Page:The reflections of Lichtenberg.djvu/82

 place in ourselves. Similarly, too, we cannot possibly feel for others, as the expression goes ; it is solely for ourselves we feel. This truth sounds harsh, but it is not so if only properly understood. It is neither father nor mother, wife nor child, that we love, but the agreeable emotions which they occasionsomething that flatters our pride and self-love. Nor could it possibly be otherwise, and those who deny the fact evidently misunderstand it. In this matter language need not be philosophical, any more than in reference to the universe it need be Copernican. In nothing, I think, does man’s superior genius appear so clearly as in the fact that he should even be able to find out the tricks, as it were, that Nature would play upon him. One question, however, does remainWho is right, the man who thinks that he is being deceived, or the man who thinks that he is not? Unquestionably the man who believes that no deception is being practiced upon him is in the right. But neither of them really considers that he is being deceived. As soon as I recognize it, deception is deception no longer. Language originated prior to philosophy, and that is what handicaps philosophy, especially when it is a matter of making it clear to those who do not themselves reflect very much. When philosophy speaks it is uniformly compelled to express itself in the language of non-philosophy. Put it how you will, philosophy is only the art of discrimination. The country bumpkin makes use of all the principles of philosophy, though indirectly, latently, or in combination, as the physicist and