| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri: consider that this action would be a necessary guarantee, in the
case of all crimes and offences, for a reasonable and definite
adjustment of the rights of the individual and of society.
Another reform, tending to a more effective guarantee of
individual rights, is the revision of judicial errors in the
interests of all who are unjustly condemned or prosecuted. Such a
reform has been advocated also by several members of the classical
school; but it seemed only too likely to remain with them a mere
benevolent expression of opinion; for it can only be carried into
effect by curtailing imprisonment, and by a more frequent and
stringent infliction of fines, as advocated by the positive
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: Murillo might be true to present fact; but there was a fairer ideal,
which once had been fact, in the Eclogues of Theocritus, and the
Loves of Daphnis and Chloe. And so men took to dreaming of
shepherds and shepherdesses, and painting them on canvas, and
modelling them in china, according to their cockney notions of what
they had been once, and always ought to be. We smile now at Sevres
and Dresden shepherdesses; but the wise man will surely see in them
a certain pathos. They indicated a craving after something better
than boorishness; and the many men and women may have become the
gentler and purer by looking even at them, and have said sadly to
themselves: "Such might have been the peasantry of half Europe, had
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: the interrogation of one of Meno's slaves, who, in the skilful hands of
Socrates, is made to acknowledge some elementary relations of geometrical
figures. The theorem that the square of the diagonal is double the square
of the side--that famous discovery of primitive mathematics, in honour of
which the legendary Pythagoras is said to have sacrificed a hecatomb--is
elicited from him. The first step in the process of teaching has made him
conscious of his own ignorance. He has had the 'torpedo's shock' given
him, and is the better for the operation. But whence had the uneducated
man this knowledge? He had never learnt geometry in this world; nor was it
born with him; he must therefore have had it when he was not a man. And as
he always either was or was not a man, he must have always had it.
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