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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: business of writing: truth to the fact and a good spirit in
the treatment. In every department of literature, though so
low as hardly to deserve the name, truth to the fact is of
importance to the education and comfort of mankind, and so
hard to preserve, that the faithful trying to do so will lend
some dignity to the man who tries it. Our judgments are
based upon two things: first, upon the original preferences
of our soul; but, second, upon the mass of testimony to the
nature of God, man, and the universe which reaches us, in
divers manners, from without. For the most part these divers
manners are reducible to one, all that we learn of past times
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