| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: when all the world is before you new and shining, and everything
is possible, if you will only be energetic and independent and seize
opportunity by the scruff of the neck.
"To hear you talk," said Irais, "no one would ever imagine
that you dream away your days in a garden with a book, and that you
never in your life seized anything by the scruff of its neck.
<151> And what is scruff? I hope I have not got any on me."
And she craned her neck before the glass.
She and Minora were going to help me decorate the trees,
but very soon Irais wandered off to the piano, and Minora was tired
and took up a book; so I called in Miss Jones and the babies--
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: enchantment, which makes things appear good and evil, like and unlike, as
the speaker pleases. Its use is not confined, as people commonly suppose,
to arguments in the law courts and speeches in the assembly; it is rather a
part of the art of disputation, under which are included both the rules of
Gorgias and the eristic of Zeno. But it is not wholly devoid of truth.
Superior knowledge enables us to deceive another by the help of
resemblances, and to escape from such a deception when employed against
ourselves. We see therefore that even in rhetoric an element of truth is
required. For if we do not know the truth, we can neither make the gradual
departures from truth by which men are most easily deceived, nor guard
ourselves against deception.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: time, but of giving it a price, a quotation; of representing in a
pecuniary sense those products developed by time which presumably you
possess in the region of your intellect; of representing also the
moral qualities with which you are endowed, and which are, Monsieur,
living forces,--as living as a cataract, as a steam-engine of three,
ten, twenty, fifty horse-power. Ha! this is progress! the movement
onward to a better state of things; a movement born of the spirit of
our epoch; a movement essentially progressive, as I shall prove to you
when we come to consider the principles involved in the logical
co-ordination of the social fabric. I will now explain my meaning by
literal examples, leaving aside all purely abstract reasoning, which I
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