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Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1809-1894

"The Poet at the Breakfast-Table"


Out of a hundred human beings fifty-one will be found in the long run on
the side of the right, so far as they know it, and against the wrong.
They will be organizers rather than disorganizers, helpers and not
hinderers in the upward movement of the race. This is the main fact we
have to depend on. The right hand of the great organism is a little
stronger than the left, that is all.
Now and then we come across a left-handed man. So now and then we find a
tribe or a generation, the subject of what we may call moral
left-handedness, but that need not trouble us about our formula. All we
have to do is to spread the average over a wider territory or a longer
period of time. Any race or period that insists on being left-handed
must go under if it comes in contact with a right-handed one. If there
were, as a general rule, fifty-one rogues in the hundred instead of
forty-nine, all other qualities of mind and body being equally
distributed between the two sections, the order of things would sooner or
later end in universal disorder. It is the question between the leak and
the pumps.
It does not seem very likely that the Creator of all things is taken by
surprise at witnessing anything any of his creatures do or think. Men
have sought out many inventions, but they can have contrived nothing
which did not exist as an idea in the omniscient consciousness to which
past, present, and future are alike Now.


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