Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child
John Greenleaf Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Winslow Sewall, Ed.

[39]

To Rev. Convers Francis.

Is not the idea of this present age written in the fact that any man can have his likeness taken in a minute by machinery? In “the philosophy of clothes” has it ever occurred to you, that in those Eastern countries, where a belief in fatalism stops the activity of human thought, the fashion of the garments changes not; while in France, where churches and governments are demolished in three days, the fashion of the garments is forever changing? I apprehend the clothing of a nation reveals much to the inhabitants of the aforesaid spiritual daguerreotype region. We borrow our fashions. How is it with our thoughts? By the way, did you hear that excellent joke, that Louis Phillippe had written to Dr. Channing to manufacture a religion for the French people?

My thoughts run on in the wildest way to-day. For the first time these six weeks, I have somebody in the kitchen to do my work; and there is a whole boys' school set loose in my brain, kicking up heels, throwing up caps, hurrahing, chasing butterflies,everything in short, except drowning kittens. So you must not look for anything like coherence. To go back to my hobby of twenty years, i. e. the forms of ideas. See you not how that old jangling pair, necessity and free-will, are shown in the tendency of all things to decay and reproduction? in mysticism and rationalism? in conservatism and reform? Forever in the universe, and the universe containing man, there is one hand winged, and the other chained. Because of necessity and free-will, [40] the revolving worlds keep their places. The sun is their necessity, centrifugal force their strong freewill. And those two opposing ideas, which regulate the motion of the stars, are constantly taking form in the most trivial actions of my daily life. By my soul, though free — will has a hard battle in these latter times, necessity presses like a patent screw.