Each makes the world he sees,.
In space or Centuries;
Who would see all things best,
Must have eyes holiest.
It is the opinion of uninstructed thought that the impressions received through the senses all pertain to the external world, and little does it ken how largely they are home-made. The familiar saying, "Men always find what they are looking for." does indeed convey a hint of the personal factor in perception, but to the average man this means little more than that the desirable thing to him is that upon which he fixes his attention, and hence it is the more likely to become his possession. The unsophisticated, as well as the ignorant constantly declare that things are what they seem, and he who challenges this dictum of "common sense" is likely to be written down as "just a little queer." Furthermore, in human experience, the erroneous thought obtains that "as things appear to me, so must they appear to all sane men," and when it is discovered that this is not the case, references are not infrequently made to the amazing stupidity of those who are capable of looking at things without seeing them. Nevertheless, all will concede that upon different people, the same object may produce entirely different impressions. The image of a flag would be precisely the same whether it fell on the retina of an ox or on that of a man, but while in the one instance it would beget only the semblance of a dull curiosity, in the other it would prove an inspiring symbol of all that stirs the spirit of patriotism and excites a manly pride. The Rosetta Stone had been seen and stumbled over, perchance, by generations of fellaheen to whom it was only a bit of ruin, but to the trained eye of a scholar it revealed itself as a key to the historic treasures of forty centuries.
We are thus led to see that the explanation of these differences of perception lies wholly in the observers, and hence that everything embraced in our education, our temperament, and our personal prejudices, necessarily lends itself to all the objects we cognize, so that the meaning of these objects constantly changes in keeping with our growth. As Emerson puts it, "Man never sees the same object twice, for with his own enlargement the object acquires new aspects."
