ON HUMAN UNDERSTANDING. 



35S 



be guilty of the same blunder if I were to speak of a square billiard-ball, or 

 a soft reposing rock. But a warm fire, on the contrary, a white, or even a 

 black billiard-ball, and a hard, rugged rock^ are congruous ideas, and, 

 consequently, consistent with good sense. Now, it is the direct office of that 

 discursive faculty of the mind which we call reason, to trace out these natural 

 coincidences or disjunctions, and to connect or separate them by proper re- 

 lations; for it is a just perception of the natural connexion and congruity, or 

 of the natural repugnancy and incongruity, of our ideas, that constitutes all 

 real knowledge. The wise man is hs who has industriously laid in and care- 

 fully assorted an extensive stock of ideas ; as the stupid or ignorant man is he 

 who, from natural hebetude, or having had but few opportunities, has col- 

 lected and arranged but a small number. The man who discovers the natural 

 relations of his ideas quickly is a man of sagacity ; and, in popular language, 

 is said,' and correctly so, to possess a quick, sharp intellect. The man, on the 

 contrary, who discovers these relations slowly, we call dull or heavy. If he 

 rapidly discover and put together relations that lie remote, and perhaps touch 

 only in a few points, but those points striking and pleasant, he is a man of wit, 

 genius, or brilliant fancy ; of agreeable allusion and metaphor. If he connect 

 ideas of fancy with ideas of reality, and mistake the one for the other, how- 

 ever numerous his ideas may be^ and whatever their order of succession, he is 

 a madman: he reasons from false principles; and, as we say in popular Ian-* 

 guage, and with perfect correctness, is out of his judgment. 



Finally, our ideas are very apt to associate or run together in trains ; and 

 upon this peculiar and happy disposition of the mind we lay our chief depend- 

 ence in sowing the important seeds of education. It often happens, how- 

 ever, that some of our ideas have been associated erroneously, and even in a 

 state of early life, before education has commenced : and hence, from the 

 difficulty of sepafating them, most of the sympathies and antipathies, the 

 whims and prejudices, that occasionally haunt us to the latest period of old 

 age. Peter the Great, having been terrified by a fall into a sheet of water 

 when an infant, could never, till he became a man, go over a bridge without 

 shuddering; and even at last had no small difficulty in breaking the connex-^ 

 ion of the ideas that were thus early and powerfully associated. Avarice did 

 not by any kind of predisposition belong to the miser Elwes, for in his youth 

 he was of gay manners^ and a spendthrift ; but he caught the vice by living 

 with his uncle : uninterrupted habit, the strong power of association, gave 

 strength to its influence, and what was originally his abhorrence, became at 

 length his idol. 



I Such, then, is the manner in which the mind, at first a sheet of white paper^ 

 without characters of any kind, becomes furnished with that vast store of 

 ideas, the materials of wisdom and knowledge, which the busy and bound- 

 less fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety. The 

 whole is derived from experience— the experience of sensation or reflec- 

 tion ; from the observations of the mind employed either about external sen- 

 sible objects, or the internal operations of itself, perceived and reflected upon 

 by its own faculties. 



But man is a social as well as a rational being ; he is dependent, for the 

 supply of his wants, upon his fellow-man ; and his happiness is made to con- 

 sist in this dependence. The ideas he possesses he feels a desire of com- 

 municating, and those possessed by others he feels an equal desire of diving into. 

 But ideas in themselves are incommunicable : he requires here, as in the case 

 of sensible objects, a circulating medium by which their value may be ex- 

 pressed. And what he requires is freely granted to him : it consists in the 

 high faculty of speech ; in reducing ideas to articulate sounds or words, the 

 aggregate of which constitutes language. And hence the great and valuable 

 systematic work to which I have now chiefly directed your attention, pro- 

 ceeds from a general analysis of our ideas to a general analysis of their 

 vocal representatives : a subject whicli every one must perceive to be of the 

 utmost importance in the progress of human understanding. Important, 

 however, as it is, it is a subject rather collateral than direct. We have briefly 



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