552 PSYCHOLOGY. 



gorgeous scenery, some to mountain-lieights and jewelled 

 mines, others through dismal swamps and darkness ? — and 

 run some ofl' the track altogether, and into the wilderness 

 of lunacy? Why do we sj^end years straining after a 

 certain scientific or practical problem, but all in vain — 

 thought refusing to evoke the solution we desire ? And 

 why, some day, walking in the street with our attention 

 miles away from that quest, does the answer saunter into 

 our minds as carelessly as if it had never been called for — 

 suggested, possibly, by the flowers on the bonnet of the 

 lady in front of us, or possibly by nothing that we can dis- 

 cover ? If reason can give us relief then, why did she not 

 do so earlier ? 



The truth must be admitted that thought works under 

 conditions imposed ah extra. The great law of habit itself 

 — that tAventy experiences make us recall a thing better 

 than one, that long indulgence in error makes right thinking 

 almost impossible — seems to have no essential foundation 

 in reason. The business of thought is with truth — the 

 number of experiences ought to have nothing to do with 

 her hold of it ; and she ought by right to be able to hug it 

 all the closer, after years wasted out of its presence. The 

 contrary arrangements seem quite fantastic and arbitrary, 

 but nevertheless are part of the very bone and marrow of 

 our minds. Eeason is only one out of a thousand possi- 

 bilities in the thinking of each of us. Who can count all 

 the silly fancies, the grotesque suppositions, the utterly 

 irrelevant reflections he makes in the course of a day? Who 

 can swear that his prejudices and irrational beliefs con- 

 stitute a less bulky part of his mental furniture than his 

 clarified opinions? It is true that a presiding arbiter 

 seems to sit aloft in the mind, and emphasize the better 

 suggestions into permanence, while it ends by drooppiug out 

 and iea-vdng unrecorded the confusion. But this is all the 

 difference. The mode of genesis of the worthy and 

 the worthless seems the same. The laws of our actual 

 thinking, of the cogitatum, must account alike for the bad 

 and the good materials on which the arbiter has to decide, 

 for wisdom and for folly. The laws of the arbiter, of the 

 cogifandum, of what we ought to think, are to the former as the 



