398 



OiS HUMAN UNDERSTANDING. 



quickly is a man of sagacity; and, in popular language, is said, and cor 

 rectiy 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, however numerous his ideas may be, and whatever their organ of 

 succession, he is a madman : he reasons from false principles ; and, as 

 we say in popular language, 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 

 dependence in sowing the important seeds of education. It often hap- 

 pens, however, 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 separating 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 diffi- 

 culty in breaking the connexion of the ideas that were thus early and 

 powerfully associated. Avarice did hot by any kind of predisposition be- 

 long 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. 



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 boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless 

 variety. The whole is derived from experience — the experience of 

 SENSATION OR REFLECTION ; from the observations of the mind employed 

 either about external sensible 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 

 consist in this dependence. The ideas he possesses he feels a desire of 

 communicating, 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 expressed. And what he requires is freely granted to 

 him : it consists in the high faculty of speech ; in reducing ideas to arti- 

 culate 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, proceeds from a general analysis of our 

 ideas to a general analysis of their vocal representatives : a subject which 

 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 glanced at it already,* and 

 may perhaps return to it hereafter, but I shall postpone it for the present, 



' * Ser. II. Lect. VIII. IX. X. 



