34 Luck, or Cunning ? 
’ 
“Principles of Psychology ” is the prominence given to 
continued personal identity, and hence to bond fide memory, 
as between successive generations ; but surely this makes 
the two books differ widely. 
Ideas can be changed to almost any extent in almost 
any direction, if the change is brought about gradually and 
in accordance with the rules of all development. As in 
music we may take almost any possible discord with pleas- 
ing effect if we have prepared and resolved it rightly, so our 
ideas will outlive and outgrow almost any modification 
which is approached and quitted in such a way as to fuse 
the old and new harmoniously. Words are to ideas what 
the fairy invisible cloak was to the prince who wore it— 
only that the prince was seen till he put on the cloak, 
whereas ideas are unseen until they don the robe of words 
which reveals them to us; the words, however, and the 
ideas, should be such as fit each other and stick to one 
another in our minds as soon as they are brought together, 
or the ideas will fly off, and leave the words void of that 
spirit by the aid of which alone they can become trans- 
muted into physical action and shape material things with 
their own impress. Whether a discord is too violent or 
no, depends on what we have been accustomed to, and on 
how widely the new differs from the old, but in no case can 
we fuse and assimilate more than a very little new at a 
time without exhausting our tempering power—and hence 
presently our temper. 
Mr. Spencer appears to have forgotten that though de 
minimis non cuvat lex,—though all the laws fail when 
applied to trifles,—yet too sudden a change in the manner 
in which our ideas are associated is as cataclysmic and 
subversive of healthy evolution as are material convul- 
sions, or too violent revolutions in politics. This must 
always be the case, for change is essentially miraculous, 
and the only lawful home of the miracle is in the micro- 
scopically small. Here, indeed, miracles were in the begin- 
