| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Wyoming by William MacLeod Raine: forgetfulness, with a hurried and yet elude the very familiarity
her manner invited. She knew her part, the heartless enticing
coquette, compounded half of passion and half of selfishness. It
was a hateful thing to do, this sacrifice of her personal
reticence, of the individual abstraction in which she wrapped
herself as a cloak, in order to hint at a possibility of some
intimacy of feeling between them. She shrank from it with a
repugnance hardly to be overcome, but she held herself with an
iron will and consummate art to the role she had undertaken. Two
lives hung on her success. She must not forget that. She would
not let herself forget that--and one of them that of the man she
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: spirit of God. The difficulties of ethics disappear when we do not suffer
ourselves to be distracted between different points of view. But to
maintain their hold on us, the general principles must also be
psychologically true--they must agree with our experience, they must accord
with the habits of our minds.
When we are told that actions are right or wrong only in so far as they
tend towards happiness, we naturally ask what is meant by 'happiness.' For
the term in the common use of language is only to a certain extent
commensurate with moral good and evil. We should hardly say that a good
man could be utterly miserable (Arist. Ethics), or place a bad man in the
first rank of happiness. But yet, from various circumstances, the measure
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: heard nobody go down the stone stairs. Was it possible that the strange
man was still there?...The thought was too absurd--Life didn't play tricks
like that--and yet--she was quite conscious of his nearness. Very quietly
she got up, unhooked from the back of the door a long white gown, buttoned
it on--smiling slyly. She did not know what was going to happen. She only
thought: "Oh, what fun!" and that they were playing a delicious game--this
strange man and she. Very gently she turned the door-handle, screwing up
her face and biting her lip as the lock snapped back. Of course, there he
was--leaning against the banister rail. He wheeled round as she slipped
into the passage.
"Da," she muttered, folding her gown tightly around her, "I must go
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