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My purpose in naming these seemingly irrelevant
contrasts, is to point out the analogy between progress in
bodily nutrition and progress in mental nutrition. The
psychically higher, like the physically higher, have greater
powers of selecting materials fit for assimilation. Just as by
appearance, texture, and odor, the superior animal is guided
in choosing food, and swallows only things which contain
much organizable matter; so the superior mind, aided by
what we may figuratively call intellectual scent, passes by
multitudes of unorganizable facts, but quickly detects facts
full of significance, and takes them in as materials out of
which cardinal truths may be elaborated. The less
developed intelligences, unable to decompose these more
complex facts and assimilate their components, and having
therefore no appetites for them, devour with avidity facts
which are mostly valueless; and out of the vast mass
absorb very little that helps to form general conceptions.
Concentrated diet furnished by the experiments of the
physicist, the investigations of the political economist, the
analyses of the psychologist, is intolerable to them,
indigestible by them; but instead, they swallow with
greediness the trivial details of table-talk, the personalities
of fashionable life, the garbage of the police and divorce
courts; while their reading, in addition to trashy novels,
includes memoirs of mediocrities, volumes of gossiping
correspondence, with an occasional history, from which
they carry away a few facts about battles and the doings
of conspicuous men. By such minds, this kind of intellectual
provender is alone available; and to feed them on a higher
kind would be as impracticable as to feed a cow on meat.
………Herbert Spencer 1877
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