The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and DiscussionsCobbe, Frances Power
Religion
The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions
Cobbe, Frances Power
Knowledge, Sociology of; Philosophy and religion; Science -- Moral and ethical aspects
Another singular phenomenon under such circumstances is that, on
returning, perhaps after the interval of years, to a spot wherein such
excessive mental tension has been experienced, some of us are suddenly
vividly impressed with the idea that we have been sitting there during
all the intervening time, gazing fixedly on the same pillars and
cornices, the same trees projected against the evening sky, or whatever
other objects happen to be before our eyes. It would appear that the
impression of such objects made on the retina, while the mind was wholly
and vehemently absorbed in other things, must be somehow photographed on
the brain in a different way from the ordinary pictures to which we have
given their fair share of notice as they passed before us, and that we
are dimly aware they have been taken so long. The sight of them once
again bringing out this abnormal consciousness is intensely painful, as
if the real self had been chained for years to the spot, and only a
phantom “I” had ever gone away and lived a natural human existence
elsewhere.
Passing, now, from the external conditions of our Thinking, if we
attempt to classify the Thoughts themselves, we shall arrive, I fear, at
the painful discovery that the majority of us think most about the least
things, and least about the greatest; and that, in short, the mass of
our lucubrations is in the inverse ratio of their value. For example, a
share of our thoughts, quite astonishing in quantity, is occupied by
petty and trivial Arrangements. Rich or poor, it is an immense amount of
thought which all (save the most care-engrossed statesmen or absorbed
philosophers) give to these wretched little concerns. The wealthy
gentleman thinks of how and where and when he will send his servants and
horses here and there, of what company he shall entertain, of the
clearing of his woods, the preservation of his game, and twenty matters
of similar import; while his wife is pondering equally profoundly on the
furniture and ornaments of her rooms, the patterns of her flower-beds or
her worsted-work, the _menu_ of her dinner, and the frocks of her little
girls. Poor people need to think much more anxiously of the perpetual
problem, “How to make both ends meet,” by pinching in this direction and
earning something in that, and by all the thousand shifts and devices by
which life can be carried on at the smallest possible expenditure. One
of the very worst evils of limited means consists in the amount of
thinking about sordid little economies which becomes imperative when
every meal, every toilet, and every attempt at locomotion is a
battle-field of ingenuity and self-denial against ever-impending debt
and difficulty. Among men, the evil is most commonly combated by
energetic efforts to _earn_ rather than to _save_; but among women, to
whom so few fields of honest industry are open, the necessity for a
perpetual guard against the smallest freedom of expense falls, with all
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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