| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: passage from unity to infinity. With him the idea of science may be said
to anticipate science; at a time when the sciences were not yet divided, he
wants to impress upon us the importance of classification; neither
neglecting the many individuals, nor attempting to count them all, but
finding the genera and species under which they naturally fall. Here,
then, and in the parallel passages of the Phaedrus and of the Sophist, is
found the germ of the most fruitful notion of modern science.
Plato describes with ludicrous exaggeration the influence exerted by the
one and many on the minds of young men in their first fervour of
metaphysical enthusiasm (compare Republic). But they are none the less an
everlasting quality of reason or reasoning which never grows old in us. At
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: the Carpathians, and the vessel sunk the night be-
fore in Eastbay was the Hamburg emigrant-ship
Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea, of appalling mem-
ory.
"A few months later we could read in the papers
the accounts of the bogus 'Emigration Agencies'
among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more re-
mote provinces of Austria. The object of these
scoundrels was to get hold of the poor ignorant
people's homesteads, and they were in league with
the local usurers. They exported their victims
Amy Foster |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: Towards evening on the sixth her determination to go away
again revived. About four o'clock she packed up anew
the few small articles she had brought in her flight
from Alderworth, and also some belonging to her which had
been left here; the whole formed a bundle not too large
to be carried in her hand for a distance of a mile or two.
The scene without grew darker; mud-coloured clouds bellied
downwards from the sky like vast hammocks slung across it,
and with the increase of night a stormy wind arose;
but as yet there was no rain.
Eustacia could not rest indoors, having nothing more to do,
Return of the Native |
