Study of Soul of Races

The Soul and Its World How is mutual understanding possible? How is it possible that we do not understand each other? What is meant by "right" understanding: that is, really understanding each other? Is there perhaps a limit beyond which there is no possible understanding? These questions implicitly contain another question: what, in a strict and objective sense, is the meaning of the term "understanding"? We can start with the most banal and simple events of daily life. When two souls direct their attention to a specific object about which they then begin to argue and, after arguing, "Understand each other", what really happened? Do they really have the same object in front of their eyes? Can the speech of each of them really refer to the same thing? Here is an example. A destitute widow is forced to rent her husband's studio. There are paintings on the wall of the studio. They are luxury paintings on gilded frames: a family picture, an Italian landscape, a marina. Adequate publicity is given to the rental offer, and one day the first potential tenant shows up. The widow shows him the room; but as soon as he enters, she is overwhelmed with memories. There the husband sat in that chair when he worked and in that other chair when he rested. The Italian landscape is a gift from his wife as a souvenir of the honeymoon, and the navy? Then that is something that she absolutely cannot talk about. Have men become so bad that they cannot perceive what is there in front of them, within reach? It offered a sacrifice to the world and the world despised it. Now, however, his means of subsistence are almost exhausted, so one day the judicial messenger shows up. He too enters that space full of memories. But the widow's speeches he does not really listen to: "he has already heard so many". What people don't tell! Could someone be persuaded to buy that picture of an Italian landscape by telling him that for the widow so and so it represents the memory of her honeymoon fifty years earlier? Foreclosures require marketable things and that's it: how long can that painting be sold? And the judicial messenger is not there to decide if the picture is done well or is in bad taste. He knows only one yardstick and knows how to use it to perfection: the taste of the mass he buys. And for that kind of mass the picture, so pompous, is certainly attractive. It has all the appearance of being something very expensive, and can bear witness to considerable wealth. Thus the judicial messenger attaches the attachment certificate to the painting, nor can the widow argue that that painting is "not foreclosure", The old widow talked about that painting with all her visitors, always saying the same things, things that were all there while she was talking. The brand was in him and the whole story of the coexistence of two married people for almost fifty years hovered over him. A fact so evident that it is almost palpable. Yet no one, except her, noticed it. The old lady and her visitors have all been in the presence of that "piece" of the world; but each had evaluated it differently. This is because each one carried within himself his own world, and when he entered that room - in that small "fragment of the world" - he attributed his 'meaning' to it. For each of us, therefore, things are all presented in a different way, that is, as something that the senses perceive according to the history of one's soul. The story of that widow had had a different path than that of her visitors; and from his personal history it derived that those objects carried that personal mark: sanctified by the use of the loved one; from being a piece of one's own land; or else.