Читать книгу Owen's Moral Physiology; or, A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question онлайн

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Young men and women! you who, if ignorant, are uncorrupted also; you in whose minds honest and simple words call up none but honest and simple ideas; you who think no evil; you who are still believers in human virtue and human happiness; you who, like our fabled first parents in their paradise, are yet unlearned alike in the hypocritical conventionalities and the odious vices of pseudo-civilization; you, with whom love is stronger than fear, and the law within the breast more powerful than that in the statue book; you whose feelings are still unblunted, and whose sympathies still warm and generous; you who belong to the better portion of your species, and who have formed your opinion of mankind from guileless spirits like your own—young men and women! it is to your pure feelings I would fain speak: it is by your unsophisticated hearts I would fain have my treatise and my motives judged.

Libertines and debauchees! this book is not for you. You have nothing to do with the subject of which it treats. Bringing to its discussion, as you do, a distrust or contempt of the human race—accustomed as you are to confound liberty with license, and pleasure with debauchery, it is not for your palled feelings and brutalized senses to distinguish moral truth in its purity and simplicity. I never discuss this subject with such as you.