| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: Experiment, according to him and others, establishes in the most
conclusive manner that no trace of electricity can pass through a
liquid compound without producing its equivalent decomposition.[2]
Faraday has now got fairly entangled amid the chemical phenomena of
the pile, and here his previous training under Davy must have been
of the most important service to him. Why, he asks, should
decomposition thus take place?--what force is it that wrenches the
locked constituents of these compounds asunder? On the 20th of June,
1833, he read a paper before the Royal Society 'On Electro-chemical
Decomposition,' in which he seeks to answer these questions.
The notion had been entertained that the poles, as they are called,
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: children--you want to bring them up and educate them--will you take them
into Thessaly and deprive them of Athenian citizenship? Is this the
benefit which you will confer upon them? Or are you under the impression
that they will be better cared for and educated here if you are still
alive, although absent from them; for your friends will take care of them?
Do you fancy that if you are an inhabitant of Thessaly they will take care
of them, and if you are an inhabitant of the other world that they will not
take care of them? Nay; but if they who call themselves friends are good
for anything, they will--to be sure they will.
'Listen, then, Socrates, to us who have brought you up. Think not of life
and children first, and of justice afterwards, but of justice first, that
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: In the discussion of the main thesis of the Dialogue--'What is Courage?'
the antagonism of the two characters is still more clearly brought out; and
in this, as in the preliminary question, the truth is parted between them.
Gradually, and not without difficulty, Laches is made to pass on from the
more popular to the more philosophical; it has never occurred to him that
there was any other courage than that of the soldier; and only by an effort
of the mind can he frame a general notion at all. No sooner has this
general notion been formed than it evanesces before the dialectic of
Socrates; and Nicias appears from the other side with the Socratic
doctrine, that courage is knowledge. This is explained to mean knowledge
of things terrible in the future. But Socrates denies that the knowledge
|
