Page 283 - erewhon

destruction of vegetable life when wanted as food by man;
and so forcibly had the philosopher shown that what was
sauce for vegetables was so also for animals, that, though
the Puritan party made a furious outcry, the acts forbidding
the use of meat were repealed by a considerable majority.
Thus, after several hundred years of wandering in the wil-
derness of philosophy, the country reached the conclusions
that common sense had long since arrived at. Even the Pu-
ritans after a vain attempt to subsist on a kind of jam made
of apples and yellow cabbage leaves, succumbed to the in-
evitable, and resigned themselves to a diet of roast beef and
mutton, with all the usual adjuncts of a modern dinner-ta-
ble.
One would have thought that the dance they had been led
by the old prophet, and that still madder dance which the
Professor of botany had gravely, but as I believe insidiously,
proposed to lead them, would have made the Erewhonians
for a long time suspicious of prophets whether they pro-
fessed to have communications with an unseen power or
no; but so engrained in the human heart is the desire to
believe that some people really do know what they say they
know, and can thus save them from the trouble of thinking
for themselves, that in a short time would-be philosophers
and faddists became more powerful than ever, and gradu-
ally led their countrymen to accept all those absurd views of
life, some account of which I have given in my earlier chap-
ters. Indeed I can see no hope for the Erewhonians till they
have got to understand that reason uncorrected by instinct
is as bad as instinct uncorrected by reason.

Erewhon