108 PSYCHOLOOT 



His introduction of tlie matter may, however, be quoted 

 He begins with an anecdote from a comic paper. 



" In the compartment of a railway-carriage six persons unkno"wrk lo 

 each other sit in lively conversation. It becomes a matter of regret thait 

 «n8 of the company must alight at the next station. One of the otiiers 

 says that he of all things prefers such a meeting with entirely unknowi 

 persons, and that on such occasions he is accustomed neither to ask who 

 or wha^ his companions may be nor to tell who or what he is. Another 

 thereupon says that he will undertake to decide this question, if they 

 each and all will answer him an entirely disconnected question. They 

 began. He drew five leaves from his note-book, wrote a question on. 

 •each, and gave one to each of his companions with the request that he 

 write the answer below. "When the leaves were returned to him, he 

 turned, after reading them, without hesitation to the others, and said to 

 the first, ' You are a man of science'; to the second, ' You are a sol 

 dier'; to the third, ' You are a philologer'; to the fourth, ' You are a 

 journalist'; to the fifth, 'You are a farmer.' All admitted that he 

 was right, whereupon he got out and left the five behind. Ecah 

 wished to know what question the others had received; and behold, he 

 iad given the same question to each. It ran thus : 



" ' What being destroys what it has itself brought forth ? 



"To this the naturalist had answered, 'vital force'; the soldier, 

 war'; the philologist, 'Kronos'; the publicist, 'revolution'; the 

 farmer, ' a boar '. This anecdote, methinks, if not true, is at least 

 splendidly well invented. Its narrator makes the journalist go on to 

 lisay : ' Therein consists th.e joke. Each one answers the first thing that 

 ■occurs to him,* and that is whatever is most newly related to his pur- 

 :suit in life. Every question is a hole-drilling experiment, and the an- 

 swer is an opening through which one sees into our interiors.' ... So 

 •do we all. We are all able to recognize the clergyman, the soldier, the 

 scholar, the business man, not only by the cut of their garments and 

 the attitude of their body, but by what they say and how they express 

 it. We guess the place in life of men by the interest which they show 

 .and the way in which they show it, by the objects of which they speak, 

 by the point of view from which they regard things, judge them, conceive 

 them, in short by their mode of apperceiving. . . . 



' ' Every man has one group of ideas which relate to his own person 

 and interests, and another which is connected with society. Each has 

 his group of ideas about plants, religion, law, art, etc., and more 

 especially about the rose, epic poetry, sermons free trade, and the like. 

 Thus the mental content of every individual, even of the uneducated 



* Oue of my colleagues, asking himself the question after reading the 

 mecdote, tells me that he replied ' Harvard College,' the faculty of that body 

 having voted, a few days previously, to keep back the degrees of members 

 €if the graduating class who might be disorderly on class-day night. W. J 



