the aspect of a child of God; when conceited, dogmatic, aggressive, all the forgotten orthodox teachings of the fate of the hopeless come back to you with the force of apostolic thunder. As the splendid immortal he is destined to be, you hasten to apotheosize him; as the monster he sometimes appears, you wonder that he exists. Burns, who was a master in human nature, characterized woman as "great for good, or great for evil; when not an angel, she's a devil." "There is something still more to be dreaded than a Jesuit," said Eugene Sue, "and that is a Jesuitess." It seems to be nearly impossible to be moderate. If we are calm or deliberate enough to be just, we are almost sure to be indifferent. Our ignorance, our education, our interests, our prejudices, blind our eyes, darken our minds, or drive us to violence. There is nothing half and half about us. The little that we see, we see so differently and so partially, and ignorance finds its complement in feeling. Dryden said of some of the judges of his day, that, right or wrong, they always decided for the poor against the rich; and he quoted a saying of Charles II., that the crown was uniformly worsted in every case which was heard before Sir Matthew Hale. "The eyes of critics," said Landor, "whether in commending or carping, are both on one side, like a turbot's." "Truth, as Humanity knows it," said Bulwer, "is not what the schoolmen call it, one and indivisible; it is like light, and splits not only into elementary colors, but into innumerable tints. Truth with Raphael is not the same as truth with Titian; truth with Shakespeare is not the same as truth with Milton; truth with St. Xavier is not the same as truth with Luther; truth with Pitt is not the same as truth with Fox. Each man takes from life his favorite truth, as each man takes from light his favorite color."

Perhaps that which astonishes us most, when we fairly open our eyes upon the world, is the diversity in everything. Out in the forest, under the spreading tree, looking up at the luxuriant foliage, you may not think of the difference between the leaves; but pull down a limb, and spend an hour comparing them; you find, much as they resemble, that no two are precisely alike. Examine the plumage of the owl that you cruelly brought down with your rifle; every feather of his beautiful dress differs from every other; and, what is more remarkable, every fibre of every feather is another feather, still more delicate, differing from every other, all of which together yield to the pressure of your hand like floss silk. No wonder he fell upon the mischievous mole or mouse as noiselessly as the shadow of a cloud. Go down to the sea-shore; the tide is out; there is an apparent waste of white sand, a dull extent of uniformity; but stretch yourself on the beach, which the innumerable differing waves have beaten to incomparable smoothness, and examine leisurely, with a good glass, a few hundred of the infinite grains which you thought to be the same, and you discover that they differ, that each is differently shaped, each holds the light differently, and, what is more wonderful than all, each appears to be a shell, or part of a shell, which was once the abode of a creature, and a different creature from every other inhabiting or that ever inhabited any other shell of the ocean. Look into the crowded street; the men are all men; they all walk upright; they might wear each other's clothes without serious inconvenience; but could they exchange souls? "Clothe me as you will," said Sancho, "I shall still be Sancho Panza." "The soul is not twin-born, but the only begotten." "And there never was in the world," said Montaigne, "two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains. The most universal quality is diversity."

"The nerve-tissue," said an acute physiologist, "is never precisely the same in two men; the blood of no two men is precisely alike; the milk of no two women is identical in composition—they all vary (within certain limits), and sometimes the variation is considerable. It is in this that depends what we call the difference of 'temperament,' which makes one twin so unlike his brother, and makes the great variety of the human race." "Give Professor Owen part of an old bone or a tooth, and he will on the instant draw you the whole animal, and tell you its habits and propensities. What professor has ever yet been able to classify the wondrous variety of human character? How very limited as yet the nomenclature! We know there are in our moral dictionary the religious, the irreligious, the virtuous, the vicious, the prudent, the profligate, the liberal, the avaricious, and so on to a few names, but the comprehended varieties under these terms—their mixtures, which, like colors, have no names—their strange complexities and intertwining of virtues and vices, graces and deformities, diversified and mingled, and making individualities—yet of all the myriads of mankind that ever were, not one the same, and scarcely alike; how little way has science gone to their discovery, and to mark their delineation! A few sounds, designated by a few letters, speak all thought, all literature, that ever was or will be. The variety is infinite, and ever creating a new infinite; and there is some such mystery in the endless variety of human character."

Cicero gives an account of a man who could distinguish marks of difference amongst eggs so well, that he never mistook one for another; and, having many hens, could tell which laid a particular egg.

Socrates asked Menon what virtue was? "There is," said Menon, "the virtue of a man and of a woman, of a magistrate and of a private person, of an old man and of a child." "Very well," said Socrates, "we were in quest of virtue, and thou hast brought us a whole swarm."

"What," asks the great French essayist, "have our legislators got by culling out a hundred thousand particular cases, and annexing to these a hundred thousand laws? The number holds no manner of proportion with the infinite diversity of human actions; the multiplication of our inventions will never arrive at the variety of examples; add to them a hundred times as many more; it will not, nevertheless, ever happen, that, of events to come, there shall any one fall out that, in this great number of thousands of events so chosen and recorded, shall find any one to which it can be so exactly coupled and compared, that there will not remain some circumstance and diversity which will require a variety of judgment."

"Some ask," says La Bruyère, "why mankind in general don't compose but one nation, and are not contented to speak one language, to live under the same laws, to agree amongst themselves in the same customs and worship: for my part, seeing the contrariety of their inclinations, tastes, and sentiments, I wonder to see seven or eight persons live under the same roof, within the same walls, and make a single family."

Molecular philosophy shows interspaces betwixt atom and atom, differing atoms, which can hardly be said to touch; so bodies are formed, and so society and public opinion are compounded. "The single individual is to collective humanity," says Alger, "as the little column of mercury in the barometer is to the whole atmosphere. They balance each other, although infinitely incommensurate. A quicksilver sea, two and a half feet deep, covering the globe, would weigh five thousand million tons. That is the heft of the air,—that transparent robe of blue gauze which outsags the Andes and the Alps. Its pressure is unfelt, yet if that pressure were annulled all the water on the earth would immediately fly into vapor. Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which the forces of the individual would collapse and all the institutions of society fly into atoms." Common sense has been defined to be the "average intellect and conscience of the