| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: be told, because it is an evidence of bad temper. Thus do
old-world fancies disappear before the inroads of the
practical sense.
From the conception of souls embodied in beast-forms, as above
illustrated, it is not a wide step to the conception of
beast-souls which, like human souls, survive the death of the
tangible body. The wide-spread superstitions concerning
werewolves and swan-maidens, and the hardly less general
belief in metempsychosis, show that primitive culture has not
arrived at the distinction attained by modern philosophy
between the immortal man and the soulless brute. Still more
Myths and Myth-Makers |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 1 by Alexis de Toqueville: freedom are kept in a state of servitude, those who are
emancipated may learn the art of being free before they become
their own masters. But it would be difficult to apply this
method in the South. To declare that all the negroes born after
a certain period shall be free, is to introduce the principle and
the notion of liberty into the heart of slavery; the blacks whom
the law thus maintains in a state of slavery from which their
children are delivered, are astonished at so unequal a fate, and
their astonishment is only the prelude to their impatience and
irritation. Thenceforward slavery loses, in their eyes, that
kind of moral power which it derived from time and habit; it is
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: let alone the wanton superfluity and uselessness of any such a loafing
consumptive hospital-bird of a Had taking up room and cumbering
the place for nothing. These finical refinements revolt me;
it is not right, it is not honorable; it is constructive nepotism
to keep in office a Had that is so delicate it can't come out when
the wind's in the nor'west--I won't have this dude on the payroll.
Cancel his exequator; and look here--"
"But you miss the point. It is like this. You see--"
"Never mind explaining, I don't care anything about it. Six Hads
is enough for me; anybody that needs twelve, let him subscribe;
I don't want any stock in a Had Trust. Knock out the Prolonged
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