| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: the age of Theodosius, and again in that of Justinian, the Roman armies
had fallen into the same state; when the Italian legions required to be
led by Stilicho the Vandal, and the Byzantine by Belisar the Sclav and
Narses the Persian, the end of all things was at hand, and came; as it
will come soon to Turkey.
But if Turkey deserves to fall, and must fall, it must not fall by our
treachery. Its sins will surely be avenged upon it: but wrong must not
avenge wrong, or the penalty is only passed on from one sinner to
another. Whatsoever element of good is left in the Turk, to that we
must appeal as our only means, if not of saving him, still of helping
him to a quiet euthanasia, and absorption into a worthier race of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: more and more misleads, till at last the bars of the iron cage close
upon him, and as "the golden opes, the iron shuts amain."
We have got something out of the lines, I think, and much more is
yet to be found in them; but we have done enough by way of example
of the kind of word-by-word examination of your author which is
rightly called "reading;" watching every accent and expression, and
putting ourselves always in the author's place, annihilating our own
personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be able
assuredly to say, "Thus Milton thought," not "Thus I thought, in
misreading Milton." And by this process you will gradually come to
attach less weight to your own "Thus I thought" at other times. You
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: different meanings, an ancient and a modern one, and we vainly try to
bridge the gulf between them. Many perplexities are avoided by keeping
them apart. There might certainly be a new science of logic; it would not
however be built up out of the fragments of the old, but would be distinct
from them--relative to the state of knowledge which exists at the present
time, and based chiefly on the methods of Modern Inductive philosophy.
Such a science might have two legitimate fields: first, the refutation and
explanation of false philosophies still hovering in the air as they appear
from the point of view of later experience or are comprehended in the
history of the human mind, as in a larger horizon: secondly, it might
furnish new forms of thought more adequate to the expression of all the
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