| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Master of the World by Jules Verne: must have finished their infernal cookery, and soared away to some
other haunt."
"Devils!" cried Mr. Smith. "Well, I hope they have not decamped
without leaving some traces of their occupation, some parings of
hoofs or horns or tails. We shall find them out."
On the morrow, the twenty-ninth of April, we started again at dawn.
By the end of this second day, we expected to reach the farm of
Wildon at the foot of the mountain. The country was much the same as
before, except that our road led more steeply upward. Woods and
marshes alternated, though the latter grew sparser, being drained by
the sun as we approached the higher levels. The country was also less
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: speculation: If a man converses with the most ordinary Lacedaemonian, he
will find him seldom good for much in general conversation, but at any
point in the discourse he will be darting out some notable saying, terse
and full of meaning, with unerring aim; and the person with whom he is
talking seems to be like a child in his hands. And many of our own age and
of former ages have noted that the true Lacedaemonian type of character has
the love of philosophy even stronger than the love of gymnastics; they are
conscious that only a perfectly educated man is capable of uttering such
expressions. Such were Thales of Miletus, and Pittacus of Mitylene, and
Bias of Priene, and our own Solon, and Cleobulus the Lindian, and Myson the
Chenian; and seventh in the catalogue of wise men was the Lacedaemonian
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: a special illumination, that they might be the lights of the earth,
and the salt of the world? What if they have, each in their turn,
abused that divine teaching to make themselves the tyrants, instead
of the ministers, of the less enlightened? To increase the
inequalities of nature by their own selfishness, instead of
decreasing them, into the equality of grace, by their own self-
sacrifice? What if the Bible after all was right, and even more
right than we were taught to think?
So runs my dream. If, after I have confessed to it, you think me
still worth listening to, in this enlightened nineteenth century, I
will go on.
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