For three thousand years, at
least, they have been at this problem, and it is far enough from being
solved yet. Its anomalies seem to have been expressly contrived by
Nature to elude our curiosity and defy our cunning. And no part of it
has she arranged so craftily as that web of institutions, habits,
manners, and customs, in which we find ourselves enmeshed as soon as
we begin to have any perception at all, and which, slight and almost
invisible as it may seem, it is so hard to struggle with and so
impossible to break through. It may be true, according to the poetical
Platonism of Wordsworth, that "heaven lies about us in our infancy";
but we very soon leave it far behind us, and, as we approach manhood,
sadly discover that we have grown up into a jurisdiction of a very
different kind.
In almost every region of the earth, indeed, it is literally true that
"shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy." As
his faculties develope, he becomes more and more conscious of the
deepening shadows, as well as of the grim walls that cast them on his
soul, and his opening intelligence is earliest exercised in divining
who built them first, and why they exist at all.
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