What, then, is our neighbor? Thou hast regarded his thought, his feeling, as somehow different from thine. Thou hast said, 'A pain in him is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.' He seems to thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning desires. . . . So, dimly and by instinct hast thou lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind. Thou hast made [of him] a thing, no Self at all. (Josiah Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy.)
Inasmuch as few people are solitary, most persons being framed in a vast variety of relationships, having families, homes, neighbors, and many other affiliations, there is nothing more important to success in living than an appreciation of our fellows or more fraught with trouble than a failure to understand them. Blindness to the thoughts and desires and feelings of others seems, nevertheless, to be acommon human trait. It is at the bottom of many a maladjustment. It appears again and again as a disturbing factor in marriage, in widowhood, in adolescence, in work, in single life. Nearly everybody has at some time been called upon to repair the damage which it has caused.
The remedy lies, obviously, in clearing away
