" A competent master-workman with good
materials would not have turned out a world so "bunglingly" made, with
great patches of poisonous morass and arid desert unfit for human
habitation, with coal and other requisites for man's comfort stored
away out of sight, with the rivers all unbridged, and mountains and
other impediments thrown in the way of free locomotion. So far, then,
from its being man's duty to imitate Nature, as some have thought it
was, it is incumbent upon him to oppose her with all his powers,
because of her gross injustice in the realm of morals, and to remedy
her physical defects as far as lies in his power. On this view of
Nature our fathers were wiser in their generation than we when they
trimmed their trees into grotesque shapes and laid out their
landscapes in geometric lines; when in medicine they substituted the
lancet and unlimited mercury for the _vis medicatrix naturae_; when in
philosophy they dictated to Nature from their internal consciousness,
before Bacon introduced the heresy of induction; when in politics they
had a profound faith in statutes and none at all in statistics; when
in education they conscientiously rammed down the ologies at the point
of the ferule, in blissful ignorance of psychology.
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