"
Page 260: "Either the passions _are_ bad or the social mechanism
_is false_, for evil prevails, and to a melancholy extent. If the
former be true, then there is no hope of a better state of things, for
every means of repression and constraint that human ingenuity could
invent has been applied to regulate their action; but all in vain--they
have remained unchanged, and in the eyes of the moralist as perverse as
ever. If, however, the latter be true--that is, if the social mechanism
be false--then there is a chance for a better future; for our
incoherent and absurd societies are changing more or less with every
century. They are at the mercy or whim of a tyrant, or of a revolution
of the mass; they may therefore be reformed or done away with
entirely."
These grand words and this powerful logic, if even too strong for some
of the readers of this book, were not so for the brave hearts of the
leaders of Brook Farm, and for Mr. Ripley in particular. The tentative
feeling, the search for science to back up the social impulses, seemed
at last to have found something solid in a society conceived by the
Creator; the man created by him, fitted to it by him; the society
fitted to the man; the one the counterpart of the other.
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