uties to
perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own
duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth.
But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with
which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in
their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity
and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance
of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they
presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons'
conditions or ideals.

Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate
than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly
fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant
for the other!--we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of
trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you
sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a
judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will
toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his
comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be
taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer
disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and
staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and
vacant of all conscious life? The African savages came nearer the truth;
but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of
our American travellers who, in the interior, had just come into
possession of a stray copy of the New York _Commercial Advertiser_, and
was devouring it column by column. When he got through, they offered him
a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they
wanted it, they said: "For an eye medicine,"--that being the only reason
they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his
eyes upon its surface.

The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to
possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of
reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the
spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and
difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the
side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.

Let me take a personal