| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: shapes itself almost unconsciously, wave after wave, into the most
luscious song. Doubt not that many a soul then, was the simpler, and
purer, and better, for reading the sweet singer of Syracuse. He has his
immoralities; but they are the immoralities of his age: his
naturalness, his sunny calm and cheerfulness, are all his own.
And now, to leave the poets, and speak of those grammarians to whose
corrections we owe, I suppose, the texts of the Greek poets as they now
stand. They seem to have set to work at their task methodically enough,
under the direction of their most literary monarch, Ptolemy
Philadelphus. Alexander the AEtolian collected and revised the
tragedies, Lycophron the comedies, Zenodotus the poems of Homer, and the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: he laid it upon the table. It was a magnificent specimen of the
jeweller's art, and the thirty-six stones were the finest that I
have ever seen. At one side of the coronet was a cracked edge,
where a corner holding three gems had been torn away.
"Now, Mr. Holder," said Holmes, "here is the corner which
corresponds to that which has been so unfortunately lost. Might I
beg that you will break it off."
The banker recoiled in horror. "I should not dream of trying,"
said he.
"Then I will." Holmes suddenly bent his strength upon it, but
without result. "I feel it give a little," said he; "but, though
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: men, the sudden change of the old nature of man into a new one, wrought by
shame or by some other overwhelming impulse. These are the greater
phenomena of mind, and he who has thought of them for himself will live and
move in a better-ordered world, and will himself be a better-ordered man.
At the other end of the 'globus intellectualis,' nearest, not to earth and
sense, but to heaven and God, is the personality of man, by which he holds
communion with the unseen world. Somehow, he knows not how, somewhere, he
knows not where, under this higher aspect of his being he grasps the ideas
of God, freedom and immortality; he sees the forms of truth, holiness and
love, and is satisfied with them. No account of the mind can be complete
which does not admit the reality or the possibility of another life.
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