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- 8493
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- 2026-01-30T20:47:57.725Z
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- 8418
- text
- fact. And yet something in you bids me think now, that whatever latent
design your impostor friend might have had upon you, it as yet remains
unaccomplished. You read his label."
"And what did it say? 'This is a genial soul,' So you see you must
either give up your doctrine of labels, or else your prejudice against
my friend. But tell me," with renewed earnestness, "what do you take him
for? What is he?"
"What are you? What am I? Nobody knows who anybody is. The data which
life furnishes, towards forming a true estimate of any being, are as
insufficient to that end as in geometry one side given would be to
determine the triangle."
"But is not this doctrine of triangles someway inconsistent with your
doctrine of labels?"
"Yes; but what of that? I seldom care to be consistent. In a
philosophical view, consistency is a certain level at all times,
maintained in all the thoughts of one's mind. But, since nature is
nearly all hill and dale, how can one keep naturally advancing in
knowledge without submitting to the natural inequalities in the
progress? Advance into knowledge is just like advance upon the grand
Erie canal, where, from the character of the country, change of level is
inevitable; you are locked up and locked down with perpetual
inconsistencies, and yet all the time you get on; while the dullest part
of the whole route is what the boatmen call the 'long level'--a
consistently-flat surface of sixty miles through stagnant swamps."
"In one particular," rejoined the cosmopolitan, "your simile is,
perhaps, unfortunate. For, after all these weary lockings-up and
lockings-down, upon how much of a higher plain do you finally stand?
Enough to make it an object? Having from youth been taught reverence for
knowledge, you must pardon me if, on but this one account, I reject your
analogy. But really you someway bewitch me with your tempting discourse,
so that I keep straying from my point unawares. You tell me you cannot
certainly know who or what my friend is; pray, what do you conjecture
him to be?"
"I conjecture him to be what, among the ancient Egyptians, was called a
----" using some unknown word.
"A ----! And what is that?"
"A ---- is what Proclus, in a little note to his third book on the
theology of Plato, defines as ---- ----" coming out with a sentence of
Greek.
Holding up his glass, and steadily looking through its transparency, the
cosmopolitan rejoined: "That, in so defining the thing, Proclus set it
to modern understandings in the most crystal light it was susceptible
of, I will not rashly deny; still, if you could put the definition in
words suited to perceptions like mine, I should take it for a favor.
"A favor!" slightly lifting his cool eyebrows; "a bridal favor I
understand, a knot of white ribands, a very beautiful type of the purity
of true marriage; but of other favors I am yet to learn; and still, in a
vague way, the word, as you employ it, strikes me as unpleasingly
significant in general of some poor, unheroic submission to being done
good to."
Here the goblet of iced-water was brought, and, in compliance with a
sign from the cosmopolitan, was placed before the stranger, who, not
before expressing acknowledgments, took a draught, apparently
refreshing--its very coldness, as with some is the case, proving not
entirely uncongenial.
At last, setting down the goblet, and gently wiping from his lips the
beads of water freshly clinging there as to the valve of a coral-shell
upon a reef, he turned upon the cosmopolitan, and, in a manner the most
cool, self-possessed, and matter-of-fact possible, said: "I hold to the
metempsychosis; and whoever I may be now, I feel that I was once the
stoic Arrian, and have inklings of having been equally puzzled by a word
in the current language of that former time, very probably answering to
your word _favor_."
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