![]() ![]() ![]() Such reflection on the nature of his being brings a man to a better awareness of all the bonds that unite us to our fellows, to the re-discovery at the inner root of his existence of that identity of common life actuating us all, to feeling the full force of that fine maxim of the ancients: 'I am a man, and nothing human is alien to me.' Our insight depends above all on the state of our faculties but how can we bring our faculties to perfection if we do not know their nature and their laws! The elements of happiness are the moral sentiments but how can we develop these sentiments without considering the principle of our affections, and the means of directing them? We become better by studying ourselves the man who thoroughly knows himself is the wise man. The source of useful illumination, we are told, is that of lasting content, is in ourselves. True philosophy, always at one with moral science, tells a different tale. Perhaps he fears that in penetrating the mysteries of his being he will ensure his own abasement, blush at his discoveries, and meet his conscience. ![]() He considers only his individual self his species is nothing to him. The attention of the egoist is directed to the immediate needs of which his senses give notice, and cannot be raised to those reflective needs that reason discloses to us his aim is satisfaction, not perfection. This is because egoism, like all passions, is blind. In an age of egoism, it is so difficult to persuade man that of all studies, the most important is that of himself. ![]() Nor was it for want of a sufficient intensity of light that one of the two portions was incapable of producing the fringes alone for when they were both uninterrupted, the lines appeared, even if the intensity was reduced to one-tenth or one-twentieth. For, a little screen being placed a few inches from the card, so as to receive either edge of the shadow on its margin, all the fringes which had before been observed in the shadow on the wall, immediately disappeared, although the light inflected on the other side was allowed to retain its course, and although this light must have undergone any modification that the proximity of the other edge of the slip of card might have been capable of occasioning. Now these fringes were the joint effects of the portions of light passing on each side of the slip of card and inflected, or rather diffracted, into the shadow. Besides the fringes of colour on each side of the shadow, the shadow itself was divided by similar parallel fringes, of smaller dimensions, differing in number, according to the distance at which the shadow was observed, but leaving the middle of the shadow always white. I brought into the sunbeam a slip of card, about one-thirtieth of an inch in breadth, and observed its shadow, either on the wall or on other cards held at different distances. For greater convenience of observation I placed a small looking-glass without the window-shutter, in such a position as to reflect the sun's light, in a direction nearly horizontal, upon the opposite wall, and to cause the cone of diverging light to pass over a table on which were several little screens of card-paper. I made a small hole in a window-shutter, and covered it with a piece of thick paper, which I perforated with a fine needle. ![]()
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