ition of
the sparrow's death as of the man's; it would see the boy with the
stone to be as much a condition of the man's fall as of the sparrow's.

The human mind, however, is constituted on an entirely different plan.
It has no such power of universal intuition. Its finiteness obliges it
to see but two or three things at a time. If it wishes to take wider
sweeps it has to use 'general ideas,' as they are called, and in so
doing to drop all concrete truths. Thus, in the present case, if we as
men wish to feel the connection between the milky way and the boy and
the dinner and the sparrow and the man's death, we can do so only by
falling back on the enormous emptiness of what is called an abstract
proposition. We must say, All things in the world are fatally
predetermined, and hang together in the adamantine fixity of a system
of natural law. But in the vagueness of this vast proposition we have
lost all the concrete facts and links; and in all practical matters the
concrete links are the only things of importance. The human mind is
essentially partial. It can be efficient at all only by _picking out_
what to attend to, and ignoring everything else,--by narrowing its
point of view. Otherwise, what little strength it has is dispersed,
and it loses its way altogether. Man always wants his curiosity
gratified for a particular purpose. If, in the case of the sparrow,
the purpose is punishment, it would be idiotic to wander off from the
cats, boys, and other possible agencies close by in the street, to
{220} survey the early Celts and the milky way: the boy would meanwhile
escape. And if, in the case of the unfortunate man, we lose ourselves
in contemplation of the thirteen-at-table mystery, and fail to notice
the ice on the step and cover it with ashes, some other poor fellow,
who never dined out in his life, may slip on it in coming to the door,
and fall and break his head too.

It is, then, a necessity laid upon us as human beings to limit our
view. In mathematics we know how this method of ignoring and
neglecting quantities lying outside of a certain range has been adopted
in the differential calculus. The calculator throws out all the
'infinitesimals' of the quantities he is considering. He treats them
(under certain rules) as if they did not exist. In themselves they
exist perfectly all the while; but they are as if they did not exist
for the purposes of his calculation. Just so an astronomer, in dealin