Without Prejudice by Israel Zangwill
page 27 of 434 (06%)
page 27 of 434 (06%)
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Which else would die of dieting on naught.
Tied down by race and sex and creed and station, Go, learn to find thy strength in limitation, To do the little good that comes to hand, Content to love and not to understand; Faithful to friends and country, work and dreams, Knowing the Real is the thing that seems. While reverencing every nobleness, In whatsoever tongue or shape or dress, Speak out the word that to _thy_ soul seems right, Strike out thy path by individual light: 'Tis contradictory rays that give the White. "The ideas are good. But what a pity you are not a poet!" said my friend the Poet. But, though I recognise that prejudice in the deepest sense supplies the matter of judgment, while logic is only regulative of the form, yet in the more work-a-day sense of the word in which prejudice is taken to mean an opinion formed without reasoning and maintained in despite of it, I claim to write absolutely without prejudice. The syllogism is my lord and king. A kind-hearted lady said I had a cruel face. It is true. I am absolutely remorseless in tracking down a _non sequitur_, pitiless in forcing data to yield up their implicit conclusions. "Logic! Logic!" snorted my friend the Poet. "Life is not logical. We cannot be logical." "Of course not," said I; "I should not dream of asking men to live logically: all I ask is that they should argue logically." But to be unprejudiced does not mean to have no convictions. The superficial confuse definiteness with prejudice, forgetting that definite |
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