| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: this again is set aside by a sophistical application of Homer: for
temperance is good as well as noble, and Homer has declared that 'modesty
is not good for a needy man.' (3) Once more Charmides makes the attempt.
This time he gives a definition which he has heard, and of which Socrates
conjectures that Critias must be the author: 'Temperance is doing one's
own business.' But the artisan who makes another man's shoes may be
temperate, and yet he is not doing his own business; and temperance defined
thus would be opposed to the division of labour which exists in every
temperate or well-ordered state. How is this riddle to be explained?
Critias, who takes the place of Charmides, distinguishes in his answer
between 'making' and 'doing,' and with the help of a misapplied quotation
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An International Episode by Henry James: often described by fellows who know nothing about them.
You mustn't mind what you read."
"Oh, I SHALL mind what I read!" Bessie Alden rejoined.
"When I read Thackeray and George Eliot, how can I help minding them?"
"Ah well, Thackeray, and George Eliot," said the young nobleman;
"I haven't read much of them."
"Don't you suppose they know about society?" asked Bessie Alden.
"Oh, I daresay they know; they were so very clever.
But these fashionable novels," said Lord Lambeth, "they are
awful rot, you know."
His companion looked at him a moment with her dark blue eyes, and then
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: screamed out, 'Certainly, certainly,' in such a loud, harsh voice,
that the gold-fish who lived in the basin of the cool splashing
fountain put their heads out of the water, and asked the huge stone
Tritons what on earth was the matter.
But somehow the Birds liked him. They had seen him often in the
forest, dancing about like an elf after the eddying leaves, or
crouched up in the hollow of some old oak-tree, sharing his nuts
with the squirrels. They did not mind his being ugly, a bit. Why,
even the nightingale herself, who sang so sweetly in the orange
groves at night that sometimes the Moon leaned down to listen, was
not much to look at after all; and, besides, he had been kind to
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