410 CONSTITUTION OF THE INTELLECT. [CHAP. XXII. 



more attentive and instructed gaze their abnormal aspect, it is 

 needless to remark. One explanation only of these facts can be 

 given, viz., that the distinction between true and false, between 

 correct and incorrect, exists in the processes of the intellect, but 

 not in the region of a physical necessity. As we advance from 

 the lower stages of organic being to the higher grade of conscious 

 intelligence, this contrast gradually dawns upon us. Wherever 

 the phenomena of life are manifested, the dominion of rigid law 

 in some degree yields to that mysterious principle of activity. 

 Thus, although the structure of the animal tribes is conformable 

 to certain general types, yet are those types sometimes, perhaps, 

 in relation to the highest standards of beauty and proportion, 

 always, imperfectly realized. The two alternatives, between 

 which Art in the present day fluctuates, are the exact imitation 

 of individual forms, and the endeavour, by abstraction from all 

 such, to arrive at the conception of an ideal grace and expression, 

 never, it may be, perfectly manifested in forms of earthly mould. 

 Again, those teleological adaptations by which, without the or- 

 ganic type being sacrificed, species become fitted to new con- 

 ditions or abodes, are but slowly accomplished, accomplished, 

 however, not, apparently, by the fateful power of external cir- 

 cumstances, but by the calling forth of an energy from within. 

 Life in all its forms may thus be contrasted with the passive fixity 

 of inorganic nature. But inasmuch as the perfection of the types 

 in which it is corporeally manifested is in some measure of an 

 ideal character, inasmuch as we cannot precisely define the 

 highest suggested excellency of form and of adaptation, the con- 

 trast is less marked here than that which exists between the in- 

 tellectual processes and those of the purely material world. For 

 the definite and technical character of the mathematical laws by 

 which both are governed, places in stronger light the fundamental 

 difference between the kind of authority which, in their capacity 

 of government, they respectively exercise. 



7. There is yet another instance connected with the general 

 objects of this chapter, in which the collation of truths or facts, 

 drawn from different sources, suggests an instructive train of re- 

 flection. It consists in the comparison of the laws of thought, in 

 their scientific expression, with the actual forms which physical 



