This is an instinct for which
there is, I think, little original sympathy in the practical English
nature, and what there was of it has undergone a long benumbing period
of blight and suppression in the epoch of concentration which followed
the French Revolution.
But epochs of concentration cannot well endure forever; epochs of
expansion, in the due course of things, follow them. Such an epoch of
expansion seems to be opening in this country. In the first place all
danger of a hostile forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice
has long disappeared; like the traveller in the fable, therefore, we
begin to wear our cloak a little more loosely. Then, with a long peace,
the ideas of Europe steal gradually and amicably in, and mingle, though
in infinitesimally small quantities at a time, with our own notions.
Then, too, in spite of all that is said about the absorbing and
brutalizing influence of our passionate material progress, it seems to
me indisputable that this progress is likely, though not certain, to
lead in the end to an apparition of intellectual life; and that man,
after he has made himself perfectly comfortable and has now to determine
what to do with himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind,
and that the mind may be made the source of great pleasure.
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