Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



of the true relation to each other of all his 

 faculties — involving all experience, and an exer- 

 cise of every faculty physical, intellectual, emo- 

 tional and spiritual, instead of one set of faculties 

 only. 



Not till we know the law of ourselves, in fact, 

 shall we know the law of the emerald and the 

 orange, or of Nature generally ; and the law of 

 ourselves is not learnt, except subordinately, 

 by intellectual investigation ; it is mainly learnt 

 by life. The relation of gravity to vitality is 

 learnt not so much by outer experiment in a 

 laboratory as by long experience within ourselves 

 from the day when as infants we cannot lift our- 

 selves above the floor, through the years of the 

 proud strength of manhood scaling the loftiest 

 mountains, to the hour when our disengaged spirits 

 finally overcome and pass beyond the attraction 

 of the earth ; and just as the sense of weight — 

 which first appears as a quite external sensation 

 — is thus at last found to stand in most pregnant 

 relation with our deepest selves, so of the other 

 senses which feed the individual life — the senses 

 of light, of warmth, of taste, of sound, of smell. 

 Taste, which begins as it were on the tip of the 

 tongue, becomes ultimately, if normally developed, 

 a sense which identifies itself with the health 

 and well-being of the whole body ; the pleasure 

 of taste becomes vastly more than a mere surface 

 pleasure, and its discrimination of food more than 

 a mere regard for the nutrition of the ordinary 

 corporeal functions. The sense of Light, which 



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