"From medicine to medicine is a change from disease to
disease; and man must cease from self-activity, ere the spirit can
fill him with truth in mind or health in body. The Civilization is
become intensely false, and thrusts the human being into false
predicaments. The antagonism of business to all that is high and
good and generic is hourly declared by the successful, as well as by
the failing. The mercantile system, based on individual
aggrandizement, draws men from unity; its swelling columns of figures
describe, in pounds, shillings, and pence, the degrees of man's
departure from love, from wisdom, from power. The idle are as
unhappy as the busy. Whether the dread factory-bell, or the
fox-hunter's horn calls to a pursuit more fatal to man's best
interests, is an inquiry which appears more likely to terminate in
the cessation of both, than in a preference of either."
Mr. Lane does not confound society with sociableness. "On the
contrary, it is when the sympathy with man is the stronger and the
truer, that the sympathy with men grows weaker, and the sympathy with
their actions weakest.
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