experience and hardly-attained self-conflict. A truce to your philosophers whose elevation above their fellow-beings consists in their ability to laugh at the ties which bind women and children, who have looked just so far into the principles of ethics as to be able to disconcert a simple soul that talks of vice and virtue as realities. The child which abstains from eating plums because grandmamma forbade is their superior in wisdom: it exercises faith and obedience to law—two of the most ennobling attributes of humanity which these philosophers have cast off. I have little more respect for those who have reached the stage of enlightenment in which virtue is another name for prudence, who give their sanction to a system of morals as they do to a system of police—to prevent inconvenience to themselves, and to society as a necessary adjunct of themselves—who would change their morals with their climate, and become lords of a harem in a country where such a position would be a title to respect, instead of infamy.
The true philosopher knows what these men know, but he knows something more. He, too, has "broken through the barriers of the heavens," but it has been with a more powerful telescope than theirs. He gathers his rule of conduct, not from the suggestions of appetite, not from the dictates of
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