| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: from other members of society. They constitute a separate
fraternity at the south, not less marked than is the fraternity
of Park Lane bullies in New York. They have been arranged and
classified <94>by that great law of attraction, which determines
the spheres and affinities of men; which ordains, that men, whose
malign and brutal propensities predominate over their moral and
intellectual endowments, shall, naturally, fall into those
employments which promise the largest gratification to those
predominating instincts or propensities. The office of overseer
takes this raw material of vulgarity and brutality, and stamps it
as a distinct class of southern society. But, in this class, as
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: two-fold translation of the Greek ousia.
So the human mind makes the reflection that God is not a person like
ourselves--is not a cause like the material causes in nature, nor even an
intelligent cause like a human agent--nor an individual, for He is
universal; and that every possible conception which we can form of Him is
limited by the human faculties. We cannot by any effort of thought or
exertion of faith be in and out of our own minds at the same instant. How
can we conceive Him under the forms of time and space, who is out of time
and space? How get rid of such forms and see Him as He is? How can we
imagine His relation to the world or to ourselves? Innumerable
contradictions follow from either of the two alternatives, that God is or
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: This is so lively a case, and contains in it so much of the real
condition of the people, that I think I cannot be too particular in it,
and therefore I descend to the several arrangements or classes of
people who fell into immediate distress upon this occasion. For example:
1. All master-workmen in manufactures, especially such as belonged
to ornament and the less necessary parts of the people's dress, clothes,
and furniture for houses, such as riband-weavers and other weavers,
gold and silver lace makers, and gold and silver wire drawers,
sempstresses, milliners, shoemakers, hatmakers, and glovemakers;
also upholsterers, joiners, cabinet-makers, looking-glass makers, and
innumerable trades which depend upon such as these; - I say, the
A Journal of the Plague Year |
