| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Profits of Religion by Upton Sinclair: minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is an unmitigated
curse to the race. The armory of science is full of weapons which
might be used to slay the monsters of disease and vice--but these
weapons are not allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be
mentioned. Consider the misery which is piling itself up in the
slams of our great cities---the degenerate, the defective, the
insane, who are multiplying as never before in history. There
exists a perfectly harmless and painless method of sterilizing
the hopelessly unfit, so that they can not reproduce their
hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this operation, and
so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There exists a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: highest meed of virtue. Some extend their rewards yet further; the
posterity, as they say, of the faithful and just shall survive to the third
and fourth generation. This is the style in which they praise justice.
But about the wicked there is another strain; they bury them in a slough in
Hades, and make them carry water in a sieve; also while they are yet living
they bring them to infamy, and inflict upon them the punishments which
Glaucon described as the portion of the just who are reputed to be unjust;
nothing else does their invention supply. Such is their manner of praising
the one and censuring the other.
Once more, Socrates, I will ask you to consider another way of speaking
about justice and injustice, which is not confined to the poets, but is
The Republic |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: /allegro assai/ in C minor is terrible in the midst of that deluge of
fire.
"Confess now," said Massimilla, at the moment when Moses, lifting his
rod, brings down the rain of fire, and when the composer puts forth
all his powers in the orchestra and on the stage, "that no music ever
more perfectly expressed the idea of distress and confusion."
"They have spread to the pit," remarked the Frenchman.
"What is it now? The pit is certainly in great excitement," said the
Duchess.
In the /finale/, Genovese, his eyes fixed on la Tinti, had launched
into such preposterous flourishes, that the pit, indignant at this
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