It cannot be denied that
the same contrast exists in the higher classes of work. We find
school-teachers who constantly complain that it is intolerably
monotonous to go on teaching immature children the rudiments of
knowledge, while other teachers with exactly the same task before them
are daily inspired anew by the manifoldness of life in the classroom.
We find physicians who complain that one case in their practice is
like another, and judges who despair because they always have to deal
with the same petty cases, while other judges and physicians feel
clearly that every case offers something new and that the repetition
as such is neither conspicuous nor disagreeable. We find actors who
feel it a torture to play the same role every evening for several
weeks, and there are actors who, as one of the most famous actresses
assured me after the four hundredth performance of her star role,
repeat their parts many hundred times with undiminished interest,
because they feel that they are always speaking to new audiences. It
seems not impossible that this individual difference might be
connected with deeper-lying psychophysical conditions. I approached
the question, to be sure, with a preconceived theory. I fancied that
certain persons had a finer, subtler sense for differences than others
and that they would recognize a manifoldness of variations where the
others would see only uniformity.
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