| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: V.
Of the 1869 cruise in the GREAT EASTERN, I give what I am able;
only sorry it is no more, for the sake of the ship itself, already
almost a legend even to the generation that saw it launched.
'JUNE 17, 1869. - Here are the names of our staff in whom I expect
you to be interested, as future GREAT EASTERN stories may be full
of them: Theophilus Smith, a man of Latimer Clark's; Leslie C.
Hill, my prizeman at University College; Lord Sackville Cecil;
King, one of the Thomsonian Kings; Laws, goes for Willoughby Smith,
who will also be on board; Varley, Clark, and Sir James Anderson
make up the sum of all you know anything of. A Captain Halpin
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Eve and David by Honore de Balzac: Eve knew enough of the debt and its cause to give up her bridal
trinkets and silver.
That evening Eve tried to induce David to talk of their affairs, for
she had noticed that he was giving less attention to the business and
more to the problem of which he had once spoken to her. Since the
first few weeks of married life, in fact, David spent most of his time
in the shed in the backyard, in the little room where he was wont to
mould his ink-rollers. Three months after his return to Angouleme, he
had replaced the old fashioned round ink-balls by rollers made of
strong glue and treacle, and an ink-table, on which the ink was evenly
distributed, an improvement so obvious that Cointet Brothers no sooner
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: and herein lies the secret of man's well-being. In the exaltation of the
reason or intellect, in the denial of the voluntariness of evil (Timaeus;
Laws) Spinoza approaches nearer to Plato than in his conception of an
infinite substance. As Socrates said that virtue is knowledge, so Spinoza
would have maintained that knowledge alone is good, and what contributes to
knowledge useful. Both are equally far from any real experience or
observation of nature. And the same difficulty is found in both when we
seek to apply their ideas to life and practice. There is a gulf fixed
between the infinite substance and finite objects or individuals of
Spinoza, just as there is between the ideas of Plato and the world of
sense.
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