42 GENERAL VIEW AND BASIS OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. 



the mind this special power faded away. 1 ' Mozart was as 

 intuitively and highly sensitive to musical ideas as Colburn 

 to arithmetical ones ; but in his case the power was largely 

 improved and developed by education and exercise. 2 The 

 selection of a profession and general occupation of life is 

 often determined by us in accordance with our particular 

 inherited tendencies ; and it is in consequence of inherited 

 fitness for one class of thoughts and actions in preference 

 to others, that each man has largely a right to select his 

 own sphere and kind of useful employment. 



Every idea is conformable in some respect to its cause, 

 and ideas are usually images or resemblances of the exist- 

 ences, attributes, or relations they represent, but not 

 necessarily so, because we often have false ones. Ideas 

 are frequently not actual resemblances either in kind or 

 degree of the objects, actions, or attributes, &c., they indi- 

 cate. A round figure indeed produces the idea of round- 

 ness, and a large one that of largeness, but a heated body, 

 although it produces a sensation and idea of pain, does 

 not possess pain, nor is the property of an orange which 

 produces an idea of sweetness, sweetness itself; and an 

 idea of the sun also is not equal in brightness to the 

 image of the sun itself, nor is that of a mountain propor- 

 tioned in size to the mountain. For every important 

 existence, real or imaginary, a representative idea is 

 usually sooner or later discovered. 



It was held and maintained by Locke, and is now 

 generally admitted, that the sole original source of all our 

 ideas is experience, and that we have no ' innate ideas,' 

 but only innate tendencies. We each derive our scientific 

 ideas not only from our own personal experience and 

 observation, but also from that of others, by means of 



1 Carpenter, Mental Physiology, pp. 232-235. 



2 See Life of Mozart, by E. Holmes, 1845. 



