| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: reckless and impudent, and that he has written this indictment in a spirit
of mere wantonness and youthful bravado. Has he not compounded a riddle,
thinking to try me? He said to himself:--I shall see whether the wise
Socrates will discover my facetious contradiction, or whether I shall be
able to deceive him and the rest of them. For he certainly does appear to
me to contradict himself in the indictment as much as if he said that
Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods, and yet of believing in
them--but this is not like a person who is in earnest.
I should like you, O men of Athens, to join me in examining what I conceive
to be his inconsistency; and do you, Meletus, answer. And I must remind
the audience of my request that they would not make a disturbance if I
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from King Lear by William Shakespeare: knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance;
drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a
divine
thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to
lay
his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father
compounded with my mother under the Dragon's Tail, and my
nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough
and
lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am, had the
King Lear |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: territory some forty miles long by fifty wide, and almost every
citizen in it seemed intent on buying or selling land, laying out
new roads, or locating some future city. John Calhoun, the county
surveyor, therefore, found himself with far more work than he
could personally attend to, and had to appoint deputies to assist
him. Learning the high esteem in which Lincoln was held by the
people of New Salem, he wisely concluded to make him a deputy,
although they differed in politics. It was a flattering offer,
and Lincoln accepted gladly. Of course he knew almost nothing
about surveying, but he got a compass and chain, and, as he tells
us, "studied Flint and Gibson a little, and went at it." The
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