| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Ruling Passion by Henry van Dyke: that he was the heir of the family." Jean, for his part, was
impressed by Pierre's simplicity and firmness of conviction. He
thought, "What a mean thing for that lawyer to fool such an innocent
as this into supposing himself the inheritor of the title." What
never occurred to either of them was the idea that the lawyer had
deceived them both. That was not to be dreamed of. To admit such a
thought would have seemed to them like throwing away something of
great value which they had just found. The family name, the papers,
the links of the genealogy which had been so convincingly set
forth,--all this had made an impression on their imagination,
stronger than any logical argument. But which was the marquis?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: whose energies are wholly spent in mere mechanical labor; then, going
on to the aggregation of ideas and rising to comparison, reflection,
meditation, and finally ecstasy and catalepsy. Lambert, of course, in
the artlessness of youth, imagined that he had laid down the lines of
a great work when he thus built up a scale of the various degrees of
man's mental powers.
I remember that, by one of those chances which seems like
predestination, we got hold of a great Martyrology, in which the most
curious narratives are given of the total abeyance of physical life
which a man can attain to under the paroxysms of the inner life. By
reflecting on the effects of fanaticism, Lambert was led to believe
Louis Lambert |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but
loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws,
governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into
one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national
class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. The
bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has
created more massive and more colossal productive forces than
have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's
forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry
and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs,
clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of
The Communist Manifesto |
