We had
each of us some whimsy in the brain, which we believed more
than anything else, and which discoloured all experience to
its own shade. How would you have people agree, when one
is deaf and the other blind?
*
The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in
convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more
apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either
he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches
the closer round that little idol of part-truth and
part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or
he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old,
and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New
truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil
and often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had
better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he
will get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good.
*
The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten
commandments; and the bones and the revolutions of the
Kosmos in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more
ancient still.
*
The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we
look abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find
them change with every climate, and no country where some
action is not honoured for a virtue and none where it is
not branded for a vice; and we look into our experience,
and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the
best a municipal fitness.
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