and of a depravity of character which is the more
revolting because it roots in culture. I forget who of the older or more
recent philosophers makes the remark, that what is more noble is the more
revolting in its destruction. The remark applies with truth to the world
of morals. The child of nature, when he breaks loose, becomes a madman;
but the art scholar, when he breaks loose, becomes a debased character.
The enlightenment of the understanding, on which the more refined classes
pride themselves with some ground, shows on the whole so little of an
ennobling influence on the mind that it seems rather to confirm
corruption by its maxims. We deny nature on her legitimate field and
feel her tyranny in the moral sphere, and while resisting her
impressions, we receive our principles from her. While the affected
decency of our manners does not even grant to nature a pardonable
influence in the initial stage, our materialistic system of morals allows
her the casting vote in the last and essential stage. Egotism has
founded its system in the very bosom of a refined society, and without
developing even a sociable character, we feel all the contagions and
miseries of society. We subject our free judgment to its despotic
opinions, our feelings to its bizarre customs, and our will to its
seductions. We only maintain our caprice against her holy rights. The
man of the world has his heart contracted by a proud self-complacency,
while that of the man of nature often beats in sympathy; and every man
seeks for nothing more than to save his wretched property from the
general destruction, as it were from some great conflagration. It is
conceived that the only way to find a shelter against the aberrations of
sentiment is by completely foregoing its indulgence, and mockery, which
is often a useful chastener of mysticism, slanders in the same breath the
noblest aspirations. Culture, far from giving us freedom, only develops,
as it advances, new necessities; the fetters of the physical close more
tightly around us, so that the fear of loss quenches even the ardent
impulse toward improvement, and the maxims of passive obedience are held
to be the highest wisdom of life. Thus the spirit of the time is seen to
waver between perversion and savagism, between what is unnatural and mere
nature, between superstition and moral unbelief, and it is often nothing
but the equilibrium of evils that sets bounds to it.

LETTER VI.

Have I gone to