| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: nature and perfect obstinacy"; but at the last, when he was
persuaded - "Yes," said he, "I am very much obliged to you; you
have done me a service; it would have been a theft." There are
many (not Catholics merely) who require their heroes and saints to
be infallible; to these the story will be painful; not to the true
lovers, patrons, and servants of mankind.
And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you are one of
those who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a
pleasure to find and publish them; and that, having found them, you
make haste to forget the overvailing virtues and the real success
which had alone introduced them to your knowledge. It is a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: worthy woman against what one MIGHT see, and she put it frankly to
Miss Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she?
"craping up to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours." The gas and
the electric light were off the house, and she fairly evoked a
gruesome vision of her march through the great grey rooms - so many
of them as there were too! - with her glimmering taper. Miss
Staverton met her honest glare with a smile and the profession that
she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer
Brydon meanwhile held his peace - for the moment; the question of
the "evil" hours in his old home had already become too grave for
him. He had begun some time since to "crape," and he knew just why
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: intermediate varieties will be liable to accidental extermination; and
during the process of further modification through natural selection, they
will almost certainly be beaten and supplanted by the forms which they
connect; for these from existing in greater numbers will, in the aggregate,
present more variation, and thus be further improved through natural
selection and gain further advantages.
Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true,
numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all the species of
the same group together, must assuredly have existed; but the very process
of natural selection constantly tends, as has been so often remarked, to
exterminate the parent forms and the intermediate links. Consequently
On the Origin of Species |
