| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: stripes, not their own parents, but other species of the genus. To admit
this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at
least for an unknown, cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and
deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant
cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in
stone so as to mock the shells now living on the sea-shore.
Summary. -- Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound. Not in one
case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign any reason why this or that
part differs, more or less, from the same part in the parents. But
whenever we have the means of instituting a comparison, the same laws
appear to have acted in producing the lesser differences between varieties
On the Origin of Species |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: sun uprising out of a great plain, and Christian hails it
with his hand:
'Where am I now! is this the love and care
Of Jesus, for the men that pilgrims are!
Thus to provide! That I should be forgiven!
And dwell already the next door to heaven!'
A page or two further, from the top of the House Beautiful,
the damsels point his gaze toward the Delectable Mountains:
'The Prospect,' so the cut is ticketed - and I shall be
surprised, if on less than a square inch of paper you can
show me one so wide and fair. Down a cross road on an
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . .
we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power
to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember,
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . .
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