| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: than the cowherd what he ought to say in order to soothe the infuriated
cows?
ION: No, he will not.
SOCRATES: But he will know what a spinning-woman ought to say about the
working of wool?
ION: No.
SOCRATES: At any rate he will know what a general ought to say when
exhorting his soldiers?
ION: Yes, that is the sort of thing which the rhapsode will be sure to
know.
SOCRATES: Well, but is the art of the rhapsode the art of the general?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: left Diard no chance for planned ill-humor. Besides, she was one of
those noble creatures to whom it is impossible to speak
disrespectfully; her glance, in which her life, saintly and pure,
shone out, had the weight of a fascination. Diard, embarrassed at
first, then annoyed, ended by feeling that such high virtue was a yoke
upon him. The goodness of his wife gave him no violent emotions, and
violent emotions were what he wanted. What myriads of scenes are
played in the depths of his souls, beneath the cold exterior of lives
that are, apparently, commonplace! Among these dramas, lasting each
but a short time, though they influence life so powerfully and are
frequently the forerunners of the great misfortune doomed to fall on
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: The most gigantic of these experiments was the French Revolution.
To find out that a society is not to be refashioned from top to
bottom in accordance with the dictates of pure reason, it was
necessary that several millions of men should be massacred and
that Europe should be profoundly disturbed for a period of twenty
years. To prove to us experimentally that dictators cost the
nations who acclaim them dear, two ruinous experiences have been
required in fifty years, and in spite of their clearness they do
not seem to have been sufficiently convincing. The first,
nevertheless, cost three millions of men and an invasion, the
second involved a loss of territory, and carried in its wake the
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