"Haggard, H Rider- Allan Quatermain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haggard H. Rider)

institutions, representing as they do the gathered experience
of humanity applied for the good of all. Of course they have
great advantages -- hospitals for instance; but then, remember,
we breed the sickly people who fill them. In a savage land they
do not exist. Besides, the question will arise: How many of
these blessings are due to Christianity as distinct from civilization?
And so the balance sways and the story runs -- here a gain,
there a loss, and Nature's great average struck across the two,
whereof the sum total forms one of the factors in that mighty
equation in which the result will equal the unknown quantity
of her purpose.

I make no apology for this digression, especially as this is
an introduction which all young people and those who never like
to think (and it is a bad habit) will naturally skip. It seems
to me very desirable that we should sometimes try to understand
the limitations of our nature, so that we may not be carried
away by the pride of knowledge. Man's cleverness is almost indefinite,
and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like
an iron ring. You can go round and round it, you can polish
it highly, you can even flatten it a little on one side, whereby
you will make it bulge out the other, but you will never, while
the world endures and man is man, increase its total circumference.
It is the one fixed unchangeable thing -- fixed as the stars,
more enduring than the mountains, as unalterable as the way of
the Eternal. Human nature is God's kaleidoscope, and the little
bits of coloured glass which represent our passions, hopes, fears,
joys, aspirations towards good and evil and what not, are turned
in His mighty hand as surely and as certainly as it turns the
stars, and continually fall into new patterns and combinations.
But the composing elements remain the same, nor will there be
one more bit of coloured glass nor one less for ever and ever.

This being so, supposing for the sake of argument we divide ourselves
into twenty parts, nineteen savage and one civilized, we must
look to the nineteen savage portions of our nature, if we would
really understand ourselves, and not to the twentieth, which,
though so insignificant in reality, is spread all over the other
nineteen, making them appear quite different from what they really
are, as the blacking does a boot, or the veneer a table. It
is on the nineteen rough serviceable savage portions that we
fall back on emergencies, not on the polished but unsubstantial
twentieth. Civilization should wipe away our tears, and yet
we weep and cannot be comforted. Warfare is abhorrent to her,
and yet we strike out for hearth and home, for honour and fair
fame, and can glory in the blow. And so on, through everything.

So, when the heart is stricken, and the head is humbled in the
dust, civilization fails us utterly. Back, back, we creep, and
lay us like little children on the great breast of Nature, she