258 Luck, or Cunning ? 
the rude, unassisted, uneducated senses see it as above all 
things motionless, whereas assisted and trained ideas con- 
cerning it represent motion as its most essential character- 
istic ; but the stone has not changed. So, again, the unedu- 
cated 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 full of elementary mind than of elemen- 
tary 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 con- 
venient, 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 sensa- 
tions 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 to- 
wards 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 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 
