"Abbott, Edwin A - Flatland" - читать интересную книгу автора (Abbott Edwin A)

you could move in a fashionable crowd without jostling against your
betters, whom it is against etiquette to ask to "feel," and who, by
their superior culture and breeding, know all about your movements,
while you know very little or nothing about theirs. in a word, to
comport oneself with perfect propriety in Polygonal society, one ought
to be a Polygon oneself. Such at least is the painful teaching of my
experience.
It is astonishing how much the Art -- or I may almost call it
instinct -- of Sight Recognition is developed by the habitual practice
of it and by the avoidance of the custom of "Feeling." Just as, with
you, the deaf and dumb, if once allowed to gesticulate and to use the
hand-alphabet, will never acquire the more difficult but far more
valuable art of lip-speech and lip-reading, so it is with us as
regards "Seeing" and "Feeling." None who in early life resort to
"Feeling" will ever learn "Seeing" in perfection.
For this reason, among our Higher Classes, "Feeling" is
discouraged or absolutely forbidden. From the cradle their children,
instead of going to the Public Elementary schools (where the art of
Feeling is taught,) are sent to higher Seminaries of an exclusive
character; and at our illustrius University, to "feel" is regarded as
a most serious fault, involving Rustication for the first offence, and
Expulsion for the second.
But among the lower classes the art of Sight Recognition is
regarded as an unattainable luxury. A common Tradesman cannot afford
to let his sun spend a third of his life in abstract studies. The
children of the poor are therefore allowed to "feel" from their
earliest years, and they gain thereby a precocity and an early
vivacity which contrast at first most favourably with the inert,
undeveloped, and listless behaviour of the half-instructed youths of
the Polygonal class; but when the latter have at last completed their
University course, and are prepared to put their theory into practice,
the change that comes over them may almost be described as a new
birth, and in every art, science, and social pursuit they rapidly
overtake and distance their Triangular competitors.
Only a few of the Polygonal Class fail to pass the Final Test or
Leaving Examination at the University. The condition of the
unsuccessful minority is truly pitiable. Rejected from the higher
class,, they are also despised by the lower. They have neither the
matured and systematically trained powers of the Polygonal Bachelors
and Masters of Arts, nor yet the native precocity and mercurial
versatility of the youthful Tradesman. The professions, the public
services, are closed against them, and though in most States they are
not actually debarred from marriage, yet they have the greatest
difficulty in forming suitable alliances, as experience shews that the
offspring of such unfortunate and ill-endowed parents is generally
itself unfortunate, if not positively Irregular.
It is from these specimens of the refuse of our Nobility that the
great Tumults and Seditions of past ages have generally derived their
leaders; and so great is the mischief thence arising that an
increasing minotiry of our more progressive Statesmen are of opinion