The Unpopular Review Vol. I / January-June 1914

by Various

Not so bad as that. He was a believer, but not a blind believer. The fact is, he had a lively sense of the limitations of pigeon-holing. He had arrived at familiarity with both its virtues and its defects through personal experience. He had dealt in pigeon-holes himself, had made them, used them, and had been in them, and for years had been growing more and more conscious that the use of them was a difficult and delicate matter.

Earlier in life, it had not been so. He still remembered vividly the time when all men were easily classifiable—into good and bad, Christian and heathen, saved and unsaved, rich and poor, wise and foolish, as easily as into black and white, or fat and lean; when all nations except the United States, and all governments except democracy, were inferior. He remembered the surprise with which he had heard for the first time that there was a difference between prohibition and temperance, that there were many forms of intemperance besides drunkenness, that English government had many points of superiority over American. He had always supposed that with those questions it was as with slavery in the mind of Charles Sumner: "Gentlemen, to this slavery question there can be no other side."

He also recalled the ferment started in his mind by a much respected teacher's remark that all truth was relative, not absolute: whether a man was good depended on what you meant by goodness; whether two and two made four depended on whether one and one made two; grammar and spelling were after all only fashions, and things that appeared in print might not be true; not even the dictionary was absolute, and the Bible was not inspired in every letter and punctuation mark.

All this shook the ground under his feet, and it took some time to recover. That about the Bible and the dictionary was especially confounding. He reeled to and fro, and staggered like a drunken man, and was at his wit's end.

You will call him stupid. He was. Most pigeon-holers are, to tell the truth. He was like them in being so busy with virtuous action that he found but little time for thought. He used the pigeon-holes customary in his neighborhood, without questioning the correctness of content or label.

But in time he came to realize that there was religion outside of sects and that there were many believers who were unconscious unbelievers, that men might be honest and still dishonorable, that a great deal of the most pernicious lying in the world was done without the utterance of a syllable, that the guiltless were often criminal and the criminal guiltless, that many democrats were really aristocrats, many fools really wise, many a rich man poor and many a poor man rich, many a learned man ignorant, many pessimists really optimists, and many optimists really stumbling-blocks to progress.

By the Saturday morning on which we catch sight of him, he had come to have a wholesome distrust of the pigeon-holes of others; and whenever he took a specimen from his own, he submitted it to fresh examination, tolerating pigeon-holes at all only under perpetual protest against men's careless use of them.

For there were multitudinous differences between things to all appearances absolutely alike. It was impossible to classify even the inanimate without some sort of violence. Even the products of the die and the press showed variation, however infinitesimal; and as for Nature, in her realm there were no two things alike. Plants, animals, persons, mountains, valleys, and streams—unending variety was the rule. The two faces most alike in all the world proved widely different on close examination, and the points of difference between the persons who owned them were infinite.

And not only that. Not only were all individual things really different from all other things, but each individual thing seemed different to different persons. Pigeon-holing implied pigeon-holers, and no two pigeon-holers were alike. Like the artists in Plato, they saw the same thing from different angles: "I mean, that you may look at a bed from different points of view, obliquely or directly, or from any other point of view, and the bed will appear different, but there is no difference in reality." The same man appeared better or worse, according to the standards of his judge; the same rain was good or bad, according to the health or the purpose of the person under the umbrella. One man's meat was another man's poison. No two men ever formulated the same definition of a thing, let alone an abstraction; and if definitions agreed in words, the words themselves meant different things to their authors. The Essayist thought of the desperate pass of Philosophy, patiently waiting while her disciples fruitlessly endeavored to define each other's definitions. Lucky for life that living did not hang on wisdom of that sort!