Canon, The - An Exposition of the Pagan Mystery

Excerpt:

We are the men.

Before our time, reason but little influenced mankind.

The demonstration of the above assertion being that in times gone by there were no railways, steamboats, torpedoes, or any of those anaesthetic inventions in regard to time and space on which we pride ourselves, and upon which we base our claim to have advanced the general welfare of mankind.

Marvels of science, mechanical improvements, increase of wealth (and income tax), and the perfection of all warlike apparatus, seem to blind us to the fact that abstract qualities of mind have shown no symptoms of progression. A rich barbarian, pale and dyspeptic, florid or flatulent, seated in a machine travelling at eighty miles an hour, with the machine luxuriously upholstered and well heated, and yet the traveller's mind a blank, or only occupied with schemes to cheat his fellows and advance himself is, in the abstract, no advance upon a citizen of Athens, in the time of Pericles, who never travelled faster than a bullock cart could take him, in all his life.

Science has no marvels; every so-called discovery heralded as marvellous (for men of science understand the power of bold advertisement to the full as well as scientists in clog dancing, in hair dressing, and tightrope walking), is not a marvel in the true meaning of the word.

The Röntgen Rays, the microphone, the phonograph, are all as simple in themselves as is the property of amber rubbed to take up straws. From the beginning there have been Roentgen Rays, and the principles of microphone and phonograph are coeval with the world. The wonder lies not in the discovery (so-called), but in the fact they have remained so long unknown. The real mystery of mysteries is the mind of man. Why, with a pen or brush, one man sits down and makes a masterpiece, and yet another, with the selfsame instruments and opportunities, turns out a daub or botch, is twenty times more curious than all the musings of the mystics, works of the Rosicrucians, or the mechanical contrivances which seem to-day so fine, and which our children will disdain as clumsy. The conquests of the mind never grow stale, let he who doubts it read a page of Plato and compare it with some à la mode philosopher. I take it that one of the objects of the author of this work is to sustain, that in astronomy, in mathematics, and in certain other branches of learn ing, the ancients knew a good deal more than modern men of science care to admit.

Knowledge to-day is not diffused, as writers in newspapers, makers of almanacks, members of school-boards, and worthy men who see the means but cannot grasp the fullness of achievement, are never tired of stating, but on the contrary, goes almost contraband. The fact that all can read and write, cypher and scan the columns of a newspaper, can tell the latitude (the longitude more rarely) of Jella Coffee, can prattle innocently of literature, art, spiritualism, and chemistry, can make their pertinent remarks upon theosophy, discuss religion, say a word in season on lithotomy, and generally comport themselves as if their minds were fashioned after the pattern of a kaleidoscope, does not go far to prove the claim of wide extended knowledge.