Prejudice

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 20, 1856

THE following admirable description of prejudice is from the "Letter to the Abbe Raymond." It is not a little remarkable that the author of such a passage could have written "The Age of Reason."

"There is something exceedingly curious in the constitution and operation of prejudice. It has the singular ability of accommodating itself to all the possible varieties of the human mind. Some passions and vices are but thinly scattered among mankind, and find only here and there a fitness of reception. But prejudice, like the spider makes every place its home. It has neither taste nor choice of situation, and all, that it requires is room. Everywhere, except in fire or water, a spider will live. So, let the mind be as naked as the walls of an empty and forsaken tenement, gloomy as a dungeon, or ornamented with the richest abilities of thinking, let it be hot, cold, dark, or light, lonely or inhabited, still prejudice, if undisturbed, will fill it with cobwebs, and live, like the spider, where there seems nothing to live on. If the one prepares her food by poisoning it to her palate and her use, the other does the same; and as several of our passions are strongly characterized by the animal world, prejudice may be denominated the spider of the mind."