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The Ethics of the Dust by John Ruskin
page 6 of 207 (02%)
directly-given command requires nothing more of virtue than
obedience.

IV. The subsequent pages, 149-158, were written especially to
check the dangerous impulses natural to the minds of many amiable
young women, in the direction of narrow and selfish religious
sentiment: and they contain, therefore, nearly everything which I
believe it necessary that young people should be made to observe,
respecting the errors of monastic life. But they in nowise enter
on the reverse, or favorable side: of which indeed I did not, and
as yet do not, feel myself able to speak with any decisiveness;
the evidence on that side, as stated in the text, having "never
yet been dispassionately examined."

V. The dialogue with Lucilla, beginning at p. 96, is, to my own
fancy, the best bit of conversation in the book; and the issue of
it, at p. 103, the most practically and immediately useful. For on
the idea of the inevitable weakness and corruption of human
nature, has logically followed, in our daily life, the horrible
creed of modern "Social science," that all social action must be
scientifically founded on vicious impulses. But on the habit of
measuring and reverencing our powers and talents that we may
kindly use them, will be founded a true Social science,
developing, by the employment of them, all the real powers and
honorable feelings of the race.

VI. Finally, the account given in the second and third lectures,
of the real nature and marvelousness of the laws of
crystallization, is necessary to the understanding of what farther
teaching of the beauty of inorganic form I may be able to give,
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