| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: For, let me ask you, Critias, whether, if you take away this, medicine will
not equally give health, and shoemaking equally produce shoes, and the art
of the weaver clothes?--whether the art of the pilot will not equally save
our lives at sea, and the art of the general in war?
Quite so.
And yet, my dear Critias, none of these things will be well or beneficially
done, if the science of the good be wanting.
True.
But that science is not wisdom or temperance, but a science of human
advantage; not a science of other sciences, or of ignorance, but of good
and evil: and if this be of use, then wisdom or temperance will not be of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: vanished. For a long time he scrutinised those remote blue
levels and saw no more....
"Wonder if I ever saw anything," he said, and then: "There ain't
such things...."
Down went the sun and down, not diving steeply, but passing
northward as it sank, and then suddenly daylight and the
expansive warmth of daylight had gone altogether, and the index
of the statoscope quivered over to Descente.
3
"NOW what's going to 'appen?" said Bert.
He found the cold, grey cloud wilderness rising towards him with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner
of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more
lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it--a mere hillock,
and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more
sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for
blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to
plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada
thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a
leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried
about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant
Moby Dick |
