| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: have no knowledge, and were then led on to think that courage is the same
as wisdom. But in this way of arguing you might come to imagine that
strength is wisdom. You might begin by asking whether the strong are able,
and I should say 'Yes'; and then whether those who know how to wrestle are
not more able to wrestle than those who do not know how to wrestle, and
more able after than before they had learned, and I should assent. And
when I had admitted this, you might use my admissions in such a way as to
prove that upon my view wisdom is strength; whereas in that case I should
not have admitted, any more than in the other, that the able are strong,
although I have admitted that the strong are able. For there is a
difference between ability and strength; the former is given by knowledge
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: practical domain, much or little according as they are
forcibly or feebly present to the mind of each.
Now, a man's view of the universe is mostly a view of the
civilised society in which he lives. Other men and women are
so much more grossly and so much more intimately palpable to
his perceptions, that they stand between him and all the
rest; they are larger to his eye than the sun, he hears them
more plainly than thunder, with them, by them, and for them,
he must live and die. And hence the laws that affect his
intercourse with his fellow-men, although merely customary
and the creatures of a generation, are more clearly and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: behaving as if the house belonged to her! I had already said some
prayers at his intention at the half-past six mass, the brave
gentleman. That maid of my sister Rita was upstairs watching him
drive away with her evil eyes, but I made a sign of the cross after
the fiacre, and then I went upstairs and banged at your door, my
dear kind young Monsieur, and shouted to Rita that she had no right
to lock herself in any of my locataires' rooms. At last she opened
it - and what do you think? All her hair was loose over her
shoulders. I suppose it all came down when she flung her hat on
your bed. I noticed when she arrived that her hair wasn't done
properly. She used your brushes to do it up again in front of your
The Arrow of Gold |
