| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: that he was arguing from the necessary imperfection of language against the
most certain facts. And here, again, we may find a parallel with the
ancients. He goes beyond facts in his scepticism, as they did in their
idealism. Like the ancient Sophists, he relegates the more important
principles of ethics to custom and probability. But crude and unmeaning as
this philosophy is, it exercised a great influence on his successors, not
unlike that which Locke exercised upon Berkeley and Berkeley upon Hume
himself. All three were both sceptical and ideal in almost equal degrees.
Neither they nor their predecessors had any true conception of language or
of the history of philosophy. Hume's paradox has been forgotten by the
world, and did not any more than the scepticism of the ancients require to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: his ease.
"Paquita," he said, "are we never to be free then?"
"Never," she said, with an air of sadness. "Even now we have but a few
days before us."
She lowered her eyes, looked at and counted with her right hand on the
fingers of her left, revealing so the most beautiful hands which Henri
had ever seen.
"One, two, three----"
She counted up to twelve.
"Yes," she said, "we have twelve days."
"And after?"
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Case of the Registered Letter by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: it is such a slight compensation for the torture these last eight
years have been to me!
And now I will explain in detail all the circumstances. I have
arranged that Albert Graumann shall come to me on the evening of
September 23rd between 7 and 8 o'clock. I asked him to do so by
letter, asking him also to keep the fact of his visit to me a secret.
To-night, the 22nd of September, I received his answer promising
that he would come. Therefore I can look upon everything that is
to happen, as having already happened, for now there need be no
further change in my plans. I will send this letter this evening
to my friend Pernburg in Frankfurt am Main. In case anything should
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