John W. Saxon

“ I admit the conceit of some of these troublesome people, who believe they have a mission; but they are a necessary and important variety of the race. It is very plain that this world is the proper stamping-ground of the reformer.
Hence, variety is a necessity of life. The man that lives upon one kind of food only must deteriorate in body; the student who gives all his thought to one idea, will become crotchety; while the devotee to a single phase of religion will in time be a bigot, which is but another name for monomaniac. Sameness is the border-land of insanity. ”

“ Leaving other worlds to themselves, watch the progress of affairs at home. As soon as the first flurry is over, Nature settles down to the creation of differences. She puts the solid earth as a foundation, and piles the hot atmosphere above it ”

“ But Nature seems to have understood that variety is not only "the spice of life," but life itself; and no sooner does she get in hand her raw material, than she sets herself to the work of creating differences. True, some astronomers reject the nebular theory; but, if not true, it will serve as an illustration. It seems to have been the great work of Nature to multiply differences. For instance, there was a time or an eternity in which Nature turned out her first owl, just as the first patent Yankee washing-machine must have had its day. ”

“ The lives of some people pass so smoothly that we count them happy. They are simply in the possession of something whose value they have never known, hence it is to them worthless. If you want to know the full value of a clear conscience you must go through the hands of remorse. If you want to know the comfort of owning two shirts at a time, you must know the discomfort of owning no shirt at a time. Whence comes the pleasure we feel from our progress in knowledge? ”

“ There is none so rich as the poor boy who has just received his first dollar after a week of hard work. We waste a great deal of pity on those who are born in the humbler ranks of life. It is my impression that, on the whole, it is better to be born poor, and work your way up to wealth and honor, than to have wealth and honor thrust upon you at birth, even though retained through life. ”

“ If things are all right as they are, why try to change them? My dear, short-sighted brother, the reformer can do no harm. He is a benefactor. He is only helping Nature out. He may cut off now and then a low note, but by adding two high ones he widens the range of the instrument. Society as a whole advances, but its extremes are probably farther apart than ever before. Moreover, if we take the world as a whole, we can still better understand the value of the reformer. ”

“ But there are other philosophers, among whom I count myself—I say it in all modesty, it runs in our family—who are not satisfied with any of these explanations, and very naturally ask: "Is the world a failure? Is it not a very good world? Is it not, in fact, as good as it can be? Were the united wisdom and goodness of the race supplemented with omnipotence and allowed to reconstruct the universe, could they improve upon the world as it is? ”

“ Having unshackled the universe, and brought chaos back again, having secured a condition somewhat like that in which the advocates of the nebular theory suppose it to have been, consider what a dull time we should have if we were unable to find some little nook outside of infinite space, and, as a result, be obliged to amuse ourselves with such monotonous surroundings! ”

“ Keep in mind that, as all knowledge comes to us as the result of the different, so do all emotions of pain or of pleasure. Every quality that is thinkable implies its opposite, or at least its different in degree. Happiness and misery are only relative terms. Absolute happiness cannot exist any more than a magnetic needle with only one pole. The sick man who rises for the first time for weeks from a bed of pain and is led out into the sunshine is very happy ”

“ COULD a man do himself up into a mathematical point and throw himself into the middle of infinite empty space, wherever that is, he would be surprised at the flatness of life under such circumstances. Infinite empty space is absolute sameness. It is, so fur as I have traveled the field of mental possibilities, the only specimen of the thinkable or the unthinkable of which we can say, "It is all alike." ”

“ Most of the washing-machines are at rest. The fittest even scarcely survives. The owls are hooting still in varieties uncounted, and if, here and there, a specimen, discouraged and disgusted with the "modern improvements" of the Cainozoic period, gave up the ghost, and laid himself away with the old saurians—his Darwinian ancestors—he now finds himself resurrected, his bones neatly wired together, and the human owls hooting over him still. Like the immortal Webster, he "still lives" as a witness of Nature's wonderful resources as a differentiator—a difference-maker. ”

“ But, if you should take each man's opinion of other men's abilities, the fools would outnumber the wise men ten to one, that one being himself. Alas! what should we philosophers do were there no simple souls whereby to measure our colossal intellects? Thank God for wise men, but thank God for fools! Every fool as well as every knave has done a great. deal for human happiness. Woe is the day when fools and knaves shall be no more! O stirpiculturist, stay thy hand, and leave us still a background to the great picture of life! ”

“ From these low forms, which carry as much life in one end as in the other, Nature goes on differentiating, till at last we find her getting up forms whose parts are so widely different that each has its own work to do, and one part cannot be substituted for another. A man losing any organ is imperfect; and many of his organs are such that the loss of one of them requires that he should go back into Nature's melting-pot, and be moulded over again into a new form of life—a Rhode Island pippin it may be, as good Roger Williams was. ”

“ Could an intelligent man be put under an exhausted receiver, get the smell of a perfect vacuum, and survive to tell about it, he might throw some light on the question.
To sum up my reasoning, it comes to this: Were the universe one of sameness, instead of the universe of differences that it is, we should be unconscious of any external world, or of our own existence, no matter though we were the best-born specimens of the scientific stirpiculturist. In fact, we should be an army of negations. ”

