| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott: philosophy, or entreat him to recall the superiority of mental
talents to the more attractive attributes that are merely
personal. 'I hear you,' he would reply; 'but you speak the voice
of cold-blooded stoicism, or, at least, of friendly partiality.
But look at every book which we have read, those excepted of that
abstract philosophy which feels no responsive voice in our
natural feelings. Is not personal form, such as at least can be
tolerated without horror and disgust, always represented as
essential to our ideas of a friend, far more a lover? Is not
such a mis-shapen monster as I am, excluded, by the very fiat of
Nature, from her fairest enjoyments? What but my wealth prevents
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: they may fail in their conception of philosophers and statesmen, and may
not know what they do and say in time of war, when they are fighting or
holding parley with their enemies. And thus people of your class are the
only ones remaining who are fitted by nature and education to take part at
once both in politics and philosophy. Here is Timaeus, of Locris in Italy,
a city which has admirable laws, and who is himself in wealth and rank the
equal of any of his fellow-citizens; he has held the most important and
honourable offices in his own state, and, as I believe, has scaled the
heights of all philosophy; and here is Critias, whom every Athenian knows
to be no novice in the matters of which we are speaking; and as to
Hermocrates, I am assured by many witnesses that his genius and education
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: brain is worked out with the strangest incongruity. He is not the master
of his words, but his words--perhaps borrowed from another--the faded
reflection of some French or German or Italian writer, have the better of
him. Though we are not going to banish the poets, how can we suppose that
such utterances have any healing or life-giving influence on the minds of
men?
'Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:' Art then must be true,
and politics must be true, and the life of man must be true and not a
seeming or sham. In all of them order has to be brought out of disorder,
truth out of error and falsehood. This is what we mean by the greatest
improvement of man. And so, having considered in what way 'we can best
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