530 PSYCHOLOGY. 



people are far more sensitive to resemblances, and far more 

 ready to point out ivherein they consist, than others are. 

 They are the wits, the poets, the iuveutors, the scientific 

 men, the practical geniuses. A native talent for perceiving 

 analogies is reckoned by Prof. Bain, and by others before 

 and after him, as the leading fact in genius of every order. 

 But as this chapter is already long, and as the question of 

 genius had better wait till Chapter XXII, where its practical 

 consequences can be discussed at the same time, I will 

 say nothing more at present either about it or about the 

 faculty of noting resemblances. If the reader feels that 

 this faculty is having small justice done it at my hands, 

 and that it ought to be wondered at and made much more of 

 than has been done in these last few pages, he will per- 

 haps find some compensation when that later chapter is 

 reached. I think I emphasize it enough when I call it one 

 of the ultimate foundation-pillars of the intellectual life, 

 the others being Discrimination, Eetentiveness, and Asso- 

 ciation. 



THE MAGNITUDE OF DIFFERENCES . 



On page 489 I spoke of difierences being greater or less, 

 and of certain groups of them being susceptible of a linear 

 arrangement exhibiting serial increase. A series whose 

 terms grow more and more difi'erent from the starting point 

 is one whose terms grow less and less like it. They grow 

 more and more like it if you read them the other wa3% 

 So that likeness and unlikeness to the starting point are 

 functions inverse to each other, of the position of any term 

 in such a series. 



Professor Stumpf introduces the word distance to de- 

 note the position of a term in any such series. The less 

 like is the term, the more distant it is from the start- 

 ing point. The ideally regular series of this sort would 

 be one in which the distances — the steps of resemblance 

 or difference — between all pairs of adjacent terms were 

 equal. This would be an evenly gradated series. And 

 it is an interesting fact in psychology that we are able, 

 in many departments of our sensibility, to arrange the 

 terms without difficulty in this evenly gradated way. Dif- 



