| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: perhaps, to know them.
I have never made much account of what has proceeded from my own mind; and
so long as I gathered no other advantage from the method I employ beyond
satisfying myself on some difficulties belonging to the speculative
sciences, or endeavoring to regulate my actions according to the
principles it taught me, I never thought myself bound to publish anything
respecting it. For in what regards manners, every one is so full of his
own wisdom, that there might be found as many reformers as heads, if any
were allowed to take upon themselves the task of mending them, except
those whom God has constituted the supreme rulers of his people or to whom
he has given sufficient grace and zeal to be prophets; and although my
Reason Discourse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Land of Footprints by Stewart Edward White: They have lived, ethnologists tell us, for thousands, perhaps
hundreds of thousands of years, just as we find them to-day. From
our standpoint that is in a hopeless intellectual darkness, for
they know absolutely nothing of the most elementary subjects of
knowledge. From their standpoint, however, they have reached the
highest DESIRABLE pinnacle of human development. Nothing remains
to be changed. Their customs, religions, and duties have been
worked out and immutably established long ago; and nobody dreams
of questioning either their wisdom or their imperative necessity.
They are the conservatives of the world.
Nor must we conclude-looking at them with the eyes of our own
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: important, what Mr. Carlyle has written on him, as on one of the
most significant personages of the age? Remember, then, that
Cagliostro was no isolated phenomenon; that his success--nay, his
having even conceived the possibility of success in the brain that
lay within that "brass-faced, bull-necked, thick-lipped" head--was
made possible by public opinion. Had Cagliostro lived in our time,
public opinion would have pointed out to him other roads to honour--
on which he would doubtless have fared as well. For when the silly
dace try to be caught and hope to be caught, he is a foolish pike
who cannot gorge them. But the method most easy for a pike-nature
like Cagliostro's, was in the eighteenth century, as it may be in
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