| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: is the discomfiture which attends the opponents of predication, who, like
the ventriloquist Eurycles, have the voice that answers them in their own
breast. For they cannot help using the words 'is,' 'apart,' 'from others,'
and the like; and their adversaries are thus saved the trouble of refuting
them. But (2) if all things have communion with all things, motion will
rest, and rest will move; here is a reductio ad absurdum. Two out of the
three hypotheses are thus seen to be false. The third (3) remains, which
affirms that only certain things communicate with certain other things. In
the alphabet and the scale there are some letters and notes which combine
with others, and some which do not; and the laws according to which they
combine or are separated are known to the grammarian and musician. And
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: sufficiently to answer the description of their papers.
But I had a friend--a sailor--who owned a sailor's protection,
which answered somewhat the purpose of free papers--describing his person,
and certifying to the fact that he was a free American sailor.
The instrument had at its head the American eagle, which gave
it the appearance at once of an authorized document.
This protection, when in my hands, did not describe
its bearer very accurately. Indeed, it called for a man
much darker than myself, and close examination of it would
have caused my arrest at the start.
In order to avoid this fatal scrutiny on the part of railroad
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: covered by the present roadway. Each house, standing almost in the
river, allowed its dwellers to get down to the water by stone or
wooden stairways, closed and protected by strong iron railings or
wooden gates, clamped with iron. The houses, like those in Venice, had
an entrance on /terra firma/ and a water entrance. At the moment when
the present sketch is published, only one of these houses remains to
recall the old Paris of which we speak, and that is soon to disappear;
it stands at the corner of the Petit-Pont, directly opposite to the
guard-house of the Hotel-Dieu.
Formerly each dwelling presented on the river-side the fantastic
appearance given either by the trade of its occupant and his habits,
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