| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from When the World Shook by H. Rider Haggard: which was delicate, yet gracious.
"You have changed your robes, Lady," I said. "Yes, Humphrey.
Bastin gave me pictures of those your women wear." (On further
investigation I found that this referred to an old copy of the
Queen newspaper, which, somehow or other, had been brought with
the books from the ship.) "I have tried to copy them a little,"
she added doubtfully.
"How do you do it? Where do you get the material?" I asked.
"Oh!" she answered with an airy wave of her hand, "I make it--
it is there."
"I don't understand," I said, but she only smiled radiantly,
When the World Shook |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: collapse which would turn that hunger into starvation. It
must be remembered that the urgency of the economic crisis
has driven political questions into the background. The
Communists (compare Rykov's remarks on this subject,
p. 175) believe that this is the natural result of social
revolution. They think that political parties will disappear
altogether and that people will band together, not for the
victory of one of several contending political parties, but
solely for economic cooperation or joint enterprise in art
or science. In support of this they point to the number of
their opponents who have become Communists, and to the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: Meno's slaves, from whom Socrates elicits truths of arithmetic and
geometry, which he had never learned in this world. He must therefore have
brought them with him from another.
The notion of a previous state of existence is found in the verses of
Empedocles and in the fragments of Heracleitus. It was the natural answer
to two questions, 'Whence came the soul? What is the origin of evil?' and
prevailed far and wide in the east. It found its way into Hellas probably
through the medium of Orphic and Pythagorean rites and mysteries. It was
easier to think of a former than of a future life, because such a life has
really existed for the race though not for the individual, and all men come
into the world, if not 'trailing clouds of glory,' at any rate able to
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