CONCLUSION. ' 307 



railway stocks merely by looking at a sheet of paper ; 

 he supposes this power to be a part of our nature, to 

 have come of itself by luck and not by cunning, but a 

 little reflection will show that feeling is not more likely 

 to have " come by nature " than reading and writing 

 are. Feeling is in all probability the result of the 

 same kind of slow laborious development as that 

 which has attended our more recent arts and our bodily 

 organs; its development must be supposed to have 

 followed the same lines as that of our other arts, and 

 indeed of the body itself, which is the ars ariium — 

 for growth of mind is throughout coincident with 

 growth of organic resources, and organic resources 

 grow with growing mind. 



Feeling is the art the possession of which dif- 

 ferentiates the civilised organic world from that of 

 brute inorganic matter, but still it is an art ; it is the 

 outcome of a mind that is common both to organic 

 and inorganic, and which the organic has alone culti- 

 vated. It is not a part of mind itself; it is no more 

 this than language and writing are parts of thought. 

 The organic world can alone feel, just as man can 

 alone speak ; but as speech is only the development of 

 powers the germs of which are possessed by the lower 

 animals, so feeling is only a sign of the employment 

 and development of powers the germs of which exist 

 in inorganic substances. It has all the characteristics 

 of an art, and though it must probably rank as the 

 oldest of those arts that are peculiar to the organic 

 world, it is one which is still in process of develop- 

 ment. None of us, indeed, can feel well on more 



