On the philosophy of hats by a.g. gardiner summary
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On The Philosophy Of Hats
The other day I went into a hatter's to get my hat ironed. It had been ruffled by the weather, and I had a reason for wishing it to look as new and glossy as possible. And as I waited and watched the process of polishing, the hatter talked to me on the subject that really interested him--that is, the subject of hats and heads.
"Yes," said he, in reply to some remark I had made; "there's a wonderful difference in the shape of 'eads and the size. Now your 'ead is what you may call an ord'nary 'ead. I mean to say," he added, no doubt seeing a shadow of disappointment pass across my ordinary face, "I mean to say, it ain't what you would call extry-ord'nary. But there's some 'eads--well, look at that 'at there. It belongs to a gentleman with a wonderful funny-shaped 'ead, long and narrer and full of nobbles--'stror'nary 'ead 'e 'as. And as for sizes, it's wonderful what a difference there is. I do a lot of trade with lawyers, and it's astonishing the size of their 'eads. You'd be surprised. I suppose it's the amount of thinking they have to do that makes their 'eads swell. Now that 'at there belongs to Mr. ------ (mentioning the name of a famous lawyer), wonderful big 'ead 'e 'as--7-1/2--that's what 'e takes, and there's lots of 'em takes over 7.
"It seems to me," he went on, "that the size of the 'ead is according to the occupation. Now I used to be in a seaport town, and I used to serve a lot of ships' captains. 'Stror'nary the 'eads they have. I suppose it's the anxiety and worry they get, thinking about the tides and the winds and the icebergs and things...."
I went out of the shop with my ord'nary 'ead, conscious of the fact that I had made a poor impression on the hatter. To him I was only a 6-7/8 size, and consequently a person of no consequence. I should have liked to point out to him that it is not always the big heads that have the jewel in them. Of course, it is true that great men often have big heads. Bismarck's size was 7-1/4, so was Gladstone's, so was Campbell-Bannerman's. But on the other hand, Byron had a small head, and a very small brain. And didn't Goethe say that Byron was the finest brain that Europe had produced since Shakespeare? I should not agree in ordinary circumstances, but as a person with a smallish head, I am prepared in this connection to take Goethe's word on the subject. As Holmes points out, it is not the size of the brain but its convolutions that are important (I think, by the way, that Holmes had a small head). Now I should have liked to tell the hatter that though my head was small I had strong reason to believe that the convolutions of my brain were quite top-hole.
In the same way, the business man looks at life through the keyhole of his counting-house. The world to him is an "emporium," and he judges his neighbour by the size of his plate glass. And so with the financier. When one of the Rothschilds heard that a friend of his who had died had left only a million of money he remarked: "Dear me, dear me! I thought he was quite well off." His life had been a failure, because he had only put a million by for a rainy day. Thackeray expresses the idea perfectly in Vanity Fair:--
"You see," said old Osborne to George, "what comes of merit and industry and judicious speculations and that. Look at me and my banker's account. Look at your poor grandfather Sedley and his failure. And yet he was a better man than I was, this day twenty years--a better man I should say by twenty thousand pounds."
I fancy I, too, have my professional way of looking at things, and am disposed to judge men, not by what they do but by the skill they have in the use of words. And I know that when an artist comes into my house he "sizes me up" from the pictures on the wall, just as when the upholsterer comes he "places" me according to the style of the chairs and the quality of the carpet, or as when the gourmet comes he judges by the cooking and the wine. If you give him champagne he reverences you; if hock he puts you among the commonplace.
In short, we all go through life wearing spectacles coloured by our own tastes, our own calling, and our own prejudices, measuring our neighbours by our own tape-measure, summing them up according to our own private arithmetic. We see subjectively, not objectively; what we are capable of seeing, not what there is to be seen. It is not wonderful that we make so many bad guesses at that prismatic thing, the truth.
Summary On the philosophy of hats by A. G. Gardines:
On the Philosophy of Hats the author makes a mockery of the idea of relating hats to the heads and then to the class of that person. In the chapter the narrator who is the author himself went to the hatter to iron his hat which has been weathered of by the tough weather. While ironing the hat the hatter starts a conversation with him in which he states that the author had a small hat therefore he would have a small head and that's why would belong to lower or poorer class. The hatter believed that people with big hats like the lawyers have big heads too and hence belongs to the upper class. The author find this analogy very strange and funny and could not help but laugh at this. He also urges his readers to not fall in such stereotypical conclusions.
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