| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: for five hundred; but twenty francs I have never had in my life. My
cook and my maid may, perhaps, have so much between them; but for my
own part, I have nothing but credit, and I should lose that if I took
to borrowing small sums. If I were to ask for twenty francs, I should
have nothing to distinguish me from my colleagues that walk the
boulevard."
"Is the milliner paid?" asked La Palferine.
"Oh, come now, are you turning stupid?" said she, with a wink. "She
came this morning for the twenty-seventh time, that is how I came to
mention it."
"What did you do?" asked Desroches.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: idealism. Like the ancient Sophists, he relegates the more important
principles of ethics to custom and probability. But crude and unmeaning as
this philosophy is, it exercised a great influence on his successors, not
unlike that which Locke exercised upon Berkeley and Berkeley upon Hume
himself. All three were both sceptical and ideal in almost equal degrees.
Neither they nor their predecessors had any true conception of language or
of the history of philosophy. Hume's paradox has been forgotten by the
world, and did not any more than the scepticism of the ancients require to
be seriously refuted. Like some other philosophical paradoxes, it would
have been better left to die out. It certainly could not be refuted by a
philosophy such as Kant's, in which, no less than in the previously
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne: crossed two hundred and seventy leagues of sea since leaving Port
Gräuben; and we are six hundred and twenty leagues from Iceland,
under England. [1]
[1] This distance carries the travellers as far as under the Pyrenees
if the league measures three miles. (Trans.)
CHAPTER XXXV.
AN ELECTRIC STORM
_Friday, August 21_. - On the morrow the magnificent geyser has
disappeared. The wind has risen, and has rapidly carried us away from
Axel Island. The roarings become lost in the distance.
The weather - if we may use that term - will change before long. The
Journey to the Center of the Earth |
