Here, then, we see both nature and cultivation making infinite variety in individual acuteness and range of all the senses. In the words of the great Chadband, “What does this teach us?”
There is, no doubt, an objective world, a something external to our perception, and outside of our originating energy, which produces the effects by us called collectively “the world.” Yet, in order to become a thing perceived, that something must undergo a modification by our organs, which, after all, makes us as truly actors in the being of the world, for all purposes of perception, as if we had helped to create it. Accordingly as the senses vary, so also will the world vary, becoming all things to all men; and literally the same thing to no two men. So, not metaphorically at all, but in the most restricted sense, every human being of us has his own world which no other man has any conception of, and this, too, with all our senses wide open, and, if you please, looking in the same direction. Only upon abstract mathematical truths, or on the forum of axioms, do we ever come exactly together, and do business with each other by the same balances. Once off of this common ground, and, though we talk about things the same in words, we mean something which we see and feel very differently. The husband does not know exactly how his voice sounds to his wife, nor the wife whether to her husband her face looks precisely as it does to herself in the glass. All that they can be tolerably sure of in their intercourse with one another is that they hit the same general and necessary facts.
But if in the mere bodily senses we find such different worlds, how much more is it the case in our spiritual organism. From the characteristic of this variation we utterly exempt that faculty of direct insight which beholds truths that are necessary and therefore universal. This, which may be called the Intuition of Truth, is not only the same in its perceptions, but pretty nearly equal in its scope among all men. None but idiots, of whatever land or tribe, could fail to see that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and in the field of ideas to which that belongs there is at present a small harvest of similar facts, and none but men preternaturally exalted have reaped any more from richer heights.
Leave this plane, and we are all irreconcilable again. That which is one man’s darling goal in life is the loathing or hatred of his neighbor. We are astonished at each other’s attachments; and while we forget the old “de gustibus” aphorism, we forget also another thing whose remembrance would be much more apt to keep us calm than any dogmatic assertion of a fact without its reasons, like that of the proverb. My dear sir, the object of your friend’s attachment you do not perceive in the slightest. With the index of a word out of your common dictionary he points in a certain direction. You look, and see something which does not please you. Do not growl for that fact; if he had your spiritual eyes, he would see something that did not please him; had you his, you would see an object as lovable as he himself sees.
The importance of a proposed measure, the value of a certain end to be secured, are utterly different with different individual judgments. The majority which wins the day must not be understood as a body of men who all think alike. Each individual mind composing it sees the question in a light varying by inexpressible shades from that which illuminates each of his colleagues. The majority is nothing more nor less than a collection of minds who, seeing one proposition in certain connections, varying in each case, think they all understand it as the same, and consent to let go their minor views with relation to it for the sake of carrying through that which on the whole they believe to be the best, though for very different ends.
There are philosophers who seriously lament over this infinite variance of perceptions, judgments, and feelings, as if it were the grand obstacle in the track of human perfection.
Deferentially, though candidly, I acknowledge that I think this a mistake. Indeed, the problem of our humanity standing as it does thus—Given our present nature, and the necessity arising out of it that investigation should be the instrument of acquiring wisdom, what is the best possible contrivance for furthering the operation? I would reply, this very state of omnipresent variance. Supposing that suddenly, and just at the point in all science which we have now reached, the law of mind should change, and, a great average being struck, we should all, not to make an extreme case by saying throughout the world, but merely over its civilized area, henceforward see everything precisely alike, and precisely alike be affected by everything which we saw—it seems to me that a worse calamity could not happen to mankind. The wheels of our spiritual progress now roll somewhat erratically, it is true, as the impulse of the hosts who urge on the chariot is stronger now on this side, now on that, but the resultant of all the forces is a rapid and a forward motion. The check which would ensue to that progress from the coming in of an entire uniformity would be sufficient to retard for centuries the millennium of mind. True, all would push in one direction, but the grand nisus, the energy of ambition, would be lost.
In the contests—yes, even in the quarrels of opinion, we have a guarantee for the development of truth. Fertility is not the characteristic of unbroken plains; they become the torrid desert or
