| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: happening than as being performed, as impersonally rather than
personally produced. The idea is due, however, to anything but
philosophic profundity. It springs from the most superficial of
childish conceptions. For the Japanese mind is quite the reverse of
abstract. Its consideration of things is concrete to a primitive
degree. The language reflects the fact. The few abstract ideas
these people now possess are not represented, for the most part, by
pure Japanese, but by imported Chinese expressions. The islanders
got such general notions from their foreign education, and they
imported idea and word at the same time.
Summing up, as it were, in propria persona the impersonality of
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: writings in general, than they have yet received, before we can finally
decide on their character. We do not consider them all as genuine until
they can be proved to be spurious, as is often maintained and still more
often implied in this and similar discussions; but should say of some of
them, that their genuineness is neither proven nor disproven until further
evidence about them can be adduced. And we are as confident that the
Epistles are spurious, as that the Republic, the Timaeus, and the Laws are
genuine.
On the whole, not a twentieth part of the writings which pass under the
name of Plato, if we exclude the works rejected by the ancients themselves
and two or three other plausible inventions, can be fairly doubted by those
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: for Paquita and for himself, the cupboard was shut. His fury waxed at
this impediment, but he recovered his tranquillity, went and found his
cravat, and advanced towards her with an air of such ferocious meaning
that, without knowing of what crime she had been guilty, Paquita
understood, none the less, that her life was in question. With one
bound she rushed to the other end of the room to escape the fatal knot
which De Marsay tried to pass round her neck. There was a struggle. On
either side there was an equality of strength, agility, and
suppleness. To end the combat Paquita threw between the legs of her
lover a cushion which made him fall, and profited by the respite which
this advantage gave to her, to push the button of the spring which
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
