| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: Boehm, Swendenborg, Martinez Pasqualis, Saint-Martin, Molinos, Madame
Guyon, Madame Bourignon, and Madame Krudener, the extensive sect of
the Ecstatics, and that of the Illuminati, have at different periods
duly treasured the doctrines of this science, of which the aim is
indeed truly startling and portentous. In Doctor Sigier's day, as in
our own, man has striven to gain wings to fly into the sanctuary where
God hides from our gaze.
This digression was necessary to give a clue to the scene at which the
old man and the youth from the island under Notre-Dame had come to be
audience; it will also protect this narrative from all blame on the
score of falsehood and hyperbole, of which certain persons of hasty
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: them, but instead he remained watching. They were a dingy,
shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part
incapable of any but obsolete and superseded types of labour.
They bore a few banners with the time-honoured inscription:
'Work, not Charity,' but otherwise their ranks were unadorned.
They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was
nothing truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no
definite objective they were just marching and showing themselves
in the more prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of
that great mass of unskilled cheap labour which the now still
cheaper mechanical powers had superseded for evermore. They were
The Last War: A World Set Free |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: idealism, Alcibiades, accompanied by a troop of revellers and a flute-girl,
staggers in, and being drunk is able to tell of things which he would have
been ashamed to make known if he had been sober. The state of his
affections towards Socrates, unintelligible to us and perverted as they
appear, affords an illustration of the power ascribed to the loves of man
in the speech of Pausanias. He does not suppose his feelings to be
peculiar to himself: there are several other persons in the company who
have been equally in love with Socrates, and like himself have been
deceived by him. The singular part of this confession is the combination
of the most degrading passion with the desire of virtue and improvement.
Such an union is not wholly untrue to human nature, which is capable of
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