308 THE GENESIS OF SPECIES. [CHAP. 



interest in jurisprudence, or a prizefighter who is an acute 

 metaphysician. Nay, more than this, a positive tendency 

 may be developed, which, in the intellectual order, may 

 result in a spontaneous and unreasoning disbelief in what- 

 ever appears at first sight to be in opposition to the more 

 familiar concept. It has been aptly said " that past ages 

 were pre-eminently credulous as compared with our own, 

 yet the difference is not so much in the amount of the 

 credulity as in the direction which it takes.^ 1 



Dr. Newman observes : " Any one study, of whatever 

 kind, exclusively pursued, deadens in the mind the interest, 

 nay the perception of any other. Thus, Cicero says that 

 Plato and Demosthenes, Aristotle and Isocrates, might have 

 respectively excelled in each other's province, but that 

 each was absorbed in his own. Specimens of this peculi- 

 arity occur every day. You can hardly persuade some men 

 to talk about anything but their own pursuit ; they refer 

 the whole world to their own centre, and measure all 

 matters by their own rule, like the fisherman in the drama, 

 whose eulogy on his deceased lord was, that ' he was so 

 fond of fish.' " 2 



The 'same author urther says: 3 "When anything which 

 comes before us is very unlike what we commonly experi- 

 ence, we consider it on that account untrue ; not because 

 it really shocks our reason as improbable, but because 

 it startles our imagination as strange. Now, revelation 



maxims, and carries them in triumph on his banner, may boast of his 

 escape from the uncertainties of metaphysics, but is himself all the while 

 the unconscious victim of their very vulgarest deception." ("Essays," 

 Second Series, A Plea for Philosophical Studies, p. 421.) 



1 Lecky's "History of nationalism, " vol. i. p. 73. 



2 "Lectures on University Subjects," by J. H. Newman, D.D., p. 322. 



3 Loc. cit. p. 324. 



