Page 156 - erewhon

less effect on their daily life and actions. It seems as though
the need for some law over and above, and sometimes even
conflicting with, the law of the land, must spring from
something that lies deep down in man’s nature; indeed, it is
hard to think that man could ever have become man at all,
but for the gradual evolution of a perception that though
this world looms so large when we are in it, it may seem a
little thing when we have got away from it.
When man had grown to the perception that in the ev-
erlasting Is- and-Is-Not of nature, the world and all that it
contains, including man, is at the same time both seen and
unseen, he felt the need of two rules of life, one for the seen,
and the other for the unseen side of things. For the laws
affecting the seen world he claimed the sanction of seen
powers; for the unseen (of which he knows nothing save
that it exists and is powerful) he appealed to the unseen
power (of which, again, he knows nothing save that it exists
and is powerful) to which he gives the name of God.
Some Erewhonian opinions concerning the intelligence
of the unborn embryo, that I regret my space will not per-
mit me to lay before the reader, have led me to conclude that
the Erewhonian Musical Banks, and perhaps the religious
systems of all countries, are now more or less of an attempt
to uphold the unfathomable and unconscious instinctive
wisdom of millions of past generations, against the com-
paratively shallow, consciously reasoning, and ephemeral
conclusions drawn from that of the last thirty or forty.
The saving feature of the Erewhonian Musical Bank
system (as distinct from the quasi-idolatrous views which

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