Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/175

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THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY.

he is for me realized as an automaton. But still frequently I do realize him in another way, but how? I note very likely that he is courteous or surly, and I like or dislike him accordingly. Now courtesy and discourtesy are qualities that belong not to automata at all. Hence I must somehow recognize him in this case as conscious. But what aspect of his consciousness do I consider? Not the inner aspect of it as such, but still the outer aspect of his conscious life, as a power affecting me; that is what I consider. He treats me so and so, and he does this deliberately; therefore I judge him. But what I realize is his deliberate act, as something important to me. It seldom occurs to me to realize fully how he feels; but I can much more easily come to note how he is disposed. The disposition is his state viewed as a power affecting me.

Now let one look over the range of his bare acquaintanceship, let him leave out his friends, and the people in whom he takes a special personal interest; let him regard for the first the rest of his world of fellow-men: his butcher, his grocer, the policeman that patrols his street, the newsboy, the servant in his kitchen, his business rivals whom he occasionally talks to, the men whose political speeches he has heard or read, and for whom he has voted, with some notion of their personal characters, — and then all the rest of the outside world, the Turks or the Indians, the men of historic fame. Napoleon, Cicero, Cæsar, the imaginary people in fictions that have excited little of his stronger emotional interest: how does he conceive of all these people? Are they not