| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: asked, I am compelled to stay and listen to you, and may not go away? I
say rather, if you have a real interest in the argument, or, to repeat my
former expression, have any desire to set it on its legs, take back any
statement which you please; and in your turn ask and answer, like myself
and Gorgias--refute and be refuted: for I suppose that you would claim to
know what Gorgias knows--would you not?
POLUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: And you, like him, invite any one to ask you about anything
which he pleases, and you will know how to answer him?
POLUS: To be sure.
SOCRATES: And now, which will you do, ask or answer?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: words or other signs arranged in such a manner as is competent to us in
order to declare our thoughts to others: for we may easily conceive a
machine to be so constructed that it emits vocables, and even that it
emits some correspondent to the action upon it of external objects which
cause a change in its organs; for example, if touched in a particular
place it may demand what we wish to say to it; if in another it may cry
out that it is hurt, and such like; but not that it should arrange them
variously so as appositely to reply to what is said in its presence, as
men of the lowest grade of intellect can do. The second test is, that
although such machines might execute many things with equal or perhaps
greater perfection than any of us, they would, without doubt, fail in
Reason Discourse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: and high civilization of this section of the country.
My "Columbian Orator," almost my only book, had done nothing
to enlighten me concerning Northern society. I had been taught
that slavery was the bottom fact of all wealth. With this foundation idea,
I came naturally to the conclusion that poverty must be the general
condition of the people of the free States. In the country from which I came,
a white man holding no slaves was usually an ignorant and poverty-stricken man,
and men of this class were contemptuously called "poor white trash."
Hence I supposed that, since the non-slave-holders at the South were ignorant,
poor, and degraded as a class, the non-slave-holders at the North must be
in a similar condition. I could have landed in no part of the United States
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