from the mark),--what almost prodigious saving may there not be
anticipated, as the _Statistics of Imposture_ advances, and so the
manufacturing of Shams (that of Realities rising into clearer and
clearer distinction therefrom) gradually declines, and at length
becomes all but wholly unnecessary!

'This for the coming golden ages. What I had to remark, for the
present brazen one, is, that in several provinces, as in Education,
Polity, Religion, where so much is wanted and indispensable, and so
little can as yet be furnished, probably Imposture is of sanative,
anodyne nature, and man's Gullibility not his worst blessing. Suppose
your sinews of war quite broken; I mean your military chest insolvent,
forage all but exhausted; and that the whole army is about to mutiny,
disband, and cut your and each other's throat,--then were it not well
could you, as if by miracle, pay them in any sort of fairy-money, feed
them on coagulated water, or mere imagination of meat; whereby, till
the real supply came up, they might be kept together and quiet? Such
perhaps was the aim of Nature, who does nothing without aim, in
furnishing her favourite, Man, with this his so omnipotent or rather
omnipatient Talent of being Gulled.

'How beautifully it works, with a little mechanism; nay, almost makes
mechanism for itself! These Professors in the Nameless lived with
ease, with safety, by a mere Reputation, constructed in past times,
and then too with no great effort, by quite another class of persons.
Which Reputation, like a strong, brisk-going undershot wheel, sunk
into the general current, bade fair, with only a little annual
repainting on their part, to hold long together, and of its own accord
assiduously grind for them. Happy that it was so, for the Millers!
They themselves needed not to work; their attempts at working, at what
they called Educating, now when I look back on it, filled me with a
certain mute admiration.

'Besides all this, we boasted ourselves a Rational University; in the
highest degree hostile to Mysticism; thus was the young vacant mind
furnished with much talk about Progress of the Species, Dark Ages,
Prejudice, and the like; so that all were quickly enough blown out
into a state of windy argumentativeness; whereby the better sort had
soon to end in sick, impotent Scepticism; the worser sort explode
(_crepiren_) in finished Self-conceit, and to all spiritual intents
become dead.--But this too is portion of mankind's l