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We may have our little failings, but we ask no pity for them from people whom we so utterly scorn, as we do the denizens of the elder world. Art! Culture! Æstheticism! Bah! Pouf! Away with all such degrading, debasing, dehumanizing trumpery! We are men of a harder, sterner, simpler mould than the emasculate degeneracies of modern England!
Of that golden age, Cotton Mather himself, "smitten with a just fear of encroaching and ill-bodied degeneracies," sat down to write the history, recording in the Magnalia "the great things done for us by our God," in the hope that he might thereby do something "to prevent the loss of the primitive principles and the primitive practices." But he had imagined a vain thing.
Perhaps there may be left a "doubting Thomas" who believes that the highest stage of psychotheism that is, monotheism was the original basis for the philosophy of the world, and that all other forms are degeneracies from that primitive and perfect state. If there be such a man left, to him what I have to say about philosophy is blasphemy.
It is only when these advanced souls view the degeneracies of "civilized" life that they feel sorrow and pain. For here they see instances of devolution instead of evolution degeneration instead of regeneration and advancement. And not only do they know this to be the fact, but the degenerate specimens of mankind themselves feel and know it.
As in years long past he had sat under chestnut-trees in the Apennines and shared the black bread and sour wine of a peasant, so in these days he frequently would have been glad to sit under a hedge and eat bread and cheese with a good fellow who did not know him and whose summing up of the domestic habits and needs of "th' workin' mon" or the amiabilities or degeneracies of the gentry would be expressed, figuratively speaking, in thoughts and words of one syllable.
Those ultra-conservatives among our number, those rigid adherents to the most primitive bush-life, of course despise all the refinements of the table. Plates, forks, and spoons are to them degeneracies, things that no noble bushman needs or requires. They scorn any leanings towards luxury and ease.
Such then is the description of a citizen who comes nearest to what all those who are called citizens are. Every one also should know, that of the component parts of those things which differ from each other in species, after the first or second remove, those which follow have either nothing at all or very little common to each. What I mean by degeneracies will be hereafter explained.
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