| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: possible, let us imagine them to be better than they are, and more willing
to answer in accordance with the rules of argument, and then their opinion
will be more worth having; for that which better men acknowledge has more
weight than that which is acknowledged by inferior men. Moreover we are no
respecters of persons, but seekers after truth.
THEAETETUS: Very good.
STRANGER: Then now, on the supposition that they are improved, let us ask
them to state their views, and do you interpret them.
THEAETETUS: Agreed.
STRANGER: Let them say whether they would admit that there is such a thing
as a mortal animal.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: first saw the light of day in SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE, Mr. Nutt
and Lord Archibald Campbell have been in public controversy
on the facts. Two clans, the Camerons and the Campbells, lay
claim to this bracing story; and they do well: the man who
preferred his plighted troth to the commands and menaces of
the dead is an ancestor worth disputing. But the Campbells
must rest content: they have the broad lands and the broad
page of history; this appanage must be denied them; for
between the name of CAMERON and that of CAMPBELL, the muse
will never hesitate.
Note 1, Mr. Nutt reminds me it was "by my sword and Ben
Ballads |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: gaudy buildings that manage to be offensive, without
being contemptible; and we know that 'fools rush in where
angels fear to tread.' But to aim at making a common-
place villa, and to make it insufferably ugly in each
particular; to attempt the homeliest achievement, and to
attain the bottom of derided failure; not to have any
theory but profit and yet, at an equal expense, to
outstrip all competitors in the art of conceiving and
rendering permanent deformity; and to do all this in what
is, by nature, one of the most agreeable neighbourhoods
in Britain:- what are we to say, but that this also is a
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