30 Jun 2005 @ 19:59, by Bruce Kodish
Mary Everest Boole wrote the following thoughtful and thought-provoking piece on "Epidemics." It made up a small section of a chapter called "The Body of Humanity" in her book "Symbolical Methods of Study" published in England in 1884:
"Epidemic disease appears at first sight a dividing power, a source of selfishness; and, in detail, so it practically is. We do, we must, keep ourselves and our children out of the way of needless infection. Yet Mr. Maurice [a British preacher] has remarked that pestilence is a witness to and revealer of the Unity of Humanity; for infection, bred among the neglected, ill-housed poor, invades the homes of the rich and forces them to remember the bond that binds all classes together, and to own that the truest safety lies not in selfish self-protection from infection."
"What we call 'sin' appears as the great dividing power; and, in detail, it is so: wars and fightings come from our lusts. But does anything so force us to recognise a common Humanity as the knowledge, gained from experience, that we are not better than the people among whom we live?"
"Is our intense feeling of the evilness of certain phenomena and certain outward acts in reality a false feeling put into us in order to force us to learn that the Unity of Humanity is deeper than any of our feelings? We do find out sometimes that it is deeper, truer, more vital, even than the distinction between something which we thought 'right' and something which we thought 'wrong'; and, as the distinction between right and wrong seems to our feeling the foundation of all morals, must not the Unity of Humanity be something truer and more vital than anything which we can conceive?"
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