"Old Greek sophistry! Knowing requires a subject to know and an object to be known. You can't be subject and object too--introspection is a self-contradiction. Hasn't every one noticed that everybody else fails to discover himself in a novel or a sermon, though his lineaments are painted down to the minutest details of wart and mole? And it's quite natural. Every soul is to itself the centre of the universe--through which the infinite panorama passes; nothing exists but in relation to it: to its standards of beauty, of right and wrong, of humour, of admiration, everything is brought. There's no man so low or so ridiculous but he finds somebody else more so, and the London street-boy who sneers at the long-haired poet is exalted to a sense of superiority. I once met a human monstrosity--hunch-backed, cross-eyed, palsied, and wooden-legged. My soul sickened with pity, but his face brightened in a smile of contempt and his cross-eyes danced with glee. I appealed to his sense of the ridiculous. Listen to the comments of people upon one another after a party, and confess that a coterie is often but a mutual contempt society. That is what makes life livable--every living creature is an amused eye upon the universe. Terence said as much long ago. We amuse one another, and exist to gratify one another's sense of superiority, like the islanders who live by taking in one another's washing. It will be a thousand pities if the spread of travelling removes the mutual superiorities of Englishmen and Frenchmen, Chinamen and Hindoos. I went to a dinner-party the other day. The host and hostess were impossible--like spiteful studies by Thackeray caricatured by Dickens. Yet there were they arrogating to themselves every privilege of judgment and jurisdiction that the most fashionable peers or the sublimest souls could claim; to their own minds the arbiters of elegance, the patrons of the arts, the flagellators of vice and snobbery, the gracious laudators of virtue, the easy fomenters of scandal.