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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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08801_Field_TCGG T566.txt
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1996-04-10
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The men of the eighteenth century hardly knew that
kind of passion for material comfort, which is, so to
speak, the mother of servitude, an enervating but
tenacious and unalterable passion, which readily mingles
with and twines itself round many private virtues such as
love of family, respectability of life, regard for religious
beliefs, and even the assiduous if lukewarm practice of
the established worship, which is partial to respectability
but forbids heroism, which excels in making men steady
but citizens mean-spirited. The men of the eighteenth
century were both better and worse.
The French of that date loved joy and adored
pleasure; they were perhaps more irregular in their habits
and more unbridled in their passions and in their ideas
than men of today; but they knew nothing of that
judicious and well-regulated sensualism that we see