| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: sometimes accidental, it is often real. The same questions are discussed
by them under different conditions of language and civilization; but in
some cases a mere word has survived, while nothing or hardly anything of
the pre-Socratic, Platonic, or Aristotelian meaning is retained. There are
other questions familiar to the moderns, which have no place in ancient
philosophy. The world has grown older in two thousand years, and has
enlarged its stock of ideas and methods of reasoning. Yet the germ of
modern thought is found in ancient, and we may claim to have inherited,
notwithstanding many accidents of time and place, the spirit of Greek
philosophy. There is, however, no continuous growth of the one into the
other, but a new beginning, partly artificial, partly arising out of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain: which warn't no use, for if you are going to find out
the facts of a thing, what's the sense in guessing out
what ain't the facts and wasting ammunition? I didn't
lose no sleep. I wouldn't give a dern to know what's
the matter of Phillips, I says to myself.
Well, in the morning we put on the aperns and got a couple
of trays of truck, and Tom he knocked on the door.
The man opened it a crack, and then he let us in and shut
it quick. By Jackson, when we got a sight of him,
we 'most dropped the trays! and Tom says:
"Why, Jubiter Dunlap, where'd YOU come from?"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember,
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . .
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . .
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . .
and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . .
shall not perish from this earth.
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