115.
“I wonder,” said C., “that facts should be called stubborn things.” I wonder, too, seeing you can always oppose a fact with another fact, and that nothing is so easy as to twist, pervert, and argue or misrepresent a fact into twenty different forms. “Il n’y a rien qui s’arrange aussi facilement que les faits,”—Nothing so tractable as facts,—said Benjamin Constant. True; so long as facts are only material,—or as one should say, mere matter of fact,—you can modify them to a purpose, turn them upside down and inside out; but once vivify a fact with a feeling, and it stands up before us a living and a very stubborn thing.
116.
Every human being is born to influence some other human being; or many, or all human beings, in proportion to the extent and power of the sympathies, rather than of the intellect.
It was said, and very beautifully said, that “one man’s wit becomes all men’s wisdom.” Even more true is it that one man’s virtue becomes a standard which raises our anticipation of possible goodness in all men.