The first man may be a complete Materialist and feel his own body as a
horrible machine manufacturing his own mind. He may listen to his
thoughts as to the dull ticking of a clock. The man next door may be a
Christian Scientist and regard his own body as somehow rather less
substantial than his own shadow. He may come almost to regard his own
arms and legs as delusions like moving serpents in the dream of
delirium tremens. The third man in the street may not be a Christian
Scientist but, on the contrary, a Christian. He may live in a fairy
tale as his neighbors would say; a secret but solid fairy tale full of
the faces and presences of unearthly friends. The fourth man may be a
theosophist, and only too probably a vegetarian; and I do not see why
I should not gratify myself with the fancy that the fifth man is a
devil worshiper.... Now whether or not this sort of variety is
valuable, this sort of unity is shaky. To expect that all men for all
time will go on thinking different things, and yet doing the same
things, is a doubtful speculation. It is not founding society on a
communion, or even on a convention, but rather on a coincidence. Four
men may meet under the same lamp post; one to paint it pea green as
part of a great municipal reform; one to read his breviary in the
light of it; one to embrace it with accidental ardour in a fit of
alcoholic enthusiasm; and the last merely because the pea green post
is a conspicuous point of rendezvous with his young lady. But to
expect this to happen night after night is unwise...." [Footnote: G.
K. Chesterton, "The Mad Hatter and the Sane Householder," _Vanity
Fair_, January, 1921, p. 54]

For the four men at the lamp post substitute the governments, the
parties, the corporations, the societies, the social sets, the trades
and professions, universities, sects, and nationalities of the world.
Think of the legislator voting a statute that will affect distant