We are told that the simple food our forefathers ate assisted to make them healthy; but that is a mistake. Their diet would not cure dyspepsia at this period. With rules of health in the head, and the most digestible food in the stomach, there would still be dyspeptics. The effeminate constitutions of our time will never grow robust until individual opinions improve, and mortal belief loses some portion of its error.
We must release pharmaceutics, and take up ontology. We must look into the Science, instead of accepting the sense of things. We should master fear, instead of cultivating it. It was the ignorance of our forefathers, concerning the knowledge that to-day walks to and fro in the earth, that made them more hardy than our trained physiologists, more honest than our sleek politicians.
Learning is useful if it is of the right sort. History, observation, invention, philosophic research, and original thought are requisite for the expansion of mortal mind, are essential to its growth out of itself, error.
The tangled barbarisms of learning we deplore, — the mere dogma, the speculative theory, the nauseous fiction. Novels, remarkable only for their exaggerated pictures, impossible ideals, and specimens of depravity, fill our young readers with wrong tastes and sentiments. Our arrangements for thinking and writing are lowering the standards to accommodate the purse, and meet a frivolous demand for amusement instead of instruction.
The core of mortal mind is not readjusted, and its coverings are thickly inlaid with foreign devices. If modern knowledge is power, it is not wisdom. It is but a blind force, whose materiality loses in power what it gains in time.
