| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: of the soldier in the field. Laches, the blunt warrior, is of opinion that
such an art is not knowledge, and cannot be of any value, because the
Lacedaemonians, those great masters of arms, neglect it. His own
experience in actual service has taught him that these pretenders are
useless and ridiculous. This man Stesilaus has been seen by him on board
ship making a very sorry exhibition of himself. The possession of the art
will make the coward rash, and subject the courageous, if he chance to make
a slip, to invidious remarks. And now let Socrates be taken into counsel.
As they differ he must decide.
Socrates would rather not decide the question by a plurality of votes: in
such a serious matter as the education of a friend's children, he would
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Tapestried Chamber by Walter Scott: passions which had animated her while she lived. The body of
some atrocious criminal seemed to have been given up from the
grave, and the soul restored from the penal fire, in order to
form for a space a union with the ancient accomplice of its
guilt. I started up in bed, and sat upright, supporting myself
on my palms, as I gazed on this horrible spectre. The hag made,
as it seemed, a single and swift stride to the bed where I lay,
and squatted herself down upon it, in precisely the same attitude
which I had assumed in the extremity of horror, advancing her
diabolical countenance within half a yard of mine, with a grin
which seemed to intimate the malice and the derision of an
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: by the subjugation of large bodies of other human creatures, either as
slaves, subject races, or classes; and as the result of the excessive
labours of those classes there has always been an accumulation of unearned
wealth in the hands of the dominant class or race. It has invariably been
by feeding on this wealth, the result of forced or ill-paid labour, that
the female of the dominant race or class has in the past lost her activity
and has come to exist purely through the passive performance of her sexual
functions. Without slaves or subject classes to perform the crude physical
labours of life and produce superfluous wealth, the parasitism of the
female would, in the past, have been an impossibility.
There is, therefore, a profound truth in that universal saw which states
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