Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/538

496 wealth are usually most at their ease in intercourse with the well-to-do. Who has not witnessed how quickly two abnormally stout men enter into confiding relations with one another; or how easily, between persons afflicted with a like disease or deformity, friendship is set up? Caste, group, and race prejudices of every kind, together with such distinctions as those implied in the names of aristocrat, commoner, bourgeois, official, proletariat, all imply and involve the coming together of likes and the separation of unlikes. In most countries there is still a strong though diminishing prejudice against alliances with foreigners; even among natives, marrying "below one's station" or "out of one's religion" meets with a certain amount of social as well as with much family resistance. Most people usually fall in love with those about their own age. Deaf-mutes almost invariably marry deaf-mutes.

Highly temporary likenesses are equally potent in promoting association. Their influence is seen in the pleasure we feel at the discovery in others of some character like to our own, even if that character be no more than a gleam of intelligence in the lower animals. We note it constantly in the unifying effect which the wearing of a common badge or uniform has upon large bodies of men brought together for special ends. So in moments of exaltation or depression, as in the excitement of conflict or intoxication; under the influence of music or during religious worship; the ordinary differences belonging to more permanent states lose their separative power, and men come into unwonted facility, even pleasure of relation with each other. It is supposed that even between deadly enemies chancing to meet at the dinner table there passes a flash of momentary reconciliation. It is certain that shipwrecked men do not quarrel over politics; that the starving are usually free from religious bigotry; and that in the presence of a general bereavement, the clamors of faction and the prejudices of class are silent. The power of a war and of the comradeship of battle to annihilate distinctions usually recognized in time of peace is notorious. In all these cases, and in all the cases which they represent, we see great importance suddenly given to one side of men's natures to some all-a,bsorbing feeling or experience in the presence of which the ease of association with likes becomes extended for the moment to each of the human beings by whom the same experience is shared, whether they be few or many; in other words, the unlikenesses which normally separate men into more or less narrow classes lose their importance in proportion as some suddenly developed feeling gives prominence to resemblances either wider in character or more strongly felt.

Observe next how unlikes tend to be separated from the