THE PERSONAL EQUATION IN HUMAN TRUTH. 795 



truths in which we are interested, only those which strike our 

 emotions, are fully operative ; others pass us by without influenc- 

 ing our actions. The laws of life declare that those truths in 

 which we have a selfish interest shall be the most numerous of 

 all. Not only the lowest but the highest of life's truths, the 

 truths of love and immortality, are emotional truths. Such 

 truths are proverbially blind. Cold reason was never responsible 

 for the lofty flights of love, or for the terrible alighting, which 

 so frequently follows, on the hardest of ground. But any truth 

 can never be a full truth to us until we have felt it. If there is 

 such an entity as absolute truth roaming around loose, not affect- 

 ing human feelings and actions, it might as well not be at large. 

 All talk about veneration for truth in the abstract is merely talk. 

 It is easy to prove this. Take some person whose self is not inter- 

 ested in the subject and talk to him about the truths of an echino- 

 derm, a cephalopod, an amoeba, or a series of latent chemical 

 reactions, and notice how soon he becomes bored. Prof. Sully 

 rightly says : " Even the scientific man who shows the speculative 

 feeling in so intense a form is often surprisingly narrow in the 

 range of his intellectual interest. The general or abstract senti- 

 ment, a pleasurable interest in all or any new ideas, is in fact a 

 kind of fiction." 



We are now brought face to face with another fact. The 

 thought limitations of any human being so circumscribe the truth 

 that we can never be sure that we have the whole truth. Our 

 thinking is principally for the sake of our doing, and that must 

 be definite, concrete, limited. A shoemaker's business renders his 

 conception of the human being a narrow one, and for that reason 

 an unfair one. The shape of the head, the hand, the trunk, may 

 be neglected by him. He may be unacquainted with the relation 

 of the auricles to the ventricles in the heart ; he may not know 

 whether the stomach is above or below the diaphragm ; he may 

 not be able to distinguish between the sympathetic and the cere- 

 bro-spinal nervous system. It is evident that his view of the 

 human body is narrow and unfair. Allow one skillful physician 

 to question another equally skillful, and the first will easily show 

 how narrow and unfair are the ideas of the other. Everything is 

 related directly or indirectly to everything else. No mortal eye 

 can detect all those relations. Some undetected one may be vital, 

 must be vital, to knowing the full truth about anything. Prof. 

 James has well emphasized the fact that the Infinite alone can 

 have a fair, impartial, or fully truthful view of any single thing. 

 The Infinite alone can see all these myriad relations. Every time 

 a man neglects one aspect of a thing he is unfair to it ; if he neg- 

 lects ninety-nine, he is still more unfair. We pick up a book ; we 

 notice the type and paper. Do we know all the crude attempts 



