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Readings: Human

Nature produced us related to one another, since she created us from the same source to the same end. She engendered in us mutual affection, and made us prone to friendships. Let this verse [by Terence] be always in your heart and on your lips: Homo sum; humani nihil a me aienum puto (I am a man; nothing human do I count foreign to me). But there is, as we have seen, another thing we are: we are beings who are capable of becoming foreign even to ourselves.

Insight is none the less our birthright and our greatest gift. Each of us begins life prepared by nature to create the world of other people in his own image. For a child there is no other choice. He sees in other people no more nor less than the feelings he himself has known, and as he grows richer in himself the world around grows richer with him. The key to his future and ours must lie in letting this childlike sense of self-importance live on into maturity, in the recognition that we can in the end give out only what we ourselves contain.

(Humphrey (1986), The Inner Eye, 176)