On Motes and Beams
It is curious that our own offenses should seem
so much less heinous than the offenses of others.
I suppose the reason is that
we know all the circumstances that have occasioned them
and so manage to excuse in ourselves
what we cannot excuse in others.
We turn our attention away from our own defects,
and when we are forced by untoward events to consider them,
find it easy to condone them.
For all I know we are right to do this;
they are part of us
and we must accept the good and bad in ourselves together.
But when we come to judge others,
it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them,
but by an image that we have formed of ourselves
from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity
or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.
To take a trivial instance:
how scornful we are when we catch someone out telling a lie;
but who can say that he has never told not one, but a hundred?
There is not much to choose between men.
They are all a hotchpotch of greatness and littleness,
of virtue and vice, of nobility and baseness.
Some have more strength of character, or more opportunity,
and so in one direction or another
give their instincts freer play, but potentially they are the same.
For my part, I do not think
I am any better or any worse than most people,
but I know that if I set down every action in my life
and every thought that has crossed my mind,
the world would consider me a monster of depravity.
The knowledge that these reveries are common to all men
should inspire one with tolerance to oneself as well as to others.
It is well also if they enable us to look upon our fellows,
even the most eminent and respectable, with humor,
and if they lead us to take ourselves not too seriously.