V.
SOME OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE.
The environments of life have much to do with its philosophy. This thought impressed itself forcibly on me in Intermere.
The environments of its people contribute much, if not most, to their philosophy, or the faculty of life's enjoyments.
They are pleasantly housed, handsomely habilitated, physically and intellectually employed, sans the driving spur of necessity or greed, with profound and earnest aspirations beyond their present stage of existence. This is not confined to the few, but animates and elevates all.
Learning, in a loftier sense than we understand the term; art, music and all the senses of physical and mental enjoyment, and the promotion of all of them, are pitched in a high and harmonious key.
Personal adornment and physical beauty in both sexes have no tinge of vanity, and awake no envy in others. Intermerean dress and its adjuncts are as closely looked after as their wonderful mechanism and its mysterious soul or motor-spirit, which enables them to travel with celerity and safety by land or air or sea, or that subtler principle by which men and women, separated by distance, talk to each other by thought instead of speech, and would render the clumsy deception of our own diplomats and other hypocrites an impossibility.