| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: mere creature or expression of the age in which he lives. His ideas are
inseparable from himself, and would have been nothing without him. Through
a thousand personal influences they have been brought home to the minds of
others. He starts from antecedents, but he is great in proportion as he
disengages himself from them or absorbs himself in them. Moreover the
types of greatness differ; while one man is the expression of the
influences of his age, another is in antagonism to them. One man is borne
on the surface of the water; another is carried forward by the current
which flows beneath. The character of an individual, whether he be
independent of circumstances or not, inspires others quite as much as his
words. What is the teaching of Socrates apart from his personal history,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: a great subterraneous lake, and they have this circumstance to
favour their opinion, that the ground is always moist and so soft
that the water boils up under foot as one walks upon it. This is
more visible after rains, for then the ground yields and sinks so
much, that I believe it is chiefly supported by the roots of trees
that are interwoven one with another; such is the ground round about
these fountains. At a little distance to the south is a village
named Guix, through which the way lies to the top of the mountain,
from whence the traveller discovers a vast extent of land, which
appears like a deep valley, though the mountain rises so
imperceptibly that those who go up or down it are scarce sensible of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: mistake. He would have cut off one hand for Tommy Hinds; and to
keep Hinds's hotel a thing of beauty was his joy in life. That
he had a score of Socialist arguments chasing through his brain
in the meantime did not interfere with this; on the contrary,
Jurgis scrubbed the spittoons and polished the banisters all the
more vehemently because at the same time he was wrestling
inwardly with an imaginary recalcitrant. It would be pleasant to
record that he swore off drinking immediately, and all the rest
of his bad habits with it; but that would hardly be exact. These
revolutionists were not angels; they were men, and men who had
come up from the social pit, and with the mire of it smeared over
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