| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain: BILL WITHERS, sworn, said: "I was coming along about
sundown, Saturday, September 2d, by the prisoner's field,
and my brother Jack was with me and we seen a man toting
off something heavy on his back and allowed it was a nigger
stealing corn; we couldn't see distinct; next we made out
that it was one man carrying another; and the way it hung,
so kind of limp, we judged it was somebody that was drunk;
and by the man's walk we said it was Parson Silas,
and we judged he had found Sam Cooper drunk in the road,
which he was always trying to reform him, and was toting
him out of danger."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Agesilaus by Xenophon: against the coming summer be alert to confront the foe.
[35] Or, "But to pass on, he was already, may be, eighty years of age,
when it came under his observation. . . ."
[36] This same Tachos.
[37] See "Hell." VII. i. 36; iv. 9.
[38] I.e. "the army under Nectanebos." See Diod. xv. 92; Plut. "Ages."
xxxvii. (Clough, iv. 44 foll.)
[39] I.e. "Nectanebos and a certain Mendesian."
III
Such, then, is the chronicle of this man's achievements, or of such of
them as were wrought in the presence of a thousand witnesses. Being of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: on one another. We begin to feel that the ancients had the same thoughts
as ourselves, the same difficulties which characterize all periods of
transition, almost the same opposition between science and religion.
Although we cannot maintain that ancient and modern philosophy are one and
continuous (as has been affirmed with more truth respecting ancient and
modern history), for they are separated by an interval of a thousand years,
yet they seem to recur in a sort of cycle, and we are surprised to find
that the new is ever old, and that the teaching of the past has still a
meaning for us.
III. In the preface to the first edition I expressed a strong opinion at
variance with Mr. Grote's, that the so-called Epistles of Plato were
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