There are unfortunately many ways of having a false mind:
1. By not examining if the principle is true, even when one deduces
accurate consequences therefrom; and this way is common.
2. By drawing false consequences from a principle recognized as true.
For example, a servant is asked if his master is in his room, by persons
he suspects of wanting his life: if he were foolish enough to tell them
the truth on the pretext that one must not lie, it is clear he would be
drawing an absurd consequence from a very true principle.
A judge who would condemn a man who has killed his assassin, because
homicide is forbidden, would be as iniquitous as he was poor reasoner.
Similar cases are subdivided in a thousand different gradations. The
good mind, the just mind, is that which distinguishes them; whence comes
that one has seen so many iniquitous judgments, not because the judges'
hearts were bad, but because they were not sufficiently enlightened.
_FATHERLAND_
A young journeyman pastrycook who had been to college, and who still
knew a few of Cicero's phrases, boasted one day of loving his
fatherland. "What do you mean by your fatherland?" a neighbour asked
him. "Is it your oven? is it the village where you were born and which
you have never seen since? is it the street where dwelled your father
and mother who have been ruined and have reduced you to baking little
pies for a living? is it the town-hall where you will never be police
superintendent's clerk? is it the church of Our Lady where you have not
been able to become a choir-boy, while an absurd man is archbishop and
duke with an income of twenty thousand golden louis?"
The journeyman pastrycook did not know what to answer.
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