Hence, he
maintained, the practice of putting dupes in the same category as the
physically diseased or the unlucky was founded on the eternal and
inherent nature of things, and could no more be interfered with than
the revolution of the earth on its axis.
He said a good deal more to the same effect, and I was beginning to
wonder how much longer he would think it necessary to insist on what
was so obvious, when his hearers began to differ from him. One
dilated on the correlation between pain and pleasure which ensured
that neither could be extinguished without the extinguishing along
with it of the other. Another said that throughout the animal and
vegetable worlds there was found what might be counted as a system of
rewards and punishments; this, he contended, must cease to exist (and
hence virtue must cease) if the pain attaching to misconduct were
less notoriously advertised. Another maintained that the horror so
freely expressed by many at the sight of pain was as much selfish as
not--and so on.
Let Erewhon be revisited by the son of the original writer--let him
hint that his father used to write the advertisements for Mother
Seigel's Syrup. He gradually worked his way up to this from being a
mere writer of penny tracts. [Dec. 1896.]
On reaching the country he finds that divine honours are being paid
him, churches erected to him, and a copious mythology daily swelling,
with accounts of the miracles he had worked and all his sayings and
doings.
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