| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger: mortality. Are we to check the infant mortality rate among the
feeble-minded and aid the unfortunate offspring to grow up, a menace
to the civilized community even when not actually certifiable as
mentally defective or not obviously imbecile?
Other figures and studies indicate the close relationship between
feeble-mindedness and the spread of venereal scourges. We are
informed that in Michigan, 75 per cent. of the prostitute class is
infected with some form of venereal disease, and that 75 per cent. of
the infected are mentally defective,--morons, imbeciles, or ``border-
line'' cases most dangerous to the community at large. At least 25
per cent. of the inmates of our prisons, according to Dr. Fernald, are
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: therefore he will not continue fighting in this direction, but he will
probably say that some ideas partake of not-being, and some not, and that
language and opinion are of the non-partaking class; and he will still
fight to the death against the existence of the image-making and phantastic
art, in which we have placed him, because, as he will say, opinion and
language do not partake of not-being, and unless this participation exists,
there can be no such thing as falsehood. And, with the view of meeting
this evasion, we must begin by enquiring into the nature of language,
opinion, and imagination, in order that when we find them we may find also
that they have communion with not-being, and, having made out the connexion
of them, may thus prove that falsehood exists; and therein we will imprison
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: severity, by the Consuls and the Senate.
But it matters little, I say, what this same tree of knowledge
was. Was every vine on earth destroyed to-morrow, and every
vegetable also from which alcohol is now distilled, man would soon
discover something else wherewith to satisfy the insatiate
craving. Has he not done so already? Has not almost every people
had its tree of knowledge, often more deadly than any distilled
liquor, from the absinthe of the cultivated Frenchman, and the
opium of the cultivated Chinese, down to the bush-poisons
wherewith the tropic sorcerer initiates his dupes into the
knowledge of good and evil, and the fungus from which the Samoiede
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