390 FALLACIES. 



feeling of mankind, and the scarcely less general 

 love of the marvellous, may be accounted for from 

 our tendency to exaggerate all effects, that seem 

 disproportionate to their visible cause, and all circum- 

 stances that are in any way strongly contrasted with 

 our notions of the persons under them." Omitting 

 some further explanations which would refer the error 

 to mal-observation, or to the other species of non- 

 observation (that of circumstances), I take up the 

 quotation farther on. " Unforeseen coincidences may 

 have greatly helped a man, yet if they have done for 

 him only what possibly from his own abilities he 

 might have effected for himself, his good work will 

 excite less attention, and the instances be less remem- 

 bered. That clever men should attain their objects 

 seems natural, and we neglect the circumstances that 

 perhaps produced that success of themselves, without 

 the intervention of skill or foresight; but we dwell on 

 the fact and remember it, as something strange, when 

 the same happens to a weak or ignorant man. So 

 too, though the latter should fail in his undertakings 

 from concurrences that might have happened to the 

 wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might 

 have been expected and accounted for from his folly, 

 it lays no hold on our attention, but fleets away among 

 the other undistinguished waves in which the stream 

 of ordinary life murmurs by us, and is forgotten. Had 

 it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those 

 all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn of 

 science on the art of chemistry, and give no obscure 

 promise of some one great constitutive law, in the 

 light of which dwell dominion, and the power of pro- 

 phecy; if these discoveries, instead of having been, as 

 they really were, preconcerted by meditation, and 

 evolved out of his own intellect, had occurred by a 



