| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: of persons who instead of doing the skilled labor for which
they were qualified were engaged in petty profiteering, etc.;
(2) that there evaporation of skilled labor into unproductive
speculation could at least be checked by the introduction of
labor books, which would give some sort of registration of
each citizen's work; (3) that workmen can be brought back
from the villages only for enterprises which are supplied
with provisions or are situated in districts where there is
plenty. ("The opinion that, in the absence of these
preliminary conditions, it will be possible to draw workmen
from the villages by measures of compulsion or mobilization
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Records of a Family of Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson: cried the Duke, `a profession with only one man in it! Pray,
who taught you?' `Why,' said Smeaton, `I believe I may say I
was self-taught, an't please your grace.' Smeaton, at the
date of Thomas Smith's third marriage, was yet living; and as
the one had grown to the new profession from his place at the
instrument-maker's, the other was beginning to enter it by the
way of his trade. The engineer of to-day is confronted with a
library of acquired results; tables and formulae to the value
of folios full have been calculated and recorded; and the
student finds everywhere in front of him the footprints of the
pioneers. In the eighteenth century the field was largely
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: perfectly possible, such knowledge is of any use.
That is what we have to consider, he said.
And here, Critias, I said, I hope that you will find a way out of a
difficulty into which I have got myself. Shall I tell you the nature of
the difficulty?
By all means, he replied.
Does not what you have been saying, if true, amount to this: that there
must be a single science which is wholly a science of itself and of other
sciences, and that the same is also the science of the absence of science?
Yes.
But consider how monstrous this proposition is, my friend: in any parallel
|
