Thus, after several hundred years of wandering in the wilderness of
philosophy, the country reached the conclusions that common sense had
long since arrived at. Even the Puritans after a vain attempt to subsist
on a kind of jam made of apples and yellow cabbage leaves, succumbed to
the inevitable, and resigned themselves to a diet of roast beef and
mutton, with all the usual adjuncts of a modern dinner-table.
One would have thought that the dance they had been led by the old
prophet, and that still madder dance which the Professor of botany had
gravely, but as I believe insidiously, proposed to lead them, would have
made the Erewhonians for a long time suspicious of prophets whether they
professed to have communications with an unseen power or no; but so
engrained in the human heart is the desire to believe that some people
really do know what they say they know, and can thus save them from the
trouble of thinking for themselves, that in a short time would-be
philosophers and faddists became more powerful than ever, and gradually
led their countrymen to accept all those absurd views of life, some
account of which I have given in my earlier chapters. Indeed I can see
no hope for the Erewhonians till they have got to understand that reason
uncorrected by instinct is as bad as instinct uncorrected by reason.
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