| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: in this world more dismal than that of the Sabbath bells
in Edinburgh: a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin; the outcry
of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on every separate
conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own
synagogue, against 'right-hand extremes and left-hand
defections.' And surely there are few worse extremes
than this extremity of zeal; and few more deplorable
defections than this disloyalty to Christian love.
Shakespeare wrote a comedy of 'Much Ado about Nothing.'
The Scottish nation made a fantastic tragedy on the same
subject. And it is for the success of this remarkable
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: research stands the philosophic Plato, whose account of primitive
man is entirely speculative and deductive.
The origin of society he ascribes to necessity, the mother of all
inventions, and imagines that individual man began deliberately to
herd together on account of the advantages of the principle of
division of labour and the rendering of mutual need.
It must, however, be borne in mind that Plato's object in this
whole passage in the REPUBLIC was, perhaps, not so much to analyse
the conditions of early society as to illustrate the importance of
the division of labour, the shibboleth of his political economy, by
showing what a powerful factor it must have been in the most
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: present needing leniency, it was myself.
"Why, yes," I told them, "it's through precocity. The new-rich American
no longer commits the blunder of keeping his children innocent. You'll
see it beginning in the dancing-class, where I heard an exquisite little
girl of six say to a little boy, 'Go away; I can't dance with you,
because my mamma says your mamma only keeps a maid to answer the
doorbell.' When they get home from the dancing-class, tutors in poker and
bridge are waiting to teach them how to gamble for each other's little
dimes. I saw a little boy in knickerbockers and a wide collar throw down
the evening paper--"
"At that age? They read the papers?" interrupted Mrs. Gregory.
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