No More Learning

Are not here two who would have me know of their marriage? And,
strangest of all, is not this singular person anxious to have me
informed that he has received a fresh supply of Dimitry Bruisgins? But
to none of us does the Present continue miraculous (even if for a moment
discerned as such). We glance carelessly at the sunrise, and get used to
Orion and the Pleiades. The wonder wears off, and to-morrow this sheet,
(Acts x. 11, 12) in which a vision was let down to me from Heaven, shall
be the wrappage to a bar of soap or the platter for a beggar's broken
victuals. '--H. W. ]



No. VII

A LETTER

FROM A CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY IN ANSWER TO SUTTIN QUESTIONS
PROPOSED BY MR. HOSEA BIGLOW, INCLOSED IN A NOTE FROM MR. BIGLOW TO S. H.
GAY, ESQ. , EDITOR OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-SLAVERY STANDARD


[Curiosity may be said to be the quality which preeminently
distinguishes and segregates man from the lower animals.
As we trace the
scale of animated nature downward, we find this faculty (as it may truly
he called) of the mind diminished in the savage, and wellnigh extinct
in the brute. The first object which civilized man proposes to himself I
take to be the finding out whatsoever he can concerning his neighbors.
_Nihil humanum a me alienum puto;_ I am curious about even John Smith.
The desire next in strength to this (an opposite pole, indeed, of the
same magnet) is that of communicating the unintelligence we have
carefully picked up.

Men in general may be divided into the inquisitive and the
communicative. To the first class belong Peeping Toms, eaves-droppers,
navel-contemplating Brahmins, metaphysicians, travellers, Empedocleses,
spies, the various societies for promoting Rhinothism, Columbuses,
Yankees, discoverers, and men of science, who present themselves to the
mind as so many marks of interrogation wandering up and down the world,
or sitting in studies and laboratories. The second class I should again
subdivide into four. In the first subdivision I would rank those who
have an itch to tell us about themselves,--as keepers of diaries,
insignificant persons generally, Montaignes, Horace Walpoles,
autobiographers, poets. The second includes those who are anxious to
impart information concerning other people,--as historians, barbers, and
such. To the third belong those who labor to give us intelligence about
nothing at all,--as novelists, political orators, the large majority of
authors, preachers, lecturers, and the like. In the fourth come those
who are communicative from motives of public benevolence,--as finders of
mares'-nests and bringers of ill news. Each of us two-legged fowls
without feathers embraces all these subdivisions in himself to a greater
or less degree, for none of us so much as lays an egg, or incubates a
chalk one, but straightway the whole barnyard shall know it by our
cackle or our cluck. _Omnibus hoc vitium est_. There are different
grades in all these classes. One will turn his telescope toward a
back-yard, another toward Uranus; one will tell you that he dined with
Smith, another that he supped with Plato. In one particular, all men may
be considered as belonging to the first grand division, inasmuch as they
all seem equally desirous of discovering the mote in their neighbor's eye.