674 PSYCHOLOGY. 



in not being themselves to tliank or blame for their natural 

 gifts, in having the same desires and pains and pleasures, 

 in short in a host of fundamental relations. Hence, if these 

 things be our essence, we should be substitutable for other 

 men, and they for us, in any proposition in which either 

 of us is involved. The more fundamental and common 

 the essence chosen, and the more simple the reasoning,* 

 the more wildly radical and unconditional Avill the justice 

 be which is aspired to. Life is one long struggle between 

 conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and 

 opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive percep- 

 tion of them as individual facts. The logical stickler 

 for justice always seems pedantic and mechanical to 

 the man who goes by tact and the particular instance, 

 and who usually makes a poor show at argument. Some- 

 times the abstract conceiver's way is better, sometimes that 

 of the man of instinct. But just as in our study of reason- 

 ing we found it impossible to lay down any mark whereby 

 to distinguish right conception of a concrete case from con- 

 fusion (see pp. 336, 3,50), so here Ave can give no general 

 rule for deciding when it is morally useful to treat a con- 

 crete case as sui generis, and when to lump it with others 

 in an abstract class. t 



* A geutleman told me thai he had a conclusive argument for opening 

 the Harvard Medical School to women. It was this: "Are not women 

 human?" — which major premise of course had to be granted. " Then are 

 they not entitled to all the rights of humanity ?" My friend said that he 

 had never met anyone who could successfully meet this reasoning. 



f You reach the Mephistophelian point of view as well as the point of 

 view of justice by treating cases as if they belonged rigorously to abstract 

 classes. Pure rationalism, complete immunity from prejudice, consists in re- 

 fusing to see that the case before one is absolutely unique. It is always possi- 

 ble to treat the country of one's nativity, the house of one's fathers, the bed 

 in which one's mother died, nay, the mother herself if need be, on a naked 

 equality with all other specimens of .so many respective genera. It shows 

 the world in a clear frosty light from which all fuliginous mists of affec- 

 tion, all swamp-lights of sentimentality, are absent. Straight and immedi- 

 ate action becomes easy then — witness a Napoleon's or a Frederick's career. 

 But the question always remains, "Are not the mists and vapors worth re- 

 taining?" The illogical refusal to treat certain concretes by the mere law 

 of their genus has made the drama of human history. The obstinate insist- 

 ing that tweedledum is not tweedledee is the bone and marrow of life, 

 Look ;it the Jews and the Scots, with their miserable factious and sec- 



