ary flashlight, giving a partial clearness for
a moment to certain jumbled memories? If the next day we open a volume
of Adam Smith, and read that man is naturally benevolent, that he cannot
but enact and share the vicissitudes of his fellow-creatures, and that
another man's imminent danger or visible torment will cause in him a
distress little inferior to that felt by the unfortunate sufferer, we
shall probably think this a truth also, and a more normal and a
profounder truth than the other. But is it a law? Is it a scientific
discovery that can lead us to definite inferences about what will happen
or help us to decompose a single event, accurately and without
ambiguity, into its component forces? Not only is such a thing
impossible, but the Scotch philosopher's amiable generalities, perhaps
largely applicable to himself and to his friends of the eighteenth
century, may fail altogether to fit an earlier or a later age; and every
new shade of brute born into the world will ground a new "theory of the
moral sentiments."

The whole cogency of such psychology, therefore, lies in the ease with
which the hearer, on listening to the analysis, recasts something in his
own past after that fashion. These endless rival apperceptions regard
facts that, until they are referred to their mechanical ground, show no
continuity and no precision in their march. The apperception of them,
consequently, must be doubly arbitrary and unstable, for there is no
method in the subject-matter and there is less in the treatment of it.
The views, however, are far from equal in value. Some may be more
natural, eloquent, enlightening, than others; they may serve better the
essential purpose of reflection, which is to pick out and bring forward
continually out of the past what can have a value for the present. The
spiritual life in which this value lies is practical in its
associations, because it understands and dominates what touches action;
yet it is contemplative in essence, since successful action consists in
knowing what you are attempting and in attempting what you can find
yourself achieving. Plan and performance will alike appeal to
imagination and be appreciated through it; so that what trains
imagination refines the very stuff that life is made of. Science is
instrumental in comparison, since the chief advantage that comes of
knowing accurately is to be able, with safety, to imagine freely. But
when it is science and accurate knowledge that