560 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of the earth into acquaintance with one another. For the civilized 

 man of our time, most of the world has become a neighborhood. He 

 interests himself in the life and doings of another hemisphere much 

 as he does in the affairs of his own town. He cannot help losing the 

 sense of strangeness and of remoteness in his cognition of other men, 

 even though they inhabit the antipodes. He cannot resist the in- 

 fluence of the association into which he is thrown with all men, of all 

 nations, races, classes, and creeds, and he necessarily extends to them, 

 more and more in common, his recognition of human fellowship. In 

 other words, he generalizes more and more his notions of right con- 

 duct toward men, because his clear perception of those relations of 

 fellowship upon which such notions are based has become a general 

 instead of a partial one. This accounts for the whole humane move- 

 ment of modern times toward democracy, toward the breaking of 

 caste and the leveling of class divisions, toward emancipations and 

 enfranchisements, toward equity in institutions and laws, toward com- 

 mon education and toward public and private charities of every kind. 



It is not the fact, however, that every man acquires entirely for 

 himself these larger and more intelligent perceptions, which broaden 

 and clarify his notions of right. There is the same giving and taking 

 in this as in other matters of knowledge. Men accept from one 

 another a great deal of what becomes the serviceable common stock 

 of knowledge in every department. We are all of us settled now in 

 the belief that the earth is round, that it revolves about the sun, that 

 it rotates on its axis, that the other planets do the same, and that 

 these motions are all controlled by the same force, under the same 

 law% which governs the fall of a ripened apple from its stem ; but 

 how many comprehend tlie mathematical proofs by which such 

 beliefs as these are sustained ? The belief makes its way among 

 men by the force of the authority of the few, whose keener facul- 

 ties have verified the demonstration of it assisted, indeed, by the 

 general growth of what may be called a receptive intelligence, 

 which enables men to discern the probability of the truth of things 

 which they do not perceive clearly in fact. But such beliefs are ac- 

 cepted at last and acted upon and reasoned uj^on, exactly as though 

 they held in each man's mind the firmest ground that his own jjer- 

 ceptions and his own reason could give them. It has appeared to 

 be the same with all the larger generalizations in morals. They are 

 diffused in society by the propagation which we call a growth of 

 public opinion, and they sometimes enforce themselves in the moral 

 code of a community even before the major part of its members have 

 half recognized the ground of fact upon which they rest. 



If we turn now to the indirect relationships between men, which 

 arise out of the institutions of property, politics, etc., we shall see that 

 they have been generally rendered more remote and less recognizable, 

 by the same operations that have produced greater intimacy and fa- 



