| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: Fainting fits. It was a scandal. A notorious scan-
dal. To that extent that old Mr. Siegers--not
your present charterer, but Mr. Siegers the father,
the old gentleman who retired from business on a
fortune and got buried at sea going home, HE had
to interview Falk in his private office. He was a
man who could speak like a Dutch Uncle, and, be-
sides, Messrs. Siegers had been helping Falk with
a good bit of money from the start. In fact you
may say they made him as far as that goes.
It so happened that just at the time he turned up
Falk |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: theories and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious
knowledge, guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning,
till an accident again changed the current of my ideas. When I was
about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Bekive,
when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm.
It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura, and the thunder burst
at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens.
I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with
curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I
beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which
stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the
Frankenstein |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: line of demarcation between genuine and spurious writings of Plato. They
fade off imperceptibly from one class to another. There may have been
degrees of genuineness in the dialogues themselves, as there are certainly
degrees of evidence by which they are supported. The traditions of the
oral discourses both of Socrates and Plato may have formed the basis of
semi-Platonic writings; some of them may be of the same mixed character
which is apparent in Aristotle and Hippocrates, although the form of them
is different. But the writings of Plato, unlike the writings of Aristotle,
seem never to have been confused with the writings of his disciples: this
was probably due to their definite form, and to their inimitable
excellence. The three dialogues which we have offered in the Appendix to
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