Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the beginning of PART I.
Reader, mine, I am about to treat herein the grandest subject that ever engaged or challenged human thought. In doing so it is likely that I may repeat some things elsewhere, by myself or others, said before; but even if so, I have struck upon many things now given to the race for the first time.
A vast amount of "physiological" chaff is current in the world, originating in the pulpy brains of certain people with "M.D" after their names; folks who eke out a good living by putting medicines, of which they know little, into bodies whereof they know less.
A still larger amount of "chaff" labeled "philosophy" is afloat, generated for the most part in the angular heads of people, whom a chronic prostatitis or ovarian fever has so deranged that they really imagine themselves philosophers, - being only shams, - who propose to revolutionize the world, especially the domain of Marriage-land, by inculcating pudacious sophistries, better calculated to kill than to cure the victims, on either side. One thing is certain: Light is needed; and this work (originally intended to be called by a different title, but which intent was abandoned, owing to the vastly larger scope of the completed and rewritten volume) is meant to afford exactly what is required; and
I. What a tremendous deal of suffering, horror, crime, wretchedness and despair there is in this beautiful, but badly misused world of ours! - most of which might be prevented in the first instance, or remedied in the second, were there less consummate and confounded ignorance afloat up and down the earth's strong tides of human life, with its strangely, wildly surging ebbs and flows, heats and snows, in reference to matters pertaining to, and concerning the, relations, wise and otherwise, subsisting between the separate genders of the human race; especially that portion of it located in the so-called "civilized" lands, and particularly in the cis-Atlantic portion of the Lord's exceedingly immoral vineyard.
Now, whoever supposes that the ignorance alluded to is confined solely to the masses, -sometimes spellable as " them asses," according to Carlyle, - or that the sum total of non-knowledge must be looked for among the unread, unlettered and unwashed crowds that throng the great highways of the world, and whose struggles for life, and clamors for bread, occupy most of their time and attention, - will find him or herself most woefully mistaken; for a far less dense and conglobate ignorance upon matters of vital import to every human being exists among the people - the rude crowd who jostle each other everywhere, and which is the plastic material that the brainful few mould into voters, hero-worshippers, or send to fight their battles against each other, armed with ploughs or rifles, pitchforks or bayonets, cannons or spades - than is to be found in circles making very lofty pretensions, not only to knowledge, but to morality also, from its geologic base to its astronomic summit.
