to enjoy
the silence."

"Absurd!" grumbled Trost.

"The supposition is logical," said I. "It is well argued from the
premises."

"Whose premises?" cried Trost, turning on me with some fierceness. "You
don't mean to call them mine, I hope."

"Heaven forbid! They seem to be flying about in the air with other
germs, and have found a sort of nidus among my melancholy fancies.
Nobody really holds them. They bear the same relation to real belief as
walking on the head for a show does to running away from an explosion or
walking fast to catch the train."

XVIII.

THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP!

To discern likeness amidst diversity, it is well known, does not require
so fine a mental edge as the discerning of diversity amidst general
sameness. The primary rough classification depends on the prominent
resemblances of things: the progress is towards finer and finer
discrimination according to minute differences. Yet even at this stage
of European culture one's attention is continually drawn to the
prevalence of that grosser mental sloth which makes people dull to the
most ordinary prompting of comparison--the bringing things together
because of their likeness. The same motives, the same ideas, the same
practices, are alternately admired and abhorred, lauded and denounced,
according to their association with superficial differences, historical
or actually social: even learned writers treating of great subjects
often show an attitude of mind not greatly superior in its logic to that
of the frivolous fine lady who is indignant at the frivolity of her
maid.

To take only the subject of the Jews: it would be difficult to find a
form of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard in
conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print; but the neglect
of resemblances is a common property of dulness which unites all the
various points of view--the prejudiced, the puerile, the spiteful, and
the abysmally ignorant.

That the preservation of national memories is an element and a means of
national greatness, that their revival is a sign of reviving
nationality, that every heroic defender, every patriotic restorer, has
been inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword, that
even such a corporate existence as that of a Roman legion or an English
regiment has been made valorous by memorial standards,--these are the
glorious commonplaces of historic teaching at our public schools and
universities, being hap