tains his opinion that the modest and timid give ground before him in argument: the mind of power we have now in view might claim its descent, not from Samuel Johnson, but from Francis Bacon.

513. Let the philosopher who assures us that Mind is invariably governed by the law of its idiosyncrasy, and of habit, and of education, and of professional occupation-by laws of taste and of moral tendency-let him take his seat at a table around which the choicest men of a neighbourhood, or of a metropolis, are assembled, and where all the liberty of speech is enjoyed which is conceivable, or which can be desirable: this sage, as he sits a silent listener to the rattle of discourse, will be glad to confirm himself in his doctrine, as he notes his pertinent instances, and feels that he should seldom err, after a time, in predicting the deliverances of each mind. on any given subject. The law of each mind is indeed, as he says, "each mind's law;"-it is a law never in fact violated; although it may often be deflected by its collision with other minds.

514. But let us imagine that chance has brought into this party—not a “celebrity" in science; not a man who has long ago won for himself a " European reputation ;" but a mind which is sovereign in relation to its own materials to its own methods and processes of intellection; and supreme in relation to "fixed sequences" of every kind. A rare mind indeed; and yet it is in no sense monstrous; it is not supernatural; it is rare, as related to the masses of a cultured community, in about the same proportion as that in which the cultured races

of the human family are few, compared with the innumerable millions of the semi-barbarous, and the savage.

515. In what then consists this supremacy, or this disposing power, which exhibits itself in combining various materials with relation to a foreseen product? In search of an answer we may follow it out a little further.

516. The company-above supposed-includes, let us imagine, men of different nations:-there is the German, the Italian, the Frenchman; and there is a southern and a northern sample of the Anglo-Saxon type, recent from the United States. Each of the guests who takes a part in promiscuous discourse upon the subjects of the day— the interests and reputation of nations, shows a well-bred regard to the national feelings and prejudices, and to the presumed opinions and professions, of his neighbours, right and left; and yet in doing so he betrays his wish to do it he fails in the skill of combination; and he fails in a way that is analogous to the mishaps of the blundering poet who, when he cannot bring rhyme and metre to obey his principal meaning, leaves his principal meaning to shift for itself, or to be quite set aside by the obdurate requirements of versification. These several speakers insert, at places, in their utterances, whatever of concession, or of oblique apology, or of varnish, they may wish to blend with the genuine expression of their individual opinions.

517. It is not so with the one speaker to whom all eyes and ears are sure to be directed, by the time he has uttered twenty words. The materials which he

deals with, and which he converts to his purpose with an artless ease, and a ready fluency, are such as these. There is, first, whatever of fact or of principle is directly pertinent to the subject in hand-political, statistical, moral, ecclesiastical-as the case may be; secondly, there is the known or surmised opinions, interests, prejudices, professions, of those present; and, thirdly, there is his own individual tendencies-his idiosyncrasies, of which he is at least as well aware as he is of those of other men, but over which he exercises a constant repressive control. Now these materials, various as they are, do not come up in the speaker's discourse as diverse patches here and there inserted ;-for the entire fabric of his utterances is homogeneous-it is a work wherein all shades of thought-even every fibre of latent meaning-comes in where it should come in, and contributes its aid to the general effect.

518. The plasticity of language, and its copiousness, are the indispensable condition of so nice an operation as this. The speaker knows how to avail himself, not merely of its stores, and of its emphatic forces, but of its ambiguities, its conventional evasions, its graceful obliquities, its dim metonymic ironies. The solid matter of thought, thrown in upon the liquid mass of language, undergoes there a process of adjustment which, though it is completed in less than an instant of time, falls little short of being a perfect work, when it reaches the ear in its measured, yet artless cadences.

519. An extemporaneous work of thought, such as that which we have now imagined, and which-although

it is not of every-day occurrence-is no miracle, we regard as the last product of A CAUSE, over and beyond, or above which, or anterior to it, there is no causality whatever. This utterance is the exponent of a Power which, in the most strict sense, is initiative:—there is nothing that is either of earlier date, or of higher position, than that Power of which the product (in the case before us) now meets the ear. In listening to such an utterance, a very peculiar feeling ensues; for instead of being invited to accept the best we can get of the worn matter of customary discourse, we now, with a sort of galvanic consciousness, feel that we are in close contact with the Power of Mind. Sheer thought comes home upon every mind-or upon every mind that is not itself too much worn, and wasted, and spent, to admit of such a consciousness.

520. A motive of reverence toward some metaphysic axiom may incline us to reject, as delusive, this vivid spontaneous consciousness of touching upon a First Cause, on occasions of this sort; nor will there be wanting the semblance of reason to support us while we are endeavouring to choke our instinctive convictions with accredited academic formulæ.

XV.

RELATIVE VALUE OF CERTAIN TERMS.

521. At this stage of our course, and before entering upon subjects of an entirely different kind, it will be well to assign to their places certain terms and phrases which are customarily employed in speaking of the intellectual faculties. The words and the modes of speaking now referred to may retain their places in colloquial parlance, for convenience' sake, if only we remember that no scientific value attaches to them; and that they are employed much in the same way as we allow ourselves to speak of astronomical phenomenanot as they are, but as they seem to be.

522. The set of words, and the usual expressions which we have now to dispose of, carry with them this apparent meaning; that the mind-or, to speak restrictively, the human mind-is a concrete of various powers and separate faculties, which are lodged, side by side, or in an upper and under relative position, within the thinking substance, to which they cohere. It is thus that the "Will" is spoken of as if it were a facult distinct; and so the "Memory," and the "power of Attention," and the "faculty of Abstraction" or of Analysis;