| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: silences within, presently they will hear him.) But when one
argues, one finds oneself suddenly in the net of those ancient
controversies between species and individual, between the one and
the many, which arise out of the necessarily imperfect methods of
the human mind. Upon these matters there has been much pregnant
writing during the last half century. Such ideas as this writer has
to offer are to be found in a previous little book of his, "First
and Last Things," in which, writing as one without authority or
specialisation in logic and philosophy, as an ordinary man vividly
interested, for others in a like case, he was at some pains to
elucidate the imperfections of this instrument of ours, this mind,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: try to make a defence:--Let their affidavit be read: it contains something
of this kind: It says that Socrates is a doer of evil, who corrupts the
youth; and who does not believe in the gods of the state, but has other new
divinities of his own. Such is the charge; and now let us examine the
particular counts. He says that I am a doer of evil, and corrupt the
youth; but I say, O men of Athens, that Meletus is a doer of evil, in that
he pretends to be in earnest when he is only in jest, and is so eager to
bring men to trial from a pretended zeal and interest about matters in
which he really never had the smallest interest. And the truth of this I
will endeavour to prove to you.
Come hither, Meletus, and let me ask a question of you. You think a great
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: hope.
IV
For a month they watched the social columns, and waited for a return
dinner-invitation.
As the hosts of Sir Gerald Doak, the McKelveys were headlined all the week
after the Babbitts' dinner. Zenith ardently received Sir Gerald (who had come
to America to buy coal). The newspapers interviewed him on prohibition,
Ireland, unemployment, naval aviation, the rate of exchange, tea-drinking
versus whisky-drinking, the psychology of American women, and daily life as
lived by English county families. Sir Gerald seemed to have heard of all those
topics. The McKelveys gave him a Singhalese dinner, and Miss Elnora Pearl
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