| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: He treats first of music or literature, which he divides into true and
false, and then goes on to gymnastics; of infancy in the Republic he takes
no notice, though in the Laws he gives sage counsels about the nursing of
children and the management of the mothers, and would have an education
which is even prior to birth. But in the Republic he begins with the age
at which the child is capable of receiving ideas, and boldly asserts, in
language which sounds paradoxical to modern ears, that he must be taught
the false before he can learn the true. The modern and ancient
philosophical world are not agreed about truth and falsehood; the one
identifies truth almost exclusively with fact, the other with ideas. This
is the difference between ourselves and Plato, which is, however, partly a
The Republic |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Book of Remarkable Criminals by H. B. Irving: address the jury. Roussel insisted on the importance of the
corpus delicti. "The delictum," he said, "is the effect, the
guilty man merely the cause; it is useless to deal with the cause
if the effect is uncertain," and he cited a case in which a woman
had been sent for trial, charged with murdering her husband; the
moral proof of her guilt seemed conclusive, when suddenly her
husband appeared in court alive and well. The advocate made a
good deal of the fact that the remains of the draught prescribed
by Dr. Pigache, a spoonful of which Castaing had given to Auguste
Ballet, had been analysed and showed no trace of poison. Against
this the prosecution set the evidence of the chemist at Saint
A Book of Remarkable Criminals |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: giggling, nudging spectators, Flora wasn't ready to tell about
herself. She held her little court in the crowd, upon the grass,
playing her light over Jews and Gentiles, completely at ease in all
promiscuities. It was an effect of these things that from the very
first, with every one listening, I could mention that my main
business with her would be just to have a go at her head and to
arrange in that view for an early sitting. It would have been as
impossible, I think, to be impertinent to her as it would have been
to throw a stone at a plate-glass window; so any talk that went
forward on the basis of her loveliness was the most natural thing
in the world and immediately became the most general and sociable.
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