| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: And the whole earth, thy threshing-floor!
The drums of war, the drums of peace,
Roll through our cities without cease,
And all the iron halls of life
Ring with the unremitting strife.
The common lot we scarce perceive.
Crowds perish, we nor mark nor grieve:
The bugle calls - we mourn a few!
What corporal's guard at Waterloo?
What scanty hundreds more or less
In the man-devouring Wilderness?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: insight into the 'characters of men.' Once more, has not medical science
become a professional routine, which many 'practise without being able to
say who were their instructors'--the application of a few drugs taken from
a book instead of a life-long study of the natures and constitutions of
human beings? Do we see as clearly as Hippocrates 'that the nature of the
body can only be understood as a whole'? (Compare Charm.) And are not
they held to be the wisest physicians who have the greatest distrust of
their art? What would Socrates think of our newspapers, of our theology?
Perhaps he would be afraid to speak of them;--the one vox populi, the other
vox Dei, he might hesitate to attack them; or he might trace a fanciful
connexion between them, and ask doubtfully, whether they are not equally
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Land of Footprints by Stewart Edward White: Nobody has bettered Kipling's description of him in the Just-so
Stories: "A horn on his nose, piggy eyes, and few manners." He
lives a self-centred life, wrapped up in the porcine contentment
that broods within nor looks abroad over the land. When anything
external to himself and his food and drink penetrates to his
intelligence he makes a flurried fool of himself, rushing madly
and frantically here and there in a hysterical effort either to
destroy or get away from the cause of disturbance. He is the
incarnation of a living and perpetual Grouch.
Generally he lives by himself, sometimes with his spouse, more
rarely still with a third that is probably a grown-up son or
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