| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: and lectures from many average orators.
But are we not still far behind the old Greeks, and the Romans of
the Empire likewise, in the amount of amusement and instruction,
and even of shelter, which we provide for the people? Recollect
the--to me--disgraceful fact, that there is not, as far as I am
aware, throughout the whole of London, a single portico or other
covered place, in which the people can take refuge during a
shower: and this in the climate of England! Where they do take
refuge on a wet day the publican knows but too well; as he knows
also where thousands of the lower classes, simply for want of any
other place to be in, save their own sordid dwellings, spend as
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: impossible by all the methods hitherto proposed. For we can
neither employ them in handicraft or agriculture; we neither
build houses, (I mean in the country) nor cultivate land: they
can very seldom pick up a livelihood by stealing till they arrive
at six years old; except where they are of towardly parts,
although I confess they learn the rudiments much earlier; during
which time they can however be properly looked upon only as
probationers: As I have been informed by a principal gentleman in
the county of Cavan, who protested to me, that he never knew
above one or two instances under the age of six, even in a part
of the kingdom so renowned for the quickest proficiency in that
A Modest Proposal |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: before birth or at birth. But all men have not this knowledge, nor have
any without a process of reminiscence; which is a proof that it is not
innate or given at birth, unless indeed it was given and taken away at the
same instant. But if not given to men in birth, it must have been given
before birth--this is the only alternative which remains. And if we had
ideas in a former state, then our souls must have existed and must have had
intelligence in a former state. The pre-existence of the soul stands or
falls with the doctrine of ideas.
It is objected by Simmias and Cebes that these arguments only prove a
former and not a future existence. Socrates answers this objection by
recalling the previous argument, in which he had shown that the living come
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