290 STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 



when skilfully and consistently employed, brings 

 with it, is probably less owing to any other advan- 

 tage resulting from its use, than to this in particular, 

 that it invests the learner with the character of self- 

 instructor. It holds up to him some acknowledged 

 fact, in which, as in a mirror, he may behold the 

 truth in question ; and leaves him to deduce it, 

 almost by observation rather than by reasoning, 

 from that which is brought before him. The mind 

 which is thus illumined, instead of being alienated 

 by the dogmatism of its teacher, or repelled by an 

 assumption of superiority on his part, recognises in 

 its own former conviction the truth which is intro- 

 duced under a new garb, and accepts it as a just 

 extension of a conclusion in which it has already 

 acquiesced. It seems, indeed, to be exerting an act 

 of recollection, instead of making fresh acquisitions 

 of knowledge. That false pride, which recoils from 

 the humiliating confession of error, and renders the 

 intellect obdurate against the better reason, is thus 

 beguiled into compliance with the arguments of an 

 opponent ; and the mind, thus relieved of the bur- 

 then of resistance to the truth, seems to say in secret 

 to itself (as Aristotle observes of the effect of meta- 

 phor in some instances), uq a,^rj6aq } \yu 8' %fj.<zpTov, 

 recanting its error, while it confesses the truth.* 



(201.) Such are the general effects and advan- 

 tages produced by analogy in the elucidation of 

 truth. Things which in their essential nature are 

 totally opposite, are found, on closer investigation, to 

 possess mutual relations, and to be governed by the 

 — « — 1 



* Hampden, Essay on the Phil. Evid. of Christ., p. 211 



