| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to
feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor.
I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there
among the lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that
you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night.
I want you to look back, as he does every day, at his birth in
vice, his starved infancy; to remember the heavy years he has
groped through as boy and man,--the slow, heavy years of
constant, hot work. So long ago he began, that he thinks
sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no hope that
it will ever end. Think that God put into this man's soul a
Life in the Iron-Mills |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: turned into the boulevard. 'It ees a goot time to marry Malfina; you
vill be der brodector off that boor family vat ess in tears; you vill
haf ein family, a home off your own; you vill haf a house ready
vurnished, und Malfina is truly ein dreashure.' "
"I seem to hear that old Robert Macaire of a Nucingen himself," said
Finot.
" 'A charming girl,' said Ferdinand du Tillet in a cool,
unenthusiastic tone," Bixiou continued.
"Just du Tillet himself summed up in a word!" cried Couture.
" 'Those that do not know her may think her plain,' pursued du Tillet,
'but she has character, I admit.'
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: of these, he is probably referring to Pherecydes and the early Ionians. In
the philosophy of motion there were different accounts of the relation of
plurality and unity, which were supposed to be joined and severed by love
and hate, some maintaining that this process was perpetually going on (e.g.
Heracleitus); others (e.g. Empedocles) that there was an alternation of
them. Of the Pythagoreans or of Anaxagoras he makes no distinct mention.
His chief opponents are, first, Eristics or Megarians; secondly, the
Materialists.
The picture which he gives of both these latter schools is indistinct; and
he appears reluctant to mention the names of their teachers. Nor can we
easily determine how much is to be assigned to the Cynics, how much to the
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