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121. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs ; he is provided with comport and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvellous, life like electronic sound and image reproductions he is enjoying. 122. Each highbrow did and does congratulate himself on being unique in his unlikeness to other men; and conversely each lowbrow now congratulate himself on being in some mystical way unique in his likenesson being, so to say, outstandingly average and extraordinarily ordinary. 123. As for the lowbrows claim to be specially human, I for one have never been able to understand why it should be inhuman to use the faculties that distinguish us from pigs and geese and human to use those which we share with the lower animals. 124. There is no disputing, says the proverb, about tastethough, in fact, human beings spend at least half their leisure doing nothing elseand if highbrowism and lowbrowism were exclusively matters of individual taste, there would be no more to say about them than what I have said in the preceding lines. 125. Thus I desire a great deal less pleasure from jazz and thrillers than from the music, let us say, of Beethoven or the novels, for example, of Dostoievsky; and the sex appeal of the girls on the covers of magazines seems to me less thrilling than the more complicated appeal to a great variety of feelings made by a Rubens, an EI Greco, a Constable, a Seurat. | 
