trust in testimony which always has its cheering side.

Hence it is worse than foolish to entertain silent suspicions of
plagiarism, still more to give them voice, when they are founded on a
construction of probabilities which a little more attention to everyday
occurrences as a guide in reasoning would show us to be really
worthless, considered as proof. The length to which one man's memory can
go in letting drop associations that are vital to another can hardly
find a limit. It is not to be supposed that a person desirous to make an
agreeable impression on you would deliberately choose to insist to you,
with some rhetorical sharpness, on an argument which you were the first
to elaborate in public; yet any one who listens may overhear such
instances of obliviousness. You naturally remember your peculiar
connection with your acquaintance's judicious views; but why should
_he_? Your fatherhood, which is an intense feeling to you, is only an
additional fact of meagre interest for him to remember; and a sense of
obligation to the particular living fellow-struggler who has helped us
in our thinking, is not yet a form of memory the want of which is felt
to be disgraceful or derogatory, unless it is taken to be a want of
polite instruction, or causes the missing of a cockade on a day of
celebration. In our suspicions of plagiarism we must recognise as the
first weighty probability, that what we who feel injured remember best
is precisely what is least likely to enter lastingly into the memory of
our neighbours. But it is fair to maintain that the neighbour who
borrows your property, loses it for a while, and when it turns up again
forgets your connection with it and counts it his own, shows himself so
much the feebler in grasp and rectitude of mind. Some absent persons
cannot remember the state of wear in their own hats and umbrellas, and
have no mental check to tell them that they have carried home a
fellow-visitor's more recent purchase: they may be excellent