Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold.  And which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we?  Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jill’s existence, as a fact?  Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anaesthesia as regards Jill’s magical importance?  Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill’s palpitating little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack.  For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not.  He struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he is also afflicted with some blindness, even here.  Whilst we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not.  Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack’s way of taking it—­so importantly—­is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too.  May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again!  Where would any of us be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making recognizant return?  We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way.

If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people’s lives; and that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big.  The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies.  Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd.

We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness weighing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by fitful revelations of the truth.  It is vain to hope for this state of things to alter much.  Our inner secrets must remain for the most part impenetrable by others, for beings as essentially practical as we are are necessarily short of sight.  But, if we cannot gain much positive insight into one another, cannot we at least use our sense of our own blindness to make us more cautious in going over the dark places?  Cannot we escape some of those hideous ancestral intolerances and cruelties, and positive reversals of the truth?

For the remainder of this hour I invite you to seek with me some principle to make our tolerance less chaotic.  And, as I began my previous lecture by a personal reminiscence, I am going to ask your indulgence for a similar bit of egotism now.