| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: destroy the delusion that there is such a thing as individual
perfection, that there is even ideal perfection for humanity. With
an abundance of convincing instances Professor Metchnikoff
demonstrates that life is a system of "disharmonies," capable of no
perfect way, that there is no "perfect" dieting, no "perfect" sexual
life, no "perfect" happiness, no "perfect" conduct. He releases one
from the arbitrary but all too easy assumption that there is even an
ideal "perfection" in organic life. He sweeps out of the mind with
all the confidence and conviction of a physiological specialist, any
idea that there is a perfect man or a conceivable perfect man. It
is in the nature of every man to fall short at every point from
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: Amestris, the wife of Xerxes and mother of Artaxerxes, and say to her,
There is a certain Dinomache, whose whole wardrobe is not worth fifty
minae--and that will be more than the value--and she has a son who is
possessed of a three-hundred acre patch at Erchiae, and he has a mind to go
to war with your son--would she not wonder to what this Alcibiades trusts
for success in the conflict? 'He must rely,' she would say to herself,
'upon his training and wisdom--these are the things which Hellenes value.'
And if she heard that this Alcibiades who is making the attempt is not as
yet twenty years old, and is wholly uneducated, and when his lover tells
him that he ought to get education and training first, and then go and
fight the king, he refuses, and says that he is well enough as he is, would
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe: Legree encouraged his two black satellites to a kind of coarse
familiarity with him,--a familiarity, however, at any moment liable
to get one or the other of them into trouble; for, on the slightest
provocation, one of them always stood ready, at a nod, to be a
minister of his vengeance on the other.
As they stood there now by Legree, they seemed an apt illustration
of the fact that brutal men are lower even than animals.
Their coarse, dark, heavy features; their great eyes, rolling
enviously on each other; their barbarous, guttural, half-brute
intonation; their dilapidated garments fluttering in the wind,--were
all in admirable keeping with the vile and unwholesome character
Uncle Tom's Cabin |
