| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: moment my tearful face, I met the doctor's eyes. They rested
upon mine with such a depth of scrutiny, pity, and interest,
that even from the freshness of my sorrow, I was startled
into attention.
'Enough,' he said, 'to lamentation. Your mother went to
death as to a bridal, dying where her husband died. It is
time, Asenath, to think of the survivors. Follow me to the
next room.'
I followed him, like a person in a dream; he made me sit by
the fire, he gave me wine to drink; and then, pacing the
stone floor, he thus began to address me -
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: roots was so artless, it showed so plainly the purity of his ways and
his ignorance of the things of life, that Madame de Listomere and
Mademoiselle de Salomon talked to him and consoled him in the tone
which mothers take when they promise a plaything to their children.
"Don't fret about such trifles," they said. "We will find you some
place less cold and dismal than Mademoiselle Gamard's gloomy house. If
we can't find anything you like, one or other of us will take you to
live with us. Come, let's play a game of backgammon. To-morrow you can
go and see the Abbe Troubert and ask him to push your claims to the
canonry, and you'll see how cordially he will receive you."
Feeble folk are as easily reassured as they are frightened. So the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: life-time of Heracleitus--a phenomenon which, though at first sight
singular, is not without a parallel in the history of philosophy and
theology.
It is this perverted form of the Heraclitean philosophy which is supposed
to effect the final overthrow of Protagorean sensationalism. For if all
things are changing at every moment, in all sorts of ways, then there is
nothing fixed or defined at all, and therefore no sensible perception, nor
any true word by which that or anything else can be described. Of course
Protagoras would not have admitted the justice of this argument any more
than Heracleitus would have acknowledged the 'uneducated fanatics' who
appealed to his writings. He might have said, 'The excellent Socrates has
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