| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: fighting one another, thought the Child.
She gathered the potatoes into her skirt, choosing big ones with few eyes
because they were easier to peel, and bending over the dull heap in the
silent cellar, she began to nod.
"Here, you, what are you doing down there?" cried the Frau, from the top of
the stairs. "The baby's fallen off the settle, and got a bump as big as an
egg over his eye. Come up here, and I'll teach you!"
"It wasn't me--it wasn't me!" screamed the Child, beaten from one side of
the hall to the other, so that the potatoes and beetroot rolled out of her
skirt.
The Frau seemed to be as big as a giant, and there was a certain heaviness
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: Being, in which all the stages of sense and knowledge are gathered up and
from being hypotheses become realities.
Leaving the comparison with Plato we may now consider the value of this
invention of Hegel. There can be no question of the importance of showing
that two contraries or contradictories may in certain cases be both true.
The silliness of the so-called laws of thought ('All A = A,' or, in the
negative form, 'Nothing can at the same time be both A, and not A') has
been well exposed by Hegel himself (Wallace's Hegel), who remarks that 'the
form of the maxim is virtually self-contradictory, for a proposition
implies a distinction between subject and predicate, whereas the maxim of
identity, as it is called, A = A, does not fulfil what its form requires.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw: "Well!" exclaimed Gertrude, outraged. Then, after a pause, "I was
under the impression that I had accepted the escort of a
gentleman." Then, after another pause, Trefusis being quite
undisturbed, "How do you know that I am unhappy?"
"By a certain defect in your countenance, which lacks the
crowning beauty of happiness; and a certain defect in your voice
which will never disappear until you learn to love or pity those
to whom you speak."
"You are wrong," said Gertrude, with calm disdain. "You do not
understand me in the least. I am particularly attached to my
friends."
|
