| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: nation. They have no genius or talent for comparatively
humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and
manufactures and agriculture. If we were left solely to the
wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance,
uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual
complaints of the people, America would not long retain her
rank among the nations. For eighteen hundred years, though
perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has
been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and
practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which
it sheds on the science of legislation.
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: good, and the intemperate is bad. And he who is temperate is also just and
brave and pious, and has attained the perfection of goodness and therefore
of happiness, and the intemperate whom you approve is the opposite of all
this and is wretched. He therefore who would be happy must pursue
temperance and avoid intemperance, and if possible escape the necessity of
punishment, but if he have done wrong he must endure punishment. In this
way states and individuals should seek to attain harmony, which, as the
wise tell us, is the bond of heaven and earth, of gods and men. Callicles
has never discovered the power of geometrical proportion in both worlds; he
would have men aim at disproportion and excess. But if he be wrong in
this, and if self-control is the true secret of happiness, then the paradox
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen: your own observation of what is passing around you.
Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do
our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated
without being known, in a country like this, where social
and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every
man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies,
and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest
Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"
They had reached the end of the gallery, and with
tears of shame she ran off to her own room.
CHAPTER 25
Northanger Abbey |
