| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Witch, et. al by Anton Chekhov: summer, and for that he takes almost all the crops for himself.
There's no one to stick up for us!"
"You are lying," Savely growled hoarsely. "Father Nikodim is a
saintly soul, a luminary of the Church; and if he does take it,
it's the regulation!"
"You've a cross one!" said the postman, with a grin. "Have you
been married long?"
"It was three years ago the last Sunday before Lent. My father
was sexton here in the old days, and when the time came for him
to die, he went to the Consistory and asked them to send some
unmarried man to marry me that I might keep the place. So I
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: the teaching of rhetoric.
The characters of the three interlocutors also correspond to the parts
which are assigned to them. Gorgias is the great rhetorician, now advanced
in years, who goes from city to city displaying his talents, and is
celebrated throughout Greece. Like all the Sophists in the dialogues of
Plato, he is vain and boastful, yet he has also a certain dignity, and is
treated by Socrates with considerable respect. But he is no match for him
in dialectics. Although he has been teaching rhetoric all his life, he is
still incapable of defining his own art. When his ideas begin to clear up,
he is unwilling to admit that rhetoric can be wholly separated from justice
and injustice, and this lingering sentiment of morality, or regard for
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: were under the empire of a powerful historical suggestion. The
task of the philosopher is to investigate what it is which
subsists of ancient beliefs beneath their apparent changes, and
to identify amid the moving flux of opinions the part determined
by general beliefs and the genius of the race.
In the absence of this philosophic test it might be supposed that
crowds change their political or religious beliefs frequently and
at will. All history, whether political, religious, artistic, or
literary, seems to prove that such is the case.
As an example, let us take a very short period of French history,
merely that from 1790 to 1820, a period of thirty years'
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