| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri: for a legal decision, in accordance with some particular article
in the penal code--except that the actual observance of this
article is at the mercy of a thousand accidents of which the judge
knows nothing, and which are all foreign to the crime, and to the
criminal.
If we rid ourselves of the assumption that we can measure the
moral culpability of the accused, the whole process of a criminal
trial consists in the assemblage of facts, the discussion, and the
decision upon the evidence. For the classical school, on the
other hand, such a trial has been regarded as a succession of
guarantees for the individual against society, and, by a sort of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: wondered how she went on without sails, and swam up to her to see.
A school of dolphins were running races round and round her, going
three feet for her one, and Tom asked them the way to Shiny Wall:
but they did not know. Then he tried to find out how she moved,
and at last he saw her screw, and was so delighted with it that he
played under her quarter all day, till he nearly had his nose
knocked off by the fans, and thought it time to move. Then he
watched the sailors upon deck, and the ladies, with their bonnets
and parasols: but none of them could see him, because their eyes
were not opened, - as, indeed, most people's eyes are not.
At last there came out into the quarter-gallery a very pretty lady,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: the same effect, which is introduced by way of contrast to the formality of
the two speeches (Socrates has a sense of relief when he has escaped from
the trammels of rhetoric), seems to be that the two speeches proceed upon
the supposition that love is and ought to be interested, and that no such
thing as a real or disinterested passion, which would be at the same time
lasting, could be conceived. 'But did I call this "love"? O God, forgive
my blasphemy. This is not love. Rather it is the love of the world. But
there is another kingdom of love, a kingdom not of this world, divine,
eternal. And this other love I will now show you in a mystery.'
Then follows the famous myth, which is a sort of parable, and like other
parables ought not to receive too minute an interpretation. In all such
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