I have now said enough to give English readers some idea of the strange
views which the Erewhonians hold concerning unreason, hypothetics, and
education generally. In many respects they were sensible enough, but I
could not get over the hypothetics, especially the turning their own good
poetry into the hypothetical language. In the course of my stay I met
one youth who told me that for fourteen years the hypothetical language
had been almost the only thing that he had been taught, although he had
never (to his credit, as it seemed to me) shown the slightest proclivity
towards it, while he had been endowed with not inconsiderable ability for
several other branches of human learning. He assured me that he would
never open another hypothetical book after he had taken his degree, but
would follow out the bent of his own inclinations. This was well enough,
but who could give him his fourteen years back again?
I sometimes wondered how it was that the mischief done was not more
clearly perceptible, and that the young men and women grew up as sensible
and goodly as they did, in spite of the attempts almost deliberately made
to warp and stunt their growth. Some doubtless received damage, from
which they suffered to their life's end; but many seemed little or none
the worse, and some, almost the better.
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