| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: is confined to the individual. The nature of language, though not the
whole, is perhaps at present the most important element in our knowledge of
it. It is not impossible that some numerical laws may be found to have a
place in the relations of mind and matter, as in the rest of nature. The
old Pythagorean fancy that the soul 'is or has in it harmony' may in some
degree be realized. But the indications of such numerical harmonies are
faint; either the secret of them lies deeper than we can discover, or
nature may have rebelled against the use of them in the composition of men
and animals. It is with qualitative rather than with quantitative
differences that we are concerned in Psychology. The facts relating to the
mind which we obtain from Physiology are negative rather than positive.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri: experts, either by agreement between them or by a scientific
reference to arbitration, as in the German, Austrian, and Russian
system; and over this finding the judges and the litigants should
have no other power than to call for explanations from the chief
of the experts.
In this way we should further avoid the scandal of judges entirely
ignorant of the elementary ideas of criminal biology, psychology,
and psycho-pathology, like the president of an assize court whom I
heard telling a jury that he was unable to say why an expert
``wanted to examine the feet of a prisoner in order to come to a
decision about his head.'' This president, who was an
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: resignation, or a feeling that her penance might best be wrought
out by this unutterable pain, she resisted the impulse, and sat
erect, pale as death, looking sadly into little Pearl's wild
eyes. Still came the battery of flowers, almost invariably
hitting the mark, and covering the mother's breast with hurts for
which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to seek
it in another. At last, her shot being all expended, the child
stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little laughing image
of a fiend peeping out -- or, whether it peeped or no, her mother
so imagined it -- from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.
The Scarlet Letter |
