so light, though pressing so heavily against us, because every pore
of our skin is saturated, so to speak, with it on all sides equally.
This perfection of knowledge sometimes extends to positive disbelief
in the thing known, so that the most thorough knower shall believe
himself altogether ignorant. No thief, for example, is such an utter
thief--so GOOD a thief--as the kleptomaniac. Until he has become a
kleptomaniac, and can steal a horse as it were by a reflex action, he
is still but half a thief, with many unthievish notions still
clinging to him. Yet the kleptomaniac is probably unaware that he
can steal at all, much less that he can steal so well. He would be
shocked if he were to know the truth. So again, no man is a great
hypocrite until he has left off knowing that he is a hypocrite. The
great hypocrites of the world are almost invariably under the
impression that they are among the very few really honest people to
be found and, as we must all have observed, it is rare to find any
one strongly under this impression without ourselves having good
reason to differ from him.

Our own existence is another case in point. When we have once become
articulately conscious of existing, it is an easy matter to begin
doubting whether we exist at all. As long as man was too
unreflecting a creature to articulate in words his consciousness of
his own existence, he knew very well that he existed, but he did not
know that he knew it. With introspection, and the perception
recognised, for better or worse, that he was a fact, came also the
perception that he had no solid ground for believing that he was a
fact at all. That nice, sensible, unintrospective people who were
too busy trying to exist pleasantly to trouble their heads as to
whether they existed or no--that this best part of mankind should
have gratefully caught at such a straw as "cogito ergo sum," is