216 NATURE AND MAN. 



other, from that merely speculative or provisional acceptance of 

 a proposition, which neither shapes our thought, nor governs our 

 action, and which really constitutes little more than an absence of 

 ^belief in it. 



You are all familiar with that current doctrine in regard to the 

 nature of belief, which assumes that we &quot; try &quot; every proposition in 

 our court of intellect, just as we try a prisoner in a court of law. 

 We are supposed to listen with equal attention to the evidence 

 adduced on each side, and to give our best consideration to the 

 arguments which the opposing advocates erect upon it. Holding 

 our intellectual balance with eyes blinded like those of Justice, we 

 poise against each other the two aggregates of pro and con ; and 

 according as one or the other scale is made to go down by the 

 &quot;preponderance of evidence,&quot; do we accept or reject the pro 

 position. But how comes it, if this be the whole account of our 

 procedure, that the judgments of different men on the very same 

 evidence are so notoriously diverse ? The great Tichborne case, 

 for example, cannot be brought up in any society, without elicit 

 ing opposite verdicts from self-constituted jurymen, who profess 

 to have followed the course of the whole trial with the greatest 

 care, and whose judgment cannot be supposed to have been 

 swayed by the least admixture of partiality or self-interest. The 

 clue to this diversity is found in the further fact, that even those 

 who agree in their conclusion, will often be found to have formed 

 it on dissimilar grounds ; the respective weights of the several 

 evidentiary facts being very differently estimated by different 

 individuals. And thus we are led to this result ; that the weights 

 or probative values of such evidentiary facts are not absolute quan 

 tities, but matters of personal estimate ; being like our sensations 

 of heat or cold as compared with the indications of the ther 

 mometer the expressions of their effects upon our own con 

 sciousness. For while there are some things as to which the 

 common consciousness of mankind is in perfect accord, there are 

 others which impress different individuals so diversely, that we 

 are forced to regard what may be termed the personal equation * 



* This term is used by astronomers to mark the quickness of sight by 

 which each of several observers is characterized ; any visual phenomenon (hat 

 is being watched for by two observers at once (as, for example, the contact of 



