| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: life never _can_ be thoroughly joyous: under the vague dullness of
the grey hours, dissatisfaction seeks a definite object, and finds
it in the privation of an untried good. Dissatisfaction seated
musingly on a childless hearth, thinks with envy of the father whose
return is greeted by young voices--seated at the meal where the
little heads rise one above another like nursery plants, it sees a
black care hovering behind every one of them, and thinks the
impulses by which men abandon freedom, and seek for ties, are surely
nothing but a brief madness. In Godfrey's case there were further
reasons why his thoughts should be continually solicited by this one
point in his lot: his conscience, never thoroughly easy about Eppie,
Silas Marner |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: duty and right, may be pushed to unpleasant consequences. Nor can Plato in
the Gorgias be deemed purely self-regarding, considering that Socrates
expressly mentions the duty of imparting the truth when discovered to
others. Nor must we forget that the side of ethics which regards others is
by the ancients merged in politics. Both in Plato and Aristotle, as well
as in the Stoics, the social principle, though taking another form, is
really far more prominent than in most modern treatises on ethics.
The idealizing of suffering is one of the conceptions which have exercised
the greatest influence on mankind. Into the theological import of this, or
into the consideration of the errors to which the idea may have given rise,
we need not now enter. All will agree that the ideal of the Divine
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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: Alone in the corner of the smoking compartment in the train to G-,
Muller arranged in his mind the facts he had already gathered. He
had questioned the servants of John Siders' former household, had
found that the dead man received very few letters, only an
occasional business communication from his bank. Of the few others,
the servants knew nothing except that he had always thrown the
envelopes carelessly in the waste paper basket and had never seemed
to have any correspondence which he cared to conceal. No friend
from elsewhere bad ever visited him in Grunau, and he had made few
friends there except the Graumann family.
The facts of the case, as he knew them now, were such as to make it
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