Page:The reflections of Lichtenberg.djvu/49

 no judgment can be passed on it. I am so thoroughly convinced of this from what I have seen of celebrated men that I believe such an autobiography, as I figure it to myself coming from the hands of a great man, would strike the conventional person as if it came from the moon. We know ourselves alone, or rather, we could do so if we cared ; whereas others we know merely by analogy, as we know the man in the moon. Take two acquaintances who are on good terms and visit each other with wife and child, and only see how it goes when they throw each other overwhat reproaches bubble up, what stories and so on. All this lay dormant in them before, like the powder in a bombshell, and when they bowed to each other it bent with them. As long as we don’t write our lives so as to exhibit all our weaknesses, from those of pride down to the most secret vices, to love each other we shall never learn. Here I hope for complete equality. The more it goes against the grain, the truer we should be to ourselves. Such self-revelation seems to have been reserved for our age. Common it will never become; though it will console many and make not a few wiser, all of which is in itself gain enough. The philosopher, too, should remember that “dulce est pro patria mori"that it is sweet to sacrifice the credit one had in one’s 1ife time, for philosophy’s sake. Matters are not made any the worse before God by doing so. —Every man, it is true, judges others by himself; but presumably he often misjudges them. It is incomprehensible tom foolery in our conventions that the one object in nature which we really knowI mean, our moral