and the ranks of mankind are constantly recruited from spirits
already hardened and depraved by a long course of ill-treatment.
Nothing developes the spirit so much as sympathy. Nothing cultivates,
refines, and aids it in its progress towards perfection so much as
kind and gentle treatment. On the contrary, the brutal usage and
want of sympathy with which we meet at the hands of men, stunt our
development and reverse all the currents of a our nature. We grow
coarse with coarseness, vile with reviling, and brutal with the
brutality of those who surround us. And when we pass out of this
stage we enter on the next depraved and hardened, and with the bent
of our dispositions such that we are ready by our nature to do in
our turn that which has been done to us. The greater number of us,
indeed, know no other or better way. For the spirit learns by
experience and imitation, and inclines necessarily to do those
things which it has been in the habit of seeing done. Humanity
will never become perfected until this doctrine is understood and
received and made the rule of conduct."

--Paris, Oct. 28, 1879





XIV. The Laboratory Underground




I dreamed that I found myself underground in a vault artificially