| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: commanded me to sit down at some distance (an honour which he had
never before conferred upon me). He said, "he had been very
seriously considering my whole story, as far as it related both
to myself and my country; that he looked upon us as a sort of
animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not
conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we
made no other use, than by its assistance, to aggravate our
natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had
not given us; that we disarmed ourselves of the few abilities she
had bestowed; had been very successful in multiplying our
original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain
Gulliver's Travels |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave by Frederick Douglass: miles from my home. She made her journeys to see
me in the night, travelling the whole distance on
foot, after the performance of her day's work. She
was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of
not being in the field at sunrise, unless a slave has
special permission from his or her master to the con-
trary--a permission which they seldom get, and one
that gives to him that gives it the proud name of
being a kind master. I do not recollect of ever seeing
my mother by the light of day. She was with me in
the night. She would lie down with me, and get me
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: exciting causes to which he is submitted may happen to decide. A
crowd is at the mercy of all external exciting causes, and
reflects their incessant variations. It is the slave of the
impulses which it receives. The isolated individual may be
submitted to the same exciting causes as the man in a crowd, but
as his brain shows him the inadvisability of yielding to them, he
refrains from yielding. This truth may be physiologically
expressed by saying that the isolated individual possesses the
capacity of dominating his reflex actions, while a crowd is
devoid of this capacity.
The varying impulses to which crowds obey may be, according to
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