| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: is not rhetoric; nothing on that subject is to be found in the endless
treatises of rhetoric, however prolific in hard names. When Plato has
sufficiently put them to the test of ridicule he touches, as with the point
of a needle, the real error, which is the confusion of preliminary
knowledge with creative power. No attainments will provide the speaker
with genius; and the sort of attainments which can alone be of any value
are the higher philosophy and the power of psychological analysis, which is
given by dialectic, but not by the rules of the rhetoricians.
In this latter portion of the Dialogue there are many texts which may help
us to speak and to think. The names dialectic and rhetoric are passing out
of use; we hardly examine seriously into their nature and limits, and
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: know the laws of business. She does not know the rules of the
game she is playing; and therefore she is playing it in the dark,
in fear and suspicion, apt to judge of questions on personal
grounds, often offending those with whom she has to do, and
oftener still making herself miserable over matters of law or of
business, on which a little sound knowledge would set her head and
her heart at rest.
When I have seen widows, having the care of children, of a great
household, of a great estate, of a great business, struggling
heroically, and yet often mistakenly; blamed severely for
selfishness and ambition, while they were really sacrificing
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: But the sympathy of the artistic temperament is necessarily with
what has found expression. In words or in colours, in music or in
marble, behind the painted masks of an AEschylean play, or through
some Sicilian shepherds' pierced and jointed reeds, the man and his
message must have been revealed.
To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can
conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ
it was not so. With a width and wonder of imagination that fills
one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate,
the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself
its eternal mouthpiece. Those of whom I have spoken, who are dumb
|
