| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Riverman by Stewart Edward White: partnership. Even though Newmark destroyed utterly the firm's
profits for the remaining year and a half the notes had to run, he
could not thereby ruin Orde's chances. A loan on the California
timber would solve all problems now. In this reasoning Orde would
have committed the mistake of all large and generous temperaments
when called upon to measure natures more subtle than their own. He
would have underestimated both Newmark's resources and his own grasp
of situations.*
* The author has considered it useless to burden the course of the
narrative with a detailed account of Newmark's financial manoeuvres.
Realising, however, that a large class of his readers might be
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin: Keimer's printing-house, I found, consisted of an old shatter'd press,
and one small, worn-out font of English which he was then using himself,
composing an Elegy on Aquila Rose, before mentioned, an ingenious
young man, of excellent character, much respected in the town,
clerk of the Assembly, and a pretty poet. Keimer made verses too,
but very indifferently. He could not be said to write them, for his
manner was to compose them in the types directly out of his head.
So there being no copy, but one pair of cases, and the Elegy
likely to require all the letter, no one could help him.
I endeavor'd to put his press (which he had not yet us'd, and of
which he understood nothing) into order fit to be work'd with;
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Euthyphro by Plato: who do not say what they think with equal frankness. For men are not
easily persuaded that any other religion is better than their own; or that
other nations, e.g. the Greeks in the time of Socrates, were equally
serious in their religious beliefs and difficulties. The chief difference
between us and them is, that they were slowly learning what we are in
process of forgetting. Greek mythology hardly admitted of the distinction
between accidental homicide and murder: that the pollution of blood was
the same in both cases is also the feeling of the Athenian diviner. He had
not as yet learned the lesson, which philosophy was teaching, that Homer
and Hesiod, if not banished from the state, or whipped out of the assembly,
as Heracleitus more rudely proposed, at any rate were not to be appealed to
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