from another. I have said that not
every man has the same sense of humour. I might have said truly that no
two men have the same sense of humour, for that no two men have the
same brain and heart and experience, by which things the sense of
humour is formed and directed. One joke may go round the world,
tickling myriads, but not two persons will be tickled in precisely the
same way, to precisely the same degree. If the vibrations of inward or
outward laughter could be (as some day, perhaps, they will be)
scientifically registered, differences between them all would be made
apparent to us. 'Oh,' is your cry, whenever you hear something that
especially amuses you, 'I must tell that to' whomever you credit with a
sense of humour most akin to your own. And the chances are that you
will be disappointed by his reception of the joke. Either he will laugh
less loudly than you hoped, or he will say something which reveals to
you that it amuses him and you not in quite the same way. Or perhaps he
will laugh so long and loudly that you are irritated by the suspicion
that you have not yourself gauged the full beauty of it. In one of his
books (I do not remember which, though they, too, I suppose, are all
numbered) Mr. Andrew Lang tells a story that has always delighted and
always will delight me. He was in a railway-carriage, and his
travelling-companions were two strangers, two silent ladies,
middle-aged. The train stopped at Nuneaton. The two ladies exchanged a
glance. One of them sighed, and said, 'Poor Eliza! She had reason to
remember Nuneaton!'... That is all. But how much! how deliciously and
memorably much! How infinite a span of conjecture is in those dots
which I have just made! And yet, would you believe me? some of my most
intimate friends, the people most like to myself, see little or nothing
of the loveliness of that pearl of price. Perhaps you would believe me.
That is the worst of it: one never knows. The most sensitive
intelligence cannot predict how will be appraised its any treasure by
its how near soever kin.

This sentence, which I admit to be somewhat mannered, has the merit of
bringing me straight to the point at which I have been aiming; that,
though the public is composed of distinct units, it may roughly be
regarded as a single entity. Precisely because you and I have sensitive
intelligences, we cannot postulate certainly anything about each other.
The higher an animal be in grade, the more numerous and re