| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: self-knowledge. But all sciences have a subject: number is the subject of
arithmetic, health of medicine--what is the subject of temperance or
wisdom? The answer is that (6) Temperance is the knowledge of what a man
knows and of what he does not know. But this is contrary to analogy; there
is no vision of vision, but only of visible things; no love of loves, but
only of beautiful things; how then can there be a knowledge of knowledge?
That which is older, heavier, lighter, is older, heavier, and lighter than
something else, not than itself, and this seems to be true of all relative
notions--the object of relation is outside of them; at any rate they can
only have relation to themselves in the form of that object. Whether there
are any such cases of reflex relation or not, and whether that sort of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: and these had now gone on their way. Venn went to the
public room, called for a mug of ale, and inquired
of the maid in an indifferent tone if Mr. Wildeve was at home.
Thomasin sat in an inner room and heard Venn's voice.
When customers were present she seldom showed herself,
owing to her inherent dislike for the business;
but perceiving that no one else was there tonight she
came out.
"He is not at home yet, Diggory," she said pleasantly.
"But I expected him sooner. He has been to East Egdon
to buy a horse."
Return of the Native |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: like his allusion to the best French, appeared to have been but
one of the notes of his rough cunning. The light refreshment of
these vain appearances had not accordingly carried any of them
very far. On the other hand it had gained Chad time; it had given
him a chance, unchecked, to strike his roots, had paved the way
for initiations more direct and more deep. It was Strether's
belief that he had been comparatively innocent before this first
migration, and even that the first effects of the migration would
not have been, without some particular bad accident, to have been
deplored. There had been three months--he had sufficiently figured
it out--in which Chad had wanted to try. He HAD tried, though not
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