| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: wayside with any living engineer in France. Gondet was one of the
places we visited together; and Laussonne, where I met the
apothecary's father, was another. There, at Laussonne, George Sand
spent a day while she was gathering materials for the MARQUIS DE
VILLEMER; and I have spoken with an old man, who was then a child
running about the inn kitchen, and who still remembers her with a
sort of reverence. It appears that he spoke French imperfectly; for
this reason George Sand chose him for companion, and whenever he let
slip a broad and picturesque phrase in PATOIS, she would make him
repeat it again and again till it was graven in her memory. The word
for a frog particularly pleased her fancy; and it would be curious to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: falsehood? The Eleatic philosopher would have replied that Being is alone
true. But mankind had got beyond his barren abstractions: they were
beginning to analyze, to classify, to define, to ask what is the nature of
knowledge, opinion, sensation. Still less could they be content with the
description which Achilles gives in Homer of the man whom his soul hates--
os chi eteron men keuthe eni phresin, allo de eipe.
For their difficulty was not a practical but a metaphysical one; and their
conception of falsehood was really impaired and weakened by a metaphysical
illusion.
The strength of the illusion seems to lie in the alternative: If we once
admit the existence of Being and Not-being, as two spheres which exclude
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Proposed Roads To Freedom by Bertrand Russell: economic system as against another, but from the
fact that they remove the veto upon our hopes which
might otherwise result from a doubt as to the productive
capacity of labor. I have dwelt upon agriculture
rather than industry, since it is in regard
to agriculture that the difficulties are chiefly supposed
to arise. Broadly speaking, industrial production
tends to be cheaper when it is carried on on
a large scale, and therefore there is no reason in
industry why an increase in the demand should lead
to an increased cost of supply.
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