| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: party of singers ventured out into the open country, they saw at some
distance a number of men armed to the teeth, whose costume was by no
means reassuring. At the words, 'Those are brigands!' they all
quickened their pace in order to reach the shelter of the wall
enclosing the cardinal's villa. At that critical moment Sarrasine saw
from La Zambinella's manner that she no longer had strength to walk;
he took her in his arms and carried her for some distance, running.
When he was within call of a vineyard near by, he set his mistress
down.
" 'Tell me,' he said, 'why it is that this extreme weakness which in
another woman would be hideous, would disgust me, so that the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: display suggestibility and but slight capacity for reasoning,
while they are open to the influence of the leaders of crowds,
and they are guided in the main by unconscious sentiments. In
the course of this investigation we shall have occasion to
observe some interesting examples of the errors that may be made
by persons not versed in the psychology of crowds.
Juries, in the first place, furnish us a good example of the
slight importance of the mental level of the different elements
composing a crowd, so far as the decisions it comes to are
concerned. We have seen that when a deliberative assembly is
called upon to give its opinion on a question of a character not
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: of the Hippias than against it.
The Menexenus or Funeral Oration is cited by Aristotle, and is interesting
as supplying an example of the manner in which the orators praised 'the
Athenians among the Athenians,' falsifying persons and dates, and casting a
veil over the gloomier events of Athenian history. It exhibits an
acquaintance with the funeral oration of Thucydides, and was, perhaps,
intended to rival that great work. If genuine, the proper place of the
Menexenus would be at the end of the Phaedrus. The satirical opening and
the concluding words bear a great resemblance to the earlier dialogues; the
oration itself is professedly a mimetic work, like the speeches in the
Phaedrus, and cannot therefore be tested by a comparison of the other
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