| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: and hope? And him I call the courageous.
SOCRATES: Do you understand his meaning, Laches?
LACHES: Yes; I suppose that, in his way of speaking, the soothsayers are
courageous. For who but one of them can know to whom to die or to live is
better? And yet Nicias, would you allow that you are yourself a
soothsayer, or are you neither a soothsayer nor courageous?
NICIAS: What! do you mean to say that the soothsayer ought to know the
grounds of hope or fear?
LACHES: Indeed I do: who but he?
NICIAS: Much rather I should say he of whom I speak; for the soothsayer
ought to know only the signs of things that are about to come to pass,
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 1 by Alexis de Toqueville: frequent collisions between those tribunals. The question then
arose to whom the right of deciding the competency of each court
was to be referred.
In nations which constitute a single body politic, when a
question is debated between two courts relating to their mutual
jurisdiction, a third tribunal is generally within reach to
decide the difference; and this is effected without difficulty,
because in these nations the questions of judicial competency
have no connection with the privileges of the national supremacy.
But it was impossible to create an arbiter between a superior
court of the Union and the superior court of a separate State
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: Hoodish readjustment of a public wrong.
And there is more behind. Not only is theft from the plantations
regarded rather as a lark and peccadillo, the idea of theft in
itself is not very clearly present to these communists; and as to
the punishment of crime in general, a great gulf of opinion divides
the natives from ourselves. Indigenous punishments were short and
sharp. Death, deportation by the primitive method of setting the
criminal to sea in a canoe, fines, and in Samoa itself the penalty
of publicly biting a hot, ill-smelling root, comparable to a rough
forfeit in a children's game - these are approved. The offender is
killed, or punished and forgiven. We, on the other hand, harbour
|
