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The great world that lies in all men's hearts is expressed in miniature, in the great man. Crowds speak in heroes. I have often heard Socialists wondering among themselves why a movement that had so many fine insights and so many noble motives behind it had produced so few artists. It has seemed to me that it might be because Socialists as a class, speaking roughly, are generalizers.
We all laughed at this reply, and Monsieur D'A , rising to depart, said, "Well, well, milord, your countrymen are great generalizers in philosophy; they reduce human actions to two grand touchstones. All hilarity, they consider the sign of a shallow mind; and all kindness, the token of a false heart." Quis sapiens bono Confidat fragili. Seneca. Grammatici certant et adhuc sub judice lis est.
We all laughed at this reply, and Monsieur D'A, rising to depart, said, "Well, well, milord, your countrymen are great generalizers in philosophy; they reduce human actions to two grand touchstones. All hilarity, they consider the sign of a shallow mind; and all kindness, the token of a false heart." Quis sapiens bono Confidat fragili. Seneca. Grammatici certant et adhuc sub judice lis est.
Hasty generalizers are apt to overlook the fact, that the Saxon was never, to any great extent, a literary language. Accordingly, it held its own very well in the names of common things, but failed to answer the demands of complex ideas, derived from them. The author of "Piers Ploughman" wrote for the people, Chaucer for the court.
Their genius was their own; and they were not the rash and hasty generalizers which, since the days of Bacon, we have been apt to suppose them. The thoughts of men widened to receive experience; at first they seemed to know all things as in a dream: after a while they look at them closely and hold them in their hands. They begin to arrange them in classes and to connect causes with effects.
So far are they from pretending to solve the antinomy of division that all of them admit, as an essential condition of organization, the hierarchy of labor, that is, the classification of laborers into parcellaires and generalizers or organizers, and in all utopias the distinction of capacities, the basis or everlasting excuse for inequality of goods, is admitted as a pivot.
Darling would be murmured over many a cradle in Saxon huts; but minion came into the language down the back stairs of the Norman palace. In the same way, terms of law are Norman, and of the Church, Latin. These are familiar examples. But hasty generalizers are apt to overlook the fact, that the Saxon was never, to any great extent, a literary language.
In our day, when each science has become so complicated, so obese, that a man's lifetime may be spent in exercising round one of them, there are hardly any generalizers or observers fit to estimate their relativity, except among the two classes called by the world idlers and ignorants the poets and the Bohemians.
But, where man has no pecuniary nor ambitious interests at stake in his commerce with any class of his fellow-creatures, his information about them is extremely confused and superficial. The best naturalists are mere generalizers, and think they have done a vast deal when they classify a species. What should we know about mankind if we had only a naturalist's definition of man?
It is simple, yet so infilled and intermixed with the possible verities of exact science and the philosophical speculations on the infinite and the unknown, as to elude our mental grasp, as it were, by its own subtle essence, and defy the keenest analysis of our profoundest generalizers in science.
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