Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 March 1884 — A Boston Girl in Chicago. [ARTICLE]

A Boston Girl in Chicago.

I feel that I am very far from Boston. T realize that I am many miles nearer the line that separates civilization from te land of savages. And into these estern solitudes I have brought a volume of Herbert Spencer to refresh and cheer my mind. He always fascinates; and the fact of his being still unmarried has something to do with it, for you know there is a halo surrounding the celibate which marriage utterly destroys.. As in most philosophical questions, it is useless to ask why this is so. We can only observe the working of the phenomena, but not its cause. But truly, of Spencer I never tire. His ideas of the higher life are so consoling—the development from an “indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity.” What could be truer or more conclusive? Perhaps the illiterate mind might be staggered by the unusual combination of polysyll ables, but we who are cultivated can appreciate the subtle significance of a definite, coherent heterogeneity. His ideas of love, however, are not extravagantly tinged with romance. Suppose that a man with tender eyes and yaven-hued mustache, having seated himself by your side, should tenderly take your hand in bis,, and then assure in fervent tones that he is conscious ot a molecular change in the vesicular nerve matter of his system, whose concomitant is love, and that you are the external object which has caused the change. Would an ice bath be more chilling ? An hysterical woman would certainly lift up her voice and shriek aloud. No wonder that Herbert Spencer has lived to the age of sixty without marrying.