APPLICATION OF FOREGOING PRINCIPLES. 75 



mischances, beings who are culled out before birth 

 instead of after ; so that even the lowest idiot, the 

 most contemptible in health or beauty, may yet reflect 

 with pride that they were horn. Certainly we observe 

 that those who have had good fortune (mother and 

 sole cause of virtue, and sole virtue in itself), and have 

 profited by their experience, and known their busi- 

 ness best before birth, so that they made themselves 

 both to be and to look well, do commonly on an aver- 

 age prove to know it best in after-life : they grow their 

 clothes best who have grown their limbs best. It is rare 

 that those who have not remembered how to finish their 

 own bodies fairly well should finish anything well in 

 later life. But how small is the addition to their 

 unconscious attainments which even the Titans of 

 human intellect have consciously accomplished, in 

 comparison with the problems solved by the meanest 

 baby living, nay, even by one whose birth is untimely ! 

 In other words, how vast is that back knowledge 

 over which we have gone fast asleep, through the 

 prosiness of perpetual repetition ; and how little in 

 comparison, is that whose novelty keeps it still within 

 the scope of our conscious perception ! What is the 

 discovery of the laws of gravitation as compared with 

 the knowledge which sleeps in every hen's egg upon a 

 kitchen shelf? 



It is all a matter of habit and fashion. Thus we 

 see kings and councillors of the earth admired for 

 facing death before what they are pleased to call dis- 

 honour. If, on being required to go without anything 



