is our own. And that, in the least of us, is so rich
that no one has yet exhausted its possibilities. It has been said that
every genuine character an artist produces is one of the characters he
might have been. By re-creating our own suppressed possibilities we
multiply the number of lives that we can really know. That as I
understand it is the psychology of the Golden Rule. For note that Jesus
did not set up some external fetich: he did not say, make your neighbor
righteous, or chaste, or respectable. He said do as you would be done by.
Assume that you and he are alike, and you can found morals on humanity.

But experience has enlarged our knowledge of differences. We realize now
that our neighbor is not always like ourselves. Knowing how unjust other
people's inferences are when they concern us, we have begun to guess that
ours may be unjust to them. Any uniformity of conduct becomes at once an
impossible ideal, and the willingness to live and let live assumes high
place among the virtues. A puzzled wisdom remarks that "it takes all
sorts of people to make a world," and half-protestingly men accept
Bernard Shaw's amendment, "Do not do unto others as you would that they
should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."

We learn perhaps that there is no contradiction in speaking of "human
nature" while admitting that men are unique. For all deepening of our
knowledge gives a greater sense of common likeness and individual
variation. It is folly to ignore either insight. But it is done
constantly, with no end of confusion as a result. Some men have got
themselves into a state where the only view that interests them is the
common humanity of us all. Their world is not populated by men and women,
but by a Unity that is Permanent. You might as well refuse to see any
differences between steam, water and ice because they have common
elements. And I have seen some of these people trying to skate on steam.
Their brothers, blind in the other eye, go about the world so sure that
each person is entirely unique, that society becomes like a row of
packing cases, each painted on the inside, and each containing one ego
and its own.

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others. That
is not the only use of art, for its function is surely greater and more
ultimate than to furnish us with a better knowledge of human nature. Nor
is that its only use even to statecraft. I suggested earlier that art
enters p