REASONING. 345 



tures. Tlie infant notices the candle-flame or the window, 

 and ignores the rest of the room, because those objects give 

 him a vivid pleasure. So, the country boy dissociates the 

 blackberry, the chestnut, and the wintergreen, from the 

 vague mass of other shrubs and trees, for their practical 

 uses, and the savage is delighted with the beads, the bits of 

 looking-glass, brought by an exploring vessel, and gives no 

 heed to the features of the vessel itself, which is too much 

 beyond his sphere. These aesthetic and practical interests, 

 then, are the weightiest factors in making particular ingre- 

 dients stand out in high relief. What they lay their accent 

 on, that we notice ; but what they are in themselves, we can- 

 not say. We must content ourselves here with simply ac- 

 cepting them as irreducible ultimate factors in determining 

 the way our knowledge grows. 



Now, a creature which has few instinctive impulses, or 

 interests, practical or aesthetic, will dissociate few charac- 

 ters, and will, at best, have limited reasoning powers ; 

 whilst one whose interests are very varied will reason much 

 better. Man, by his immensely varied instincts, practical 

 wants, and aesthetic feelings, to which every sense contrib- 

 utes, would, by dint of these alone, be sure to dissociate 

 vastly more characters than any other animal ; and accord- 

 ingly we find that the lowest savages reason incomparably 

 better than the highest brutes. The diverse interests lead, 

 too, to a diversification of experiences, whose accumulation 

 becomes a condition for the play of that laio of dissociation 

 by varying concomitants of which I treated in a former cha;^- 

 ter (see Vol I. p. 506). 



The Help given by Association by Similarity. 



It is probable, also, that man's superior association by 

 similarity has much to do with those discriminations of 

 character on which his higher flights of reasoning are based. 

 As this latter is an important matter, and as little or noth- 

 ing was said of it in the chapter on Discrimination, it be- 

 hooves me to dwell a little upon it here. 



What does the reader do when he wishes to see in what 

 the precise likeness or difference of two objects lies ? He 



