that the soul looked "upon things with [93] another eye, and
represented them to itself with another kind of face; reason being a
tincture almost equally infused into all our manners and opinions;
though there never were in the world two opinions exactly alike."
And the practical comment was, not as one might have expected,
towards the determination of some common standard of truth amid that
infinite variety, but to this effect rather, that we are not bound to
receive every opinion we are not able to refute, nor to accept
another's refutation of our own; these diversities being themselves
ultimate, and the priceless pearl of truth lying, if anywhere, not in
large theoretic apprehension of the general, but in minute vision of
the particular; in the perception of the concrete phenomenon, at this
particular moment, and from this unique point of view--that for you,
this for me--now, but perhaps not then.

Now; and not then! For if men are so diverse, not less disparate are
the many men who keep discordant company within each one of us,
"every man carrying in him the entire form of human condition."
"That we taste nothing pure:" the variancy of the individual in
regard to himself: the complexity of soul which there, too, makes
"all judgments in the gross" impossible or useless, certainly
inequitable, he delighted to note. Men's minds were like the
grotesques which some artists of that day loved to joint together, or
like one of his own [94] inconstant essays, never true for a page to
its proposed subject. "Nothing is so supple as our understanding: it
is double and diverse; and the matters are double and diverse, too."

Here, as it seemed to Gaston, was one for whom exceptions had taken
the place of law: the very genius of qualification followed him
through all his keen, constant, changeful consideration of men and