tuted the sole exponent of all things in heaven and earth, and that,
for the simple reason that it is encroaching on territory not its own, and
undertaking problems which it has no instruments to solve. And I set off
thus:

3.

One of the first acts of the human mind is to take hold of and appropriate
what meets the senses, and herein lies a chief distinction between man's
and a brute's use of them. Brutes gaze on sights, they are arrested by
sounds; and what they see and what they hear are mainly sights and sounds
only. The intellect of man, on the contrary, energizes as well as his eye
or ear, and perceives in sights and sounds something beyond them. It
seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what
need not have been seen or heard except in its constituent parts. It
discerns in lines and colours, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is
not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea. It gathers up
a succession of notes into the expression of a whole, and calls it a
melody; it has a keen sensibility towards angles and curves, lights and
shadows, tints and contours. It distinguishes between rule and exception,
between accident and design. It assigns phenomena to a general law,
qualities to a subject, acts to a principle, and effects to a cause. In a
word, it philosophizes; for I suppose Science and Philosophy, in their
elementary idea, are nothing else but this habit of _viewing_, as it may
be called, the objects which sense conveys to the mind, of throwing them
into system, and uniting and stamping them with one form.

This method is so natural to us, as I have said, as to be almost
spontaneous; and we are impatient when we cannot exercise it, and in
consequence we do not always wait to have the means of exercising it
aright, but we often put up with insufficient or absurd views or
interpretations of what we meet with, rather than have none at all. We
refer the various matters which are brought home to us, material or moral,
to causes which we happen to know of, or to such as are simply imaginary,
sooner than refer them to nothing; and according to the activity of our
intellect do we feel a pain and begin to fret, if we are not able to do
so. Here we have an explanation of the multitude of off-hand sayings,
flippant judgments, and shallow generalizations, with which the world
abounds. Not from self-will only, nor from malevolence, but from the
irritation which suspense