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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: men to remain long content with rigid formulae of conduct. Iron-
bound, impersonal ethics, the procrustean bed of rules, he soon saw
at their true value as the deification of averages. 'As to Miss (I
declare I forget her name) being bad,' I find him writing, 'people
only mean that she has broken the Decalogue - which is not at all
the same thing. People who have kept in the high-road of Life
really have less opportunity for taking a comprehensive view of it
than those who have leaped over the hedges and strayed up the
hills; not but what the hedges are very necessary, and our stray
travellers often have a weary time of it. So, you may say, have
those in the dusty roads.' Yet he was himself a very stern
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