One of Emerson's claims is that experience is subjective, and that we can never really conceptualize another person's experience as real. He introduces a paradox to help explain this point:
We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. [...] Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles: it is an act quite easy to be contemplated, but in its sequel, it turns out to be a horrible jangle and confounding of all relations.
It is debatable whether Emerson is right that people on the whole are more forgiving of themselves than others. However, he is working from the assumption that we tend to condemn behavior in others that we accept in ourselves. For example, we might call theft a "sin" against God when other people do it. Meanwhile, we ourselves might have stolen because we wanted to test the limits of the law, or simply because we thought we deserved whatever we were taking. This double standard does not appear to make logical sense until, as Emerson demonstrates, we notice that someone else's theft can never seem justified to us in the way our own can. Our reality appears internally consistent to us, and our behavior is driven by subjective experience that we—and we alone—can access. Conversely, we cannot access the "string of beads" making up someone else's subjective reality. It makes sense that we would be comparatively lenient with ourselves because we can only truly understand our own actions.
Emerson gives a striking example of how this paradoxical double standard can play out in real life. "Murder in the murderer," he argues, is never as dramatic an action as it appears in literature or even in the news. When someone commits murder, there is usually an internally coherent sequence of events leading up to that behavior (no matter how extreme the action may look from the outside). Nevertheless, the "sequel" to murder (meaning the set of events that unfolds in its wake) draws in many people who have not been privy to the murderer's subjective experience. What results is "a horrible jangle and confounding of all relations." It is not the murderer's mind so much as the clash of different subjective experiences that creates sensational drama and the sense that "the unthinkable" has happened in the wake of murder.
