| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: often implied in this and similar discussions; but should say of some of
them, that their genuineness is neither proven nor disproven until further
evidence about them can be adduced. And we are as confident that the
Epistles are spurious, as that the Republic, the Timaeus, and the Laws are
genuine.
On the whole, not a twentieth part of the writings which pass under the
name of Plato, if we exclude the works rejected by the ancients themselves
and two or three other plausible inventions, can be fairly doubted by those
who are willing to allow that a considerable change and growth may have
taken place in his philosophy (see above). That twentieth debatable
portion scarcely in any degree affects our judgment of Plato, either as a
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: horizontal tunnel in which I could lie down and rest. It was not
too soon. My arms ached, my back was cramped, and I was
trembling with the prolonged terror of a fall. Besides this, the
unbroken darkness had had a distressing effect upon my eyes. The
air was full of the throb and hum of machinery pumping air down
the shaft.
`I do not know how long I lay. I was roused by a soft hand
touching my face. Starting up in the darkness I snatched at my
matches and, hastily striking one, I saw three stooping white
creatures similar to the one I had seen above ground in the ruin,
hastily retreating before the light. Living, as they did, in
The Time Machine |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Nada the Lily by H. Rider Haggard: this woman was mad. For it had chanced that her husband had been
"smelt out" by the witch-doctors as a worker of magic against the
king, and slain. Then Chaka, according to custom, despatched the
slayers to eat up his kraal, and they came to the kraal and killed his
people. Last of all they killed his children, three young girls, and
would have assegaied their mother, when suddenly a spirit entered into
her at the sight, and she went mad, so that they let her go, being
afraid to touch her afterwards. So she fled and took up her abode in
the haunted glen; and this was the nature of her madness, that
whenever she saw children, and more especially girl children, a
longing came upon her to kill them as her own had been killed. This,
Nada the Lily |
