'Our Faculties Are Unequal to the Subject'

“[W]e very often differ from ourselves.” 

I know I’m not the man I was when I woke up this morning. I was foggy, befuddled and briefly memory-less, my customary pre-caffeinated state. Slowly the world leaked in. Consciousness grows like mushrooms after a spring rain and as quickly disappears in sleep, intoxication or death. We fancy ourselves solid and at least semi-permanent. Experience teaches otherwise. We are not nothing, a fiction, but a loosely aligned colony of mutating selves, not an empire.

 

In The Adventurer #107, published on this date, Nov. 13, in 1753, Dr. Johnson continues: “How often we alter our minds, we do not always remark; because the change is sometimes made imperceptibly and gradually, and the last conviction effaces all memory of the former: yet every man, accustomed from time to time to take a survey of his own notions, will by a slight retrospection be able to discover, that his mind has suffered many revolutions . . .”

 

Imagine holding, unchanged, the opinions, convictions, values and beliefs you did at seventeen, twenty or thirty-three. My first reaction to such a thought experiment is embarrassment. I was an idiot then, while fancying myself quite worldly and sophisticated. Young people, who have little experience and less judgment, are likeliest to fall for grandiose theories and violent convictions.

 

A reader upbraids me for having not stated my preference in the presidential election. She asks if I’m a “coward . . .  afraid to come right out and say who you voted for.” No, it’s just not an interesting subject. Besides, I didn’t vote. I don’t expect others to agree with me. My opinions on any subject are the least pertinent things you can know about me. Don’t reduce me to my opinions or lack of them.  

 

“We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinion, because we very often differ from ourselves. . . . Such is the uncertainty in which we are always likely to remain with regard to questions wherein we have most interest, and which every day affords us fresh opportunity to examine: we may examine, indeed, but we never can decide, because our faculties are unequal to the subject; we see a little, and form an opinion; we see more, and change it.”