Topic
Difference in this collection is most valuable when it resists the pressure toward uniformity. Rousseau's I-may-be-no-better-but-at-least-I-am-different is the foundational claim: difference is not superiority but it is something — a refusal of merger that has its own value. Twain's cat-and-lie comparison is here because it is structurally a comparison of differences, and one of his best — the lie has only one life, the cat nine, which tells you something about the relative vitality of deception. Twain's taxidermist-and-tax-collector is the difference-as-method entry: he always turns on a single distinction, and the quality of his comparisons is a lesson in what precise differentiation can do. La Rochefoucauld on passions as different degrees of heat and cold in the blood is the physiological reduction: what we experience as qualitative difference is actually quantitative variation. Twain on starving dogs and their gratitude closes the collection: the principal difference between man and dog, in his telling, does not favor man.