| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: the country, an ominous thought flashed through my soul like a
thunderbolt tearing its way through a veil of gray cloud.
What an awful piece of news it was for a woman whose whole
thoughts were full of her young lover, who was looking forward
hour by hour to a joy which no words can express, a woman who had
been at a world of pains to invent plausible pretexts to draw him
to her side. Yet, after all, it was a cruel deed of charity to be
the messenger of death! So I hurried on, splashing and bemiring
myself in the byways of the Bourbonnais.
Before very long I reached a great chestnut avenue with a pile of
buildings at the further end--the Chateau of Montpersan stood out
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: Theages by the mention of Theages in the Apology and Republic; or as the
Second Alcibiades seems to be founded upon the text of Xenophon, Mem. A
similar taste for parody appears not only in the Phaedrus, but in the
Protagoras, in the Symposium, and to a certain extent in the Parmenides.
To these two doubtful writings of Plato I have added the First Alcibiades,
which, of all the disputed dialogues of Plato, has the greatest merit, and
is somewhat longer than any of them, though not verified by the testimony
of Aristotle, and in many respects at variance with the Symposium in the
description of the relations of Socrates and Alcibiades. Like the Lesser
Hippias and the Menexenus, it is to be compared to the earlier writings of
Plato. The motive of the piece may, perhaps, be found in that passage of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri: ``monumental'' code with foolish judges, so a prison system,
however ingenious and symmetrical, is worthless without a staff to
correspond.
And as the question of the staff is always very serious,
especially for financial reasons, I believe that, instead of the
impracticable idea of individualisation in punishment, we ought to
substitute that of classification, which is equally efficacious
and more easily applied. It cannot be denied that criminal
anthropologists are not all agreed on the classification of
criminals. But I have already shown that the differences
between proposed classifications are only formal and of secondary
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