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the questions that lay piled in confused heaps over the subject of perception! What can be more admirable than the workings of the trained legal, or rather judicial, mind, as it walks firmly through labyrinths of statute and precedent and principle, holding fast its strong but tenuous thread, till it stands forth in the bright light of day it may be some Sir John Jervis, unraveling in a criminal case the web of sophistries with which a clever counsel has bewildered a jury; or it may be Marshall or Story, in our own college case, shredding away, one by one, its intricacies, entanglements, and accretions, till all is delightfully, restfully clear.

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It is a trait all the more to be insisted on in these very times, because there is so strong a drift toward a seeming clearness which is a real confusion. By two opposite methods do men now seek to reach that underlying order and majestic simplicity which more and more appear to mark this universe. The one distinguishes, the other confounds, things that certainly differ. The one system belongs to the reality and grandeur of nature, the other to the pettiness and perverseness of man. Not a few seem bent on seeing simplicity and uniformity by the short process of shutting their eyes upon actual diversity. They proceed not by analytical incision, but by summary excision. They work with the cleaver and not with the scalpel. What singular denials of the intuitive facts of universal consciousness, what summary identifications of most palpable diversities, and what kangaroo-leaps

beyond the high wall of their facts mark many of the deliverances of those who loudly warn us off from "the unknowable"! What shall we say of the steady confusion, in some arguments, of structure and function, and of force with material? When men, however eminent, openly propose to identify the force which screws together two plates of metal with the agency which corrodes or dissolves both in an acid, or to identify the affinity that forms chemical combinations with the vitality that so steadily overrides, suspends, and counteracts those affinities, is this an ascent into the pure ether or a plunge in the Cimmerian dark? When, in opposition to every possible criterion, a man claims that there is but "one ultimate form of matter out of which successively the more complex forms of matter are built up," is this the advance march of chemistry or the retrograde to alchemy? When a writer, in a style however lucid and taking, firmly assumes that there is no essential difference in two objects alike in material elements, but separated by that mighty and mysterious thing, life, is that the height of wisdom or the depth of folly? And how such a central paralysis of the mental retina spreads its darkness! as, for example, in the affirmation that as oxygen and hydrogen are reciprocally convertible with water, so are water, ammonia, and carbonic acid convertible into and resolvable from living protoplasm!

a statement said to be as false in chemistry as it certainly is in physiology. An ordinary merchant's accountant will, if need be, work a week to correct in

his trial balance the variation of a cent. But when he listens to Sir John Lubbock calmly reckoning the age of the human implements in the valley of the Somme at from one hundred thousand up to two hundred and forty thousand years; when he sees Croll, in dating the close of the glacial age, leap down from the height of near eight hundred thousand to eighty thousand years; when he finds Darwin and Lyell claiming for the period of life on the earth more than three hundred millions of years, while Tait, Young, and Thompson pronounce it quite impracticable to grant more than ten, or, at most, fifteen millions, this poor benighted clerk is bound to sit and hearken to his masters in all outward solemnity, but he must be excused for a prolonged inward smile. Who are these, he says, that reckon with a leeway of hundreds of thousands of years, and fling the hundreds of millions of years right and left, like pebbles and straws?

Brilliancy, so called, is no equivalent or substitute for precision. It is often its worst enemy. A man may mold himself to think in curves and zigzags, and not in right lines. He sends never an arrow, but a boomerang. Or he thinks in poetry instead of prose, deals in analogy where it should be analysis, puts rhetoric for logic, scatters and not concentrates, and while he radiates never irradiates. A late divine was suspected of heresy, partly because of his poetic bias; and one of his volumes was unfortunate for him and his readers, in that for his central position he planted himself on a figure of speech and not on a

logical proposition.

The well-known story se non

vero e ben trovato, of that keenest of lawyers, listening to a lecture of which every sentence was a gem and every paragraph rich with the spoils of literature, and replying to the question, "Do you understand all that?" "No; but my daughters do." It was as beautiful and iridescent as the Staubbach, and as impalpable.

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The more is the pity when a vigorous mind, in the outset of some great discussion, heads for a fog bank or a windmill. When a man proposes to chronicle a Conflict between Religion and Science," and makes religion stand indiscriminately for Romanism, Mohammedanism, superstition, malignant passion, obstinate prejudice, and what not, also confounding Christianity with so-called Christians, and those often most unrepresentative, at the same time appropriating to "Science" all intellectual activity whatever, though found in good Christian men, and though fostered and made irrepressible by the fire of that very religion, — it is easy to see what must be the outcome of such a sweep-stakes race. There will be a deification of science, and not even a whited sepulcher erected over the measureless Golgothas of its slaughtered theories. There will be, on the other hand, the steady suppressio veri concerning books, systems, men, and events, the occasional though unintended assertio falsi, the eager conversion of theories into facts, constructions unfair and uncandid, and, throughout, with much that is bright and just, that "admixture of a lie that doth ever

add pleasure" to its author and grief to the judicious. Such confusions are no doubt often the outgrowth of the will. But a main end of a true culture is to prevent or expose all such bewilderments, whether helpless or crafty.

The great predominance of the disciplinary process was what once characterized the English university system even more than now. It consisted in the exact and exhaustive mastery of certain limited sections of knowledge and thought, as the gymnastic for all other spheres and toils. At Oxford, not long ago, four years were spent in mastering some fourteen books. Whatever may be our criticism of the process, we may not deny its singular effect. In its best estate it forged many a trenchant blade. To the man who asks for its monument, it can point to British thought, law, statesmanship. Bacon and Burke, Coke and Eldon, Hooker and Butler, Pitt and Canning shall make answer. whole massive literature of England shall respond.

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But to this precision of working must be furnished material with which to work. Mental fullness is, therefore, another prime quality of a manly culture. To what degree it should be sought in the curriculum has been in dispute. It is the American theory, and a growing belief of the English nation, that the British universities have been defective here. Their men of mark have traveled later over the broader field.

Provincialism of intellect is a calamity. All men of great achievements have had to know what others achieved. The highest monuments are always built

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