| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: in our days American honor. I have shown how the Americans are
constantly driven to engage in commerce and industry. Their
origin, their social condition, their political institutions, and
even the spot they inhabit, urge them irresistibly in this
direction. Their present condition is then that of an almost
exclusively manufacturing and commercial association, placed in
the midst of a new and boundless country, which their principal
object is to explore for purposes of profit. This is the
characteristic which most peculiarly distinguishes the American
people from all others at the present time. All those quiet
virtues which tend to give a regular movement to the community,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: again. `There was too much dust to see anything. What a time
the Monster is, cutting up that cake!'
Alice had seated herself on the bank of a little brook, with
the great dish on her knees, and was sawing away diligently with
the knife. `It's very provoking!' she said, in reply to the Lion
(she was getting quite used to being called `the Monster').
`I've cut several slices already, but they always join on again!'
`You don't know how to manage Looking-glass cakes,' the Unicorn
remarked. `Hand it round first, and cut it afterwards.'
This sounded nonsense, but Alice very obediently got up, and
carried the dish round, and the cake divided itself into three
Through the Looking-Glass |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: educated in every age, by which to each school, or party, or nation, is
given some one great truth, which they are to work out to its highest
development, to exemplify in actual life, leaving some happier age--
perhaps, alas! only some future state--to reconcile that too favoured
dogma with other truths which lie beside it, and without which it is
always incomplete, and sometimes altogether barren.
But such schools of science, founded on such a ground as this, on the
mere instinct of curiosity, had little chance of originality or
vitality. All the great schools of the world, the elder Greek
philosophy, the Alexandrian, the present Baconian school of physics,
have had a deeper motive for their search, a far higher object which
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