| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: his vitality, suspended while the phenomenon lasted was restored as
soon as it was over without his feeling any further inconvenience.
These effects of antipathy, all well authenticated, and chosen from
among many which history has happened to preserve, are enough to give
a clue to the sympathies which remain unknown.
This fragment of Lambert's investigations, which I remember from among
his essays, will throw a light on the method on which he worked. I
need not emphasize the obvious connection between this theory and the
collateral sciences projected by Gall and Lavater; they were its
natural corollary; and every more or less scientific brain will
discern the ramifications by which it is inevitably connected with the
Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Yates Pride by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: which grazed a few sheep. There were no houses until she reached
the turn which would lead back to the main street, on which her
home was located.
Eudora was about midway of this street when she saw a man
approaching. He was a large man clad in gray, and he was
swinging an umbrella. Somehow the swing of that umbrella, even
from a distance, gave an impression of embarrassment and boyish
hesitation. Eudora did not know him at first. She had expected
to see the same Harry Lawton who had gone away. She did not
expect to see a stout, middle-aged man, but a slim youth.
However, as they drew nearer each other, she knew; and curiously
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: allowable in a modern writer. But we are not therefore justified in
connecting passages from different parts of his writings, or even from the
same work, which he has not himself joined. We cannot argue from the
Parmenides to the Philebus, or from either to the Sophist, or assume that
the Parmenides, the Philebus, and the Timaeus were 'written
simultaneously,' or 'were intended to be studied in the order in which they
are here named (J. of Philol.) We have no right to connect statements
which are only accidentally similar. Nor is it safe for the author of a
theory about ancient philosophy to argue from what will happen if his
statements are rejected. For those consequences may never have entered
into the mind of the ancient writer himself; and they are very likely to be
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