| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile,
must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make
that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory after
separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than
friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced
between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war,
you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides,
an no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions
as to terms of intercourse are again upon you.
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.
Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: principles to be unwaveringly acted on. They were firm, not because
of their basis, but because she held them with a tenacity
inseparable from her mental action. On all the duties and
proprieties of life, from filial behaviour to the arrangements of
the evening toilette, pretty Nancy Lammeter, by the time she was
three-and-twenty, had her unalterable little code, and had formed
every one of her habits in strict accordance with that code. She
carried these decided judgments within her in the most unobtrusive
way: they rooted themselves in her mind, and grew there as quietly
as grass. Years ago, we know, she insisted on dressing like
Priscilla, because "it was right for sisters to dress alike", and
Silas Marner |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: (Greek) 'on the one hand' ('on the one hand to become good is hard'); there
would be no reason for the introduction of (Greek), unless you suppose him
to speak with a hostile reference to the words of Pittacus. Pittacus is
saying 'Hard is it to be good,' and he, in refutation of this thesis,
rejoins that the truly hard thing, Pittacus, is to become good, not joining
'truly' with 'good,' but with 'hard.' Not, that the hard thing is to be
truly good, as though there were some truly good men, and there were others
who were good but not truly good (this would be a very simple observation,
and quite unworthy of Simonides); but you must suppose him to make a
trajection of the word 'truly' (Greek), construing the saying of Pittacus
thus (and let us imagine Pittacus to be speaking and Simonides answering
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