| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: have been a duke and a peer of France, like many another; whereas, in
1805, he thought himself uncommonly lucky when he married Mlle.
Marie-Louise-Anais de Negrepelisse, the daughter of a noble long
relegated to the obscurity of his manor-house, scion though he was of
the younger branch of one of the oldest families in the south of
France. There had been a Negrepelisse among the hostages of St. Louis.
The head of the elder branch, however, had borne the illustrious name
of d'Espard since the reign of Henri Quatre, when the Negrepelisse of
that day married an heiress of the d'Espard family. As for M. de
Negrepelisse, the younger son of a younger son, he lived upon his
wife's property, a small estate in the neighborhood of Barbezieux,
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: stopped, looking towards the door, and trying assiduously to give
her features a severe and contemptuous expression. She felt she
was afraid of him, and afraid of the coming interview. She was
just attempting to do what she had attempted to do ten times
already in these last three days--to sort out the children's
things and her own, so as to take them to her mother's--and again
she could not bring herself to do this; but now again, as each
time before, she kept saying to herself, "that things cannot go
on like this, that she must take some step" to punish him, put
him to shame, avenge on him some little part at least of the
suffereing he had caused her. She still continued to tell
Anna Karenina |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: problems or invent forms of thought which add nothing to knowledge and are
of no use in assisting the acquisition of it. This seems to be the natural
limit of logic and metaphysics; if they give us a more comprehensive or a
more definite view of the different spheres of knowledge they are to be
studied; if not, not. The better part of ancient logic appears hardly in
our own day to have a separate existence; it is absorbed in two other
sciences: (1) rhetoric, if indeed this ancient art be not also fading away
into literary criticism; (2) the science of language, under which all
questions relating to words and propositions and the combinations of them
may properly be included.
To continue dead or imaginary sciences, which make no signs of progress and
|
