this
kind. In many who have no definite rules of judgment, preference is
decided by little else, and thus, unfortunately, its operations are
mistaken for, or rather substituted for, those of inherent beauty, and
its real position and value in the moral system is in a great measure
overlooked.

Sec. 10. The dignity of its function.

For I believe that mere pleasure and pain have less associative power
than duty performed or omitted, and that the great use of the
associative faculty is not to add beauty to material things, but to add
force to the conscience. But for this external and all-powerful witness,
the voice of the inward guide might be lost in each particular instance,
almost as soon as disobeyed; the echo of it in after time, whereby,
though perhaps feeble as warning, it becomes powerful as punishment,
might be silenced, and the strength of the protection pass away in the
lightness of the lash. Therefore it has received the power of enlisting
external and unmeaning things in its aid, and transmitting to all that
is indifferent, its own authority to reprove or reward, so that, as we
travel the way of life, we have the choice, according to our working, of
turning all the voices of nature into one song of rejoicing, and all her
lifeless creatures into a glad company, whereof the meanest shall be
beautiful in our eyes, by its kind message, or of withering and
quenching her sympathy into a fearful, withdrawn, silence of
condemnation, or into a crying out of her stones, and a shaking of her
dust against us. Nor is it any marvel that the theoretic faculty should
be overpowered by this momentous operation, and the indifferent appeals
and inherent glories of external things in the end overlooked, when the
perfection of God's works is felt only as the sweetness of his promises,
and their admirableness only as the threatenings of his power.

Sec. 11. How it is connected with impressions of beauty.

But it is evident that the full exercise of this noble function of the
associative faculty is inconsistent with absolute and incontrovertible
conclusions on subjects of theoretic preference. For it is quite
impossible for any individual to distinguish in himself the unconscious
underworking of indefinite association, peculiar to him individually,
from those great laws of choice under which he is comprehended with all
his race. And it is well for us that it is so, the harmony of God's good
work is not in us interrupted by