As representatives elect other representatives to represent them, government gets more complex and farther away from the people governed. Many sports that today are engaged in by millions of people were at one time frowned on by the authorities. Lawn bowls and billiards were once considered immoral. Golf was banned in 1457 during part of the reign of James II of Scotland for a reason other than immorality. It is not meter but a meter-making argument that makes a poem.
Some minds resemble a fertile but thin soil.
There is a quick, but not a strong, vegetation of whatever chances to be thrown down there. The oak of the forest does not grow there. The attitude is common that there is danger in flooding the world with too much knowledge. The story of Faust, which permeates literature, is evidence of the widespread, age-long belief in the bond between the person of knowledge and the powers of darkness. There is a doctrine, well known to philosophers, that the moon ceases to exist when no one is looking at it.