| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Pathology of Lying, Etc. by William and Mary Healy: subject is the fact that almost nothing has been written on it in
English.
The important part which behavior of this type sometimes plays in
court work is witnessed to by the records of our own cases as
well as those cited in the previous literature. The legal issues
presented by pathological lying may be exceedingly costly. These
facts make it important that the well-equipped lawyer, as well as
the student of abnormal psychology, be familiar with the
specific, related facts. For such students the cardinal point of
recognition of this class of conduct may at once be stated to be
its apparent baselessness.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: beauty, good, evil, which are severally one, yet in their various
combinations appear to be many. Those who recognize these realities are
philosophers; whereas the other class hear sounds and see colours, and
understand their use in the arts, but cannot attain to the true or waking
vision of absolute justice or beauty or truth; they have not the light of
knowledge, but of opinion, and what they see is a dream only. Perhaps he
of whom we say the last will be angry with us; can we pacify him without
revealing the disorder of his mind? Suppose we say that, if he has
knowledge we rejoice to hear it, but knowledge must be of something which
is, as ignorance is of something which is not; and there is a third thing,
which both is and is not, and is matter of opinion only. Opinion and
The Republic |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: probably the arts both of speaking and of conversation have been unduly
neglected by us. But the mind of Socrates pierces through the differences
of times and countries into the essential nature of man; and his words
apply equally to the modern world and to the Athenians of old. Would he
not have asked of us, or rather is he not asking of us, Whether we have
ceased to prefer appearances to reality? Let us take a survey of the
professions to which he refers and try them by his standard. Is not all
literature passing into criticism, just as Athenian literature in the age
of Plato was degenerating into sophistry and rhetoric? We can discourse
and write about poems and paintings, but we seem to have lost the gift of
creating them. Can we wonder that few of them 'come sweetly from nature,'
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