| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: there were a God of mercy such as you cling to, could He suffer
that such things be? You are my god, husband, to you and for you I
pray, and you alone. Let us have done now with pleading to those
who are not, or who, if they live, are deaf to our cries and blind
to our misery, and befriend ourselves. Yonder lies rope, that
window has bars, very soon we can be beyond the sun and the cruelty
of Teules, or sound asleep. But there is time yet; let us talk a
while, they will scarcely begin their torments before the dawn, and
ere dawn we shall be far.'
So we talked as well as my sufferings would allow. We talked of
how we first had met, of how Otomie had been vowed to me as the
Montezuma's Daughter |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: taken on and given food, for there the Government, or at any rate
the War Office, still existed as an energetic fact, concentrated
amidst collapse and social disaster upon the effort to keep the
British flag still flying in the air, and trying to brisk up
mayor and mayor and magistrate and magistrate in a new effort of
organisation. They had brought together all the best of the
surviving artisans from that region, they had provisioned the
park for a siege, and they were urgently building a larger type
of Butteridge machine. Bert could get no footing at this work:
he was not sufficiently skilled, and he had drifted to Oxford
when the great fight occurred in which these works were finally
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: the profession of knowledge, but right opinion is our actual guide. There
is another sort of progress from the general notions of Socrates, who asked
simply, 'what is friendship?' 'what is temperance?' 'what is courage?' as
in the Lysis, Charmides, Laches, to the transcendentalism of Plato, who, in
the second stage of his philosophy, sought to find the nature of knowledge
in a prior and future state of existence.
The difficulty in framing general notions which has appeared in this and in
all the previous Dialogues recurs in the Gorgias and Theaetetus as well as
in the Republic. In the Gorgias too the statesmen reappear, but in
stronger opposition to the philosopher. They are no longer allowed to have
a divine insight, but, though acknowledged to have been clever men and good
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