100 Rev. J. Wills on Mr. Stewart's Explanation of 



dious source arise the similarly combined groups of our more purely intellectual 

 stores. The lawyer, together with the stock of precedents, maxims, and forensic 

 conventions and technicalities, which are to him an habitual language and rule of 

 reason, is also possessed of his treasury of phrase, adapted to the exigency of his 

 profession ; as he increases in practice, they grow together by the process of as- 

 sociation, as insensibly as the muscles of the Athlete, and acquire command by 

 training. With these he similarly obtains the habitual command of trains of 

 considerations, which being variously adapted to the questions that engross his 

 understanding, offer various and new points of relation to each other. These, 

 however varied, subtle, and remote, must, in proportion as they are liable to re- 

 cur in practice, become gradually arranged by some certain index of the mind 

 with more or less familiar combinations, and, therefore, demanding a greater 

 or less degree of separate attention to bring them together ; the less familiar de- 

 manding more distinct and separate efforts of thought, because they are either not 

 at all, or less, involved in the common process. But still, only in proportion 

 as the combining processes have taken place, will the operation, so lucidly ' 

 described by Lord Brougham, be performed. To the more experienced mind, 

 or the more powerful and richer intellect, vast and seemingly boundless galleries 

 (if I may use the metaphor) of views, combined in order, and ranged in their 

 due subordination and distance, will start at every suggestion ; and trains of rea- 

 soning, which hours are insufficient to express, will be placed like a picture before 

 the mind. Of this, too, every mind possesses its share, but it is not given to all, or 

 even to many, to look with a length and breadth of intellectual range that might 

 well pass for inspiration along the chain of consequence to the remote conclusion. 



Every pursuit and every character of mind has its own range, in which it 

 gathers intellectual combinations of its own, incomprehensible to most others. 

 It is needless, and would occupy a long discussion, to dwell on these unconscious 

 commonplaces, the ideal or verbal associations of politicians and poets, moralists 

 and preachers. I should use one description for all ; the science does not exist, 

 nor perhaps the intellect to produce it, which could reduce so wide a scope of 

 method, arrangement, and material, into a practical compendium. It would hold 

 the place to thought which logic does to reasoning, or rhetoric to language. 



But here it may be useful to guard against the suspicion that two distinct 

 processes are confused. Let it be observed, that in the whole of the operations 