“ The stirpiculturist had finished his work and gone home. There was not a physical deformity of any kind among the millions that walked the earth. All were brought up to the highest type of physical beauty. There was not a woman I met with whom I did not instantly fall in love, though it was like Caliban falling in love with the houris. Every man was an Apollo, and every woman a Venus. ”

“ Why, my dear sir, after all the orthodox animals were made—though I don't know where you would draw the line between the regulars and the irregulars—you and I both could find much pleasure in looking at a hell-bender, and he no doubt finds far more pleasure in being a hell-bender than in being nobody. However many forms we may have seen, we still want to see something different. Yes, but how about the miserable, suffering leper? How about these extremes of wretchedness? Something in the way of music may be got up from the eight simple tones of a simple octave. ”

“ Nature has done much to create differences, and human egotism has come in to second the efforts of Nature, and supplement her work by getting up differences in our favor where no such thing in point of fact exists. ”

“ Should we melt up the matter which is supposed to be scattered throughout infinite space, and then, by increased heat, turn it into gas, and expand it till all the systems of the universe became one infinitely-extended and equally-distributed universe of intermingled gases, we should have about as little variety as in the case of empty space. ”

“ In this particular, division of labor often works mischief to the individual, however advantageous it may be to the community. Imagine the stupidity that must creep over the mind of a man who spends year after year pointing pins! It may be well to inquire as to whether or not the social and business framework of society is not doing much to reduce some of its members to a state little better than monomania.
To enforce the lesson taught by the Law of Differences we will pass by a million years, while I give the reader a picture of the reconstructed universe. ”

“ Take the happiness that comes from social position in life. It arises from the fact that we are higher up than some one else. Bring all to the same level and it would be enough to make an angel weep to see how much happiness some people would lose. ”

“ With a force that almost took away my breath, it came to me that we owe a great debt to the deformed, the hideous, and the wicked; that those, the morally hideous, whom society hunts down as its worst enemies, spend their lives in serving the very class that seeks to destroy them. ”

“ Take the tramps and vagabonds out of society, and the whole fabric would be cut down one story; for, to change the figure, they put one more round into the ladder—it matters not that it is at the bottom—and give the climber a chance to go one round higher. It is the length of the ladder that counts, no matter where the bottom is placed. What are wealth and poverty? ”

“ Can you spare the lowest octave from the big organ? If so, you bring the extremes an octave nearer, and so far restrict the range of the instrument, and by repeating the removal of the lowest notes you would at last find it impossible to play even the thinnest of tunes. So with human society. As you bring the extremes together, you take from life that which makes life worth having. The extremes in deep-water oyster society are very near each other, but each member of that society is only an oyster. ”

“ Compare unreformed Africa, with its cannibalism and slow travel, with America, the land of the Grahamite and the home of the telegraph, and see if the various reformers have not made it a glorious thing to be a Caucasian! Every step in the moral world secured by the reformers makes greater the distance from the top to the bottom of the moral ladder. ”

“ The progress of these two men in all knowledge resting upon color must differ widely. As in this, so in all departments of education: the man who is skillful in detecting differences holds the key to knowledge.
3. Relation to Happiness.—The wise and the good of all religions and the philosophers of every school are puzzled over what they term the evils of life. Assuming the Creator to be wise, good, and omnipotent, they wonder that he should allow these evils. They cannot understand the problem of pain and misery which meets them at every turn, and importunes for a solution. ”

“ A dweller in Jupiter coming to visit his mundane cousins might, when he struck our atmosphere, expand his nostrils, as one sniffs the air when he all at once smells something very nice, or he might turn up his Jovian nose, as though he smelt something very bad. ”

“ They look upon creation with much the same feeling as that with which we look upon the first house built from cellar-drain to chimney-top by a self-made artisan. As a house pure and simple, it may be a failure, but as a self-made artisan's first attempt it is a wonderful success. ”

“ B may be a fool, but thinks himself wiser than C, who is in truth far wiser than B. C thinks himself much wiser than he really is, and in comparing himself with B gets the full benefit of the real difference, with a large surplus from the inflation. ”

“ The philosophers best satisfied with the present order of things are those whom I shall name the protoplasmics. Denying the existence of a personal God, and falling back upon protoplasm as a substitute, they think that, taking into account the humble character of their protoplasmic god, he has done remarkably well. ”

“ There is many a man living a life of excessive toil or of idleness, of so fixed a routine that he is partially insane. It should be the aim of every man to so arrange his life as to bring into it a good degree of variety if he would secure physical, mental, and moral health. ”

“ But, as she has only begun her work, she makes very little difference between the opposite ends of these forms. One end of a worm is so much like the other end that you may cut him in two, and one part putting on a tail and the other a head, you will in a short time have two very respectable worms. ”

“ There were met with only those with whom, having been so well generated for a thousand years, regeneration was impossible. A long line of physical, mental, and moral saints were the ancestors of the race. ”