3o6 LUCK, OR CUNNING ? 



the stone has not changed. So, again, the uneducated 

 idea represents it as above all things mindless, and is 

 as little able to see mind in connection with it as it 

 lately was to see motion ; it will be no greater change 

 of opinion than we have most of us undergone already 

 if we come presently to see it as no less fuU of 

 elementary mind than of elementary motion, but the 

 stone will not have changed. 



The fact that we modify our opinions suggests that 

 our ideas are formed not so much in involuntary self- 

 adjusting mimetic correspondence with the objects that 

 we believe to give rise to them, as by what was in the 

 outset voluntary, conventional arrangement in whatever 

 way we found convenient, of sensation and perception- 

 symbols, which had nothing whatever to do with the 

 objects, and were simply caught hold of as the only 

 things we could grasp. It would seem as if, in the 

 first instance, we must have arbitrarily attached some 

 one of the few and vague sensations which we could 

 alone at first command, to certain motions of outside 

 things as echoed by our brain, and used them to think 

 and feel the things with, so as to docket them, and 

 recognise them with greater force, certainty, and clear- 

 ness — much as we use words to help us to docket and 

 grasp our feelings and thoughts, or written characters to 

 help us to docket and grasp our words. 



If this view be taken we stand in much the same 

 attitude towards our feelings as a dog may be supposed 

 to do towards our own reading and writing. The dog 

 may be supposed to marvel at the wonderful instinctive 

 faculty by which we can tell the price of the different 



