooner found than it
vanishes away. 'If there is knowledge, there must be teachers; and where
are the teachers?' There is no knowledge in the higher sense of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: being seen with Rosedale: all her thoughts were centred on the
object of her search. The latter, however, was not discoverable
in the conservatories, and Lily, oppressed by a sudden conviction
of failure, was casting about for a way to rid herself of her now
superfluous companion, when they came upon Mrs. Van Osburgh,
flushed and exhausted, but beaming with the consciousness of duty
performed.
She glanced at them a moment with the benign but vacant eye of
the tired hostess, to whom her guests have become mere whirling
spots in a kaleidoscope of fatigue; then her attention became
suddenly fixed, and she seized on Miss Bart with a confidential
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