| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: do not think so,' I replied, assuming the manner of a friend; 'but be
as devout as possible, reconcile yourself to God, for the Duke waits
for proofs; he hesitates, you must bring him to the point.'
"She rose, and walked twice round the boudoir in real or affected
agitation; then she no doubt found an attitude and a look beseeming
the new state of affairs, for she stopped in front of me, held out her
hand, and said in a voice broken by emotion, 'Well, Henri, you are
loyal, noble, and a charming man; I shall never forget you.'
"These were admirable tactics. She was bewitching in this transition
of feeling, indispensable to the situation in which she wished to
place herself in regard to me. I fell into the attitude, the manners,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: subtle adjustment of question and answer, the lively play of fancy, the
power of drawing characters, are wanting in them. But the Platonic
dialogue is a drama as well as a dialogue, of which Socrates is the central
figure, and there are lesser performers as well:--the insolence of
Thrasymachus, the anger of Callicles and Anytus, the patronizing style of
Protagoras, the self-consciousness of Prodicus and Hippias, are all part of
the entertainment. To reproduce this living image the same sort of effort
is required as in translating poetry. The language, too, is of a finer
quality; the mere prose English is slow in lending itself to the form of
question and answer, and so the ease of conversation is lost, and at the
same time the dialectical precision with which the steps of the argument
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: electricity. I had the pleasure of going over this ground with
Kohlrausch in 1849, and his experiments left no doubt upon my mind
that the contact electricity of Volta was a reality, though it could
produce no current. With one of the beautiful instruments devised
by himself, Sir William Thomson has rendered this point capable of
sure and easy demonstration; and he and others now hold what may be
called a contact theory, which, while it takes into account the
action of the metals, also embraces the chemical phenomena of the
circuit. Helmholtz, I believe, was the first to give the contact
theory this new form, in his celebrated essay, Ueber die Erhaltung
der Kraft, p. 45.
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