CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS KNOWERS. 27 



on to explain that it glistened in her right eye and not 

 in her left, because she had had a wart on her left 

 which had been removed — and successfully. Goethe 

 probably wrote this without a chuckle ; he believed 

 what a good many people who have never read Wil- 

 helm Meister believe still, namely, that it was a 

 work full of pathos, of fine and tender feeling ; yet a 

 less consummate humorist must have felt that there 

 was scarcely a paragraph in it from first to last the 

 chief merit of which did not lie in its absurdity. 



Another example may be taken from Bacon of the 

 manner in which sayings which drop from men un- 

 consciously, give the key of their inner thoughts to 

 another person, though they themselves know not 

 that they have such thoughts at all ; much less that 

 these thoughts are their only true convictions. In his 

 Essay on Friendship the great philosopher writes: 

 " Reading good books on morality is a little flat and 

 dead." Innocent, not to say pathetic, as this passage 

 may sound it is pregnant with painful inferences con- 

 cerning Bacon's moral character. For if he knew that 

 he found reading good books of morality a little flat 

 and dead, it follows he must have tried to read them ; 

 nor is he saved by the fact that he found them a little 

 flat and dead ; for though this does indeed show that 

 he had begun to be so familiar with a few first princi- 

 ples as to find it more or less exhausting to have his 

 attention directed to them further — yet his words 

 prove that they were not so incorporate with him 

 that he should feel the loathing for further discourse 

 upon the matter which honest people commonly feel 



