Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties 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 example of the kind that befalls each one of us daily:—­