334 PSYCHOLOGY. 



erally.' But we cannot aim ' generally ' at the universe ; 

 or if we do, we miss our game. Our scope is narrow, and 

 we must attack things piecemeal, ignoring the solid fulness 

 in which the elements of Nature exist, and stringing one 

 after another of them together in a serial way, to suit our 

 little interests as they change from hour to hour. In this, 

 the partiality of one moment is partly atoned for by the 

 different sort of partiality of the next. To me now, writing 

 these words, emphasis and selection seem to be the essence 

 of the human mind. In other chapters other qualities have 

 seemed, and will again seem, more important parts of psy- 

 chology. 



Men are so ingrainedly partial that, for common-sense 

 and scholasticism (which is only common-sense grown artic- 

 ulate), the notion that there is no one quality genuinely, 

 absolutely, and exclusively essential to anything is almost 

 unthinkable. " A thing's essence makes it what it is. With- 

 out an exclusive essence it would be nothing in particular, 

 would be quite nameless, we could not say it was this 

 rather than that. What you write on, for example, — why 

 talk of its being combustible, rectangular, and the like, 

 w^hen you know that these are mere accidents, and that 

 what it really is, and was made to be, is just paper and 

 nothing else?" The reader is pretty sure to make some 

 such comment as this. But he is himself merely insisting 

 on an aspect of the thing which suits his own petty purpose, 

 that of naming the thing ; or else on an aspect which suits 

 the manufacturer's purpose, that of producing an article 

 for ivMcli there is a vulgar demand. Meanwhile the reality 

 overflows these purposes at every pore. Our usual purpose 

 with it, our commonest title for it, and the jjroperties which 

 this title suggests, have in reality nothing sacramental. 

 They characterize us more than they characterize the thing. 

 But we are so stuck in our prejudices, so petrified intellec- 

 tually, that to our vulgarest names, with their suggestions, 

 we ascribe an eternal and exclusive worth. The thing must 

 be, essentially, what the vulgarest name connotes ; what 

 less usual names connote, it can be only in an * accidental ' 

 and relatively unreal sense.* 



* Readers brought up on Popular Science may think that the moleculai 



