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John Burroughs from his quiet vantage point of observation says "The present civilization arms us with the forces of earth, air and water, while it weakens our hold upon the sources of personal power. "It gives us great intellectual riches but it deadens our finer spiritual faculties, our clear conception of the higher values of life.
Our desires blind us to the truth that there is in man, and this is the greatest wrong done by ourselves to our own soul. It deadens our consciousness, and is but a gradual method of spiritual suicide.
Wordsworth contemptuously advised the philosopher, and not a few other poets have felt that philosophy deadens life as a crust of ice deadens a flowing stream. That reason kills poetry is the unoriginal theme of a recent poem. The poet scornfully characterizes present writers, One must turn to Poe for the clearest statement of the antagonism. He declares,
But the coming of the machine deadens the workman's inclination toward inventive adventure. "So the multitude of men and women stand before the cunning machinery of industry, in the pose of helplessness before a mechanical finality. They cannot help feeling that in so far as their special task is involved, the machine has said the last word. The challenge dies out of their work.
The judgment is grossly insufficient, and therefore false, but it is based upon a proof which is very salient in English letters, which is that, say, in quite short and modern work the sense of complete unity deadens the English mind.
I feel them so this morning, after prisonership. I could not have been driven to my lord. 'I know the feeling, said Gower; 'any movement of us not our own impulse, hurries the body and deadens the mind. And by the way, my dear lady, I spoke of the earl's commands to this man behind us walking with your Madge. My father would accuse me of Jesuitry.
Every time anyone sits through the service or the sermon in this stupid and careless mood, he dulls and deadens his soul, till at last he is able coolly to sit through the most awful warnings of God's judgment, the most tender entreaties of God's love, as if he were a brute animal without understanding.
When they did mention it, it was in a cynical tone. Probably, this was just as well, since, in many people, remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future. On rainy, cold, or dull days in the late autumn, these "creatures that once were men" gathered in the eatinghouse of Vaviloff.
The men moved the stove with exceeding gentleness and care, so that he had often been far more roughly shaken in his big brothers' arms than he was in his journey now; and though both hunger and thirst made themselves felt, being foes that will take no denial, he was still in that state of nervous exaltation which deadens all physical suffering and is at once a cordial and an opiate.
It is not that one violent sorrow leaves us without power of enjoyment; it only lessens the power, and deadens the enjoyment: it does not take away from us the objects of life; it only forestalls the more indifferent calmness of age.
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