UNIVERSALITY OF What we are so fond of saying, that no two men are alike, is no more true than its exact opposite, that no two men are different. The likeness both mental and physical between men is fundamental and permanent; the differences, however obtrusive they may be, are accidental and to a great extent shifting and transient. That a man is a man gives perfect assurance of his possessing every distinctive attribute of humanity. Completely lacking but one such characteristic, he would be either a brute or something between brute and man; gaining but one altogether new power, he would be an angel of some degree. Once determine by an exact analysis what are all the essentially different ways in which the mind of man can display its activity, and the sum of the powers thus manifested must be considered as constituting universal human nature. It is on this account, as well as others, and in a unique sense, that man can fitly be called a microcosma little universe, there being in every man all the possibilities of the race. But this homogeneity, this absolute oneness of constitution, is no special characteristic of humanity; it is the law of all created things after their several kinds. Every particle of gold has all the essential qualities of every other particle; every ounce of water is always just so much hydrogen and oxygen, never more nor less of these, and never, by any possibility, anything else; every form of animal and vegetable life has its own unvarying constitution, fixed forever by the law to which it owes its existence. This is, in brief, а universe of kinds, or, stated more concretely, of kinds of things, and not, primarily, of individuals infinitely diverse. Not otherwise than thus is it conceivable that a world of life and order could exist. Isolation is death, and the possibility of a human life such as we now live is dependent upon the actuality of a human nature which knows no variation except within the comparatively narrow limits of unessential forms.1 If the essential principles of the doctrine which we are presenting are not universally accepted, it is partly at least because of a failure to discriminate between what is actual and what only potential in man, or between a weak and unobtrusive and a full and strong manifestation of a power. Thus a man is often said to have no ear for music, who is merely unable to enjoy its more complex forms; or to have no voice for singing, when he has never made any serious effort to train the vocal powers which he has possessed from infancy. Sometimes one denies to 1 Plato held that of every created thing there is an image or prototype or "idea" in the Divine mind, and that these are the only permanent realities. others the possession of the ability which he himself lacks or seems to lack; as when a person who delights only in simple melodies declares that it shows affectation to claim to enjoy the more varied and elaborate music of the oratorio or the opera. There are a few people, having some pretension to sound judgment in general, who speak with the utmost disdain of the old masterpieces of pictorial art, and a considerable multitude who really derive from these works no true enjoyment; but such inconsiderately set up their own immaturity as a standard by which to judge the full-grown, when they declare that the beauty which they do not see has no real existence. It is one of the most striking characteristics of ignorance and inexperience that they imagine the world to be bounded by their own narrow horizon. If the sightless fishes of the Mammoth Cave were possessed of powers of reasoning analogous to our own, they would be in great danger of judging that those of their tribe living in other waters were altogether endowed and circumstanced like themselves. And yet these blind cave-dwellers have rudimentary organs of vision, either never developed or now atrophied through lack of use. In a stream whose depths were pierced by the sunlight, their disability might sometime disappear. In nature's plan, every organ, whether of body or mind, begins to exist in advance of a demand for its use. We are not questioning now what |