| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: side of three hundred years ago, you are all right; but the minute
you get back of Elizabeth's time the language begins to fog up, and
the further back you go the foggier it gets. I had some talk with
one Langland and a man by the name of Chaucer - old-time poets -
but it was no use, I couldn't quite understand them, and they
couldn't quite understand me. I have had letters from them since,
but it is such broken English I can't make it out. Back of those
men's time the English are just simply foreigners, nothing more,
nothing less; they talk Danish, German, Norman French, and
sometimes a mixture of all three; back of THEM, they talk Latin,
and ancient British, Irish, and Gaelic; and then back of these come
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: of gravity. This motion of the mass is arrested by collision with
the earth; being broken up into molecular tremors, to which we give
the name of heat.
And when we reverse the process, and employ those tremors of heat to
raise a weight, as is done through the intermediation of an elastic
fluid in the steam-engine, a certain definite portion of the
molecular motion is destroyed in raising the weight. In this sense,
and this sense only, can the heat be said to be converted into
gravity, or more correctly, into potential energy of gravity. It is
not that the destruction of the heat has created any new attraction,
but simply that the old attraction has now a power conferred upon it,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: other political virtue, let me give you a further proof, which is this. In
other cases, as you are aware, if a man says that he is a good flute-
player, or skilful in any other art in which he has no skill, people either
laugh at him or are angry with him, and his relations think that he is mad
and go and admonish him; but when honesty is in question, or some other
political virtue, even if they know that he is dishonest, yet, if the man
comes publicly forward and tells the truth about his dishonesty, then, what
in the other case was held by them to be good sense, they now deem to be
madness. They say that all men ought to profess honesty whether they are
honest or not, and that a man is out of his mind who says anything else.
Their notion is, that a man must have some degree of honesty; and that if
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