ter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths
revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs _are_ among
the wonders of creation, _are_ worthy of this sympathetic interest; and
it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack
realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union
with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires,
understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately,
too; for he is also afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst
we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are
contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us
as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way
of taking it--so importantly--is the true and serious way; and she
responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May
the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again!
Where would any of _us_ be, were there no one willing to know us as we
really are or ready to repay us for _our_ insight by making recognizant
return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense,
pathetic, and important way.

If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with
everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact,
certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and
for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know
more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary
Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its
jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up
before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing
intrinsically absurd.

We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness
weighing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by fitful
revelations of the truth. It is vain to hope for this state of things to
alter much. Our inner secrets must remain for the most part impenetrable
by others, for beings as essentially practical as we are are necessarily
short of sight. But, if we cannot gain much positive insight into one
another, cannot we at least use our sense of our own blindness to make
us more cautious in going over the dark places? Cannot we escape some of
those hideous ancestral intolerances and cruelties, and positive
reversals of the truth?

For the