| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: the low ground-floor. The house walls are washed with yellow color;
and door, and first-floor shutters, all the Venetian shutters of the
attic windows, all are painted green.
Entering the house, you find yourself in a little lobby with a crooked
staircase straight in front of you. It is a crazy wooden structure,
the spiral balusters are brown with age, and the steps themselves take
a new angle at every turn. The great old-fashioned paneled dining-
room, floored with square white tiles from Chateau-Regnault, is on
your right; to the left is the sitting-room, equally large, but here
the walls are not paneled; they have been covered instead with a
saffron-colored paper, bordered with green. The walnut-wood rafters
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: the idea of good and the cause of all the rest. They seem, however, to
have lost their first aspect of universals under which individuals are
contained, and to have been converted into forms of another kind, which are
inconsistently regarded from the one side as images or ideals of justice,
temperance, holiness and the like; from the other as hypotheses, or
mathematical truths or principles.
In the Timaeus, which in the series of Plato's works immediately follows
the Republic, though probably written some time afterwards, no mention
occurs of the doctrine of ideas. Geometrical forms and arithmetical ratios
furnish the laws according to which the world is created. But though the
conception of the ideas as genera or species is forgotten or laid aside,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: The massacres began as soon as the beast was unchained--that is,
from 1789, long before the Convention. They were carried
out with all possible refinements of cruelty. During the killing
of September the prisoners were slowly chopped to bits by sabre-
cuts in order to prolong their agonies and amuse the spectators,
who experienced the greatest delight before the spectacle of the
convulsions of the victims and their shrieks of agony.
Similar scenes were observed all over France, even in the early
days of the Revolution, although the foreign war did not excuse
them then, nor any other pretext.
From March to September a whole series of burnings, killings, and
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