Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/578

560 of the earth into acquaintance with one another. For the civilized man of our time, most of the world has become a neighborhood. He interests himself in the life and doings of another hemisphere much as he does in the affairs of his own town. He cannot help losing the sense of strangeness and of remoteness in his cognition of other men, even though they inhabit the antipodes. He cannot resist the influence of the association into which he is thrown with all men, of all nations, races, classes, and creeds, and he necessarily extends to them, more and more in common, his recognition of human fellowship. In other words, he generalizes more and more his notions of right conduct toward men, because his clear perception of those relations of fellowship upon which such notions are based has become a general instead of a partial one. This accounts for the whole humane movement of modern times toward democracy, toward the breaking of caste and the leveling of class divisions, toward emancipations and enfranchisements, toward equity in institutions and laws, toward common education and toward public and private charities of every kind.

It is not the fact, however, that every man acquires entirely for himself these larger and more intelligent perceptions, which broaden and clarify his notions of right. There is the same giving and taking in this as in other matters of knowledge. Men accept from one another a great deal of what becomes the serviceable common stock of knowledge in every department. We are all of us settled now in the belief that the earth is round, that it revolves about the sun, that it rotates on its axis, that the other planets do the same, and that these motions are all controlled by the same force, under the same law, which governs the fall of a ripened apple from its stem; but how many comprehend the mathematical proofs by which such beliefs as these are sustained? The belief makes its way among men by the force of the authority of the few, whose keener faculties have verified the demonstration of it—assisted, indeed, by the general growth of what may be called a receptive intelligence, which enables men to discern the probability of the truth of things which they do not perceive clearly in fact. But such beliefs are accepted at last and acted upon and reasoned upon, exactly as though they held in each man's mind the firmest ground that his own perceptions and his own reason could give them. It has appeared to be the same with all the larger generalizations in morals. They are diffused in society by the propagation which we call a growth of public opinion, and they sometimes enforce themselves in the moral code of a community even before the major part of its members have half recognized the ground of fact upon which they rest.

If we turn now to the indirect relationships between men, which arise out of the institutions of property, politics, etc., we shall see that they have been generally rendered more remote and less recognizable, by the same operations that have produced greater intimacy and