Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/815

Rh truths in which we are interested, only those which strike our emotions, are fully operative; others pass us by without influencing our actions. The laws of life declare that those truths in which we have a selfish interest shall be the most numerous of all. Not only the lowest but the highest of life's truths, the truths of love and immortality, are emotional truths. Such truths are proverbially blind. Cold reason was never responsible for the lofty flights of love, or for the terrible alighting, which so frequently follows, on the hardest of ground. But any truth can never be a full truth to us until we have felt it. If there is such an entity as absolute truth roaming around loose, not affecting human feelings and actions, it might as well not be at large. All talk about veneration for truth in the abstract is merely talk. It is easy to prove this. Take some person whose self is not interested in the subject and talk to him about the truths of an echinoderm, a cephalopod, an amoeba, or a series of latent chemical reactions, and notice how soon he becomes bored. Prof. Sully rightly says: "Even the scientific man who shows the speculative feeling in so intense a form is often surprisingly narrow in the range of his intellectual interest. The general or abstract sentiment, a pleasurable interest in all or any new ideas, is in fact a kind of fiction."

We are now brought face to face with another fact. The thought limitations of any human being so circumscribe the truth that we can never be sure that we have the whole truth. Our thinking is principally for the sake of our doing, and that must be definite, concrete, limited. A shoemaker's business renders his conception of the human being a narrow one, and for that reason an unfair one. The shape of the head, the hand, the trunk, may be neglected by him. He may be unacquainted with the relation of the auricles to the ventricles in the heart; he may not know whether the stomach is above or below the diaphragm; he may not be able to distinguish between the sympathetic and the cerebro-spinal nervous system. It is evident that his view of the human body is narrow and unfair. Allow one skillful physician to question another equally skillful, and the first will easily show how narrow and unfair are the ideas of the other. Everything is related directly or indirectly to everything else. No mortal eye can detect all those relations. Some undetected one may be vital, must be vital, to knowing the full truth about anything. Prof. James has well emphasized the fact that the Infinite alone can have a fair, impartial, or fully truthful view of any single thing. The Infinite alone can see all these myriad relations. Every time a man neglects one aspect of a thing he is unfair to it; if he neglects ninety-nine, he is still more unfair. We pick up a book; we notice the type and paper. Do we know all the crude attempts