previous next
[39]

To Rev. Convers Francis.

Northampton, October 30, 1840.
Is not the idea of this present age written in the fact that any man can have his likeness taken in a minute by machinery? In “the philosophy of clothes” has it ever occurred to you, that in those Eastern countries, where a belief in fatalism stops the activity of human thought, the fashion of the garments changes not; while in France, where churches and governments are demolished in three days, the fashion of the garments is forever changing? I apprehend the clothing of a nation reveals much to the inhabitants of the aforesaid spiritual daguerreotype region. We borrow our fashions. How is it with our thoughts? By the way, did you hear that excellent joke, that Louis Phillippe had written to Dr. Channing to manufacture a religion for the French people?

My thoughts run on in the wildest way to-day. For the first time these six weeks, I have somebody in the kitchen to do my work; and there is a whole boys' school set loose in my brain, kicking up heels, throwing up caps, hurrahing, chasing butterflies,everything in short, except drowning kittens. So you must not look for anything like coherence. To go back to my hobby of twenty years, i. e. the forms of ideas. See you not how that old jangling pair, necessity and free-will, are shown in the tendency of all things to decay and reproduction? in mysticism and rationalism? in conservatism and reform? Forever in the universe, and the universe containing man, there is one hand winged, and the other chained. Because of necessity and free-will,

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Northampton (Massachusetts, United States) (1)
France (France) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Louis Phillippe (1)
Convers Francis (1)
William Ellery Channing (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
October 30th, 1840 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: