| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Peter Pan by James M. Barrie: to see the last of them; but she could not help peeping between
the feathers.
I forget whether I have told you that there was a stave on the
rock, driven into it by some buccaneers of long ago to mark the
site of buried treasure. The children had discovered the
glittering hoard, and when in a mischievous mood used to fling
showers of moidores, diamonds, pearls and pieces of eight to the
gulls, who pounced upon them for food, and then flew away, raging
at the scurvy trick that had been played upon them. The stave
was still there, and on it Starkey had hung his hat, a deep
tarpaulin, watertight, with a broad brim. Peter put the eggs
Peter Pan |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Case of the Registered Letter by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: wait until the trial?"
"You have not given this promise. Would you take it upon yourself
to endanger your guardian's life still more? Every further day
spent in his prison, in this anxiety, might be fatal."
"But this promise? The promise demanded of me by the man to whom
I had given my love? Is it not my duty to keep it?"
Muller rose from his chair. His slight figure seemed to grow
taller, and the gentleness in his voice gave way to a commanding
tone of firm decision.
"Our duty is to the living, not to the dead. The dead have no right
to drag down others after them. Believe me, Miss Roemer, the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: curtain falls, and the veil of mythology descends upon the argument. After
the confession of Socrates that he is an interested party, and the
acknowledgment that no man of sense will think the details of his narrative
true, but that something of the kind is true, we return from speculation to
practice. He is himself more confident of immortality than he is of his
own arguments; and the confidence which he expresses is less strong than
that which his cheerfulness and composure in death inspire in us.
Difficulties of two kinds occur in the Phaedo--one kind to be explained out
of contemporary philosophy, the other not admitting of an entire solution.
(1) The difficulty which Socrates says that he experienced in explaining
generation and corruption; the assumption of hypotheses which proceed from
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