On no point did he and I differ
more widely than on this.
It has always seemed to me that the formation of a judgment and
opinion is an involuntary function of the mind, not a matter of
effort, as others seem to regard it. Your judgment may be wrong, so
may your opinion; your perception may be misled. I understand that.
But can you exist without judgment, without opinion, without
perception, till another man hand you his? This is hard to realise.
My father in all these years had not said my son is a fool and will
not succeed, nor had he said my son is clever and will succeed, but
what he had said was this, he may be a fool or he may be clever, we
will see what the publishers say. And this attitude of mind, which
repeated itself in different forms in half the men one meets, is
fascinatingly incomprehensible to me. If I have the opportunity of
seeing a man or testing a ring, what do I care, what does it matter
to me, whether he is successful or unsuccessful, whether the ring is
hall-marked or not! I have my own eyes, ears, and intelligence at
command. What more do I want? Give me the man or the metal: in a
very short time I have decided their worth to my own satisfaction. I
may be wrong in my estimate, of course, but that is another matter.
If my brain is in a healthy state, I can do more avoid its forming
an exact, personal opinion of the man, and a computation of his
powers, than I can avoid my eye spontaneously taking his shape and
muscles into its vision.
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