| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac: some thousands of francs but pretty soon lost five or six thousand,
which brought home to him the necessity of a purse for play.
Victurnien had the spirit that gains goodwill everywhere, and puts a
young man of a great family on a level with the very highest. He was
not merely admitted at once into the band of patrician youth, but was
even envied by the rest. It was intoxicating to him to feel that he
was envied, nor was he in this mood very likely to think of reform.
Indeed, he had completely lost his head. He would not think of the
means; he dipped into his money-bags as if they could be refilled
indefinitely; he deliberately shut his eyes to the inevitable results
of the system. In that dissipated set, in the continual whirl of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: subject. In the endless maze of English law is there any 'dividing the
whole into parts or reuniting the parts into a whole'--any semblance of an
organized being 'having hands and feet and other members'? Instead of a
system there is the Chaos of Anaxagoras (omou panta chremata) and no Mind
or Order. Then again in the noble art of politics, who thinks of first
principles and of true ideas? We avowedly follow not the truth but the
will of the many (compare Republic). Is not legislation too a sort of
literary effort, and might not statesmanship be described as the 'art of
enchanting' the house? While there are some politicians who have no
knowledge of the truth, but only of what is likely to be approved by 'the
many who sit in judgment,' there are others who can give no form to their
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
God.' I have heard this and similar texts ingeniously
explained away and brushed from the path of the aspiring
Christian by the tender Great-heart of the parish. One
excellent clergyman told us that the 'eye of a needle' meant
a low, Oriental postern through which camels could not pass
till they were unloaded - which is very likely just; and then
went on, bravely confounding the 'kingdom of God' with
heaven, the future paradise, to show that of course no rich
person could expect to carry his riches beyond the grave -
which, of course, he could not and never did. Various greedy
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