not because it is really more unlucky than another day, but because any day of the week on which attentive note was taken, through a sufficiently long succession of experiences, of the events happening on it would have a preponderance of ills; a proof of this being that, in the opinion of some persons, Monday is an unlucky day on which to begin a new enterprise. Omens of good fortune, being more often discredited by the event, would be limited to comparatively rare concurrences and sequences. However bright, then, the ideal theory of life, a solid basis of pessimism is discovered practically in the instinctive experience of the race, as it is implied also in the central thought at the heart of all religions; in the invention of a future life to redress. the calamities of this life; in the hearty thanks which devout Christians give to Almighty God, when it has pleased Him to deliver a brother or sister from the miseries of this sinful world.

Fallacies of Coincidence in Observation.

The tendency of the mind to respond to agreeing instances and to overlook opposing instances, out of which so many errors of thought have sprung, is not manifest in reasoning from facts only, but operates equally in the observation or perception of the facts

themselves; it is, indeed, this tendency which so often vitiates direct observation of that which lies plain to sense, were sense only applied plainly to it. A wrong idea or image of the fact, suggested by some agreeing features of it, prevents the person from seeing the real fact. How easy it is to make mistakes as to the identities of persons, and how often it happens that a witness, or one witness after another, swears positively in a court of justice to the identity of a person, who is not only not the person he is believed to be, but perhaps has no great likeness to that person! Nothing can be more positive than the assurance with which the mistaken evidence is given on such an occasion, nothing more inexcusable as an example of observation, nothing more instructive as an illustration of a common fallacy of observation. As in reasoning, so in perception, the tendency to generalize is stronger than the tendency to discriminate. What happens is that the resemblance of one or two leading features excites the idea of a certain person in the observer's mind, and the mental image of that person thereupon usurps his attention so that he has no eyes for the manifest and manifold minor points of difference in the real object. Perceiving the like features, he instantly, although unconsciously, fills in the rest of them, not from the real face before him, but

from the notional image which he has had evoked in his mind; just as in ordinary vision it is our habit to see a few features or signs only which, informed by previous experience, we interpret into the object; or as in ordinary hearing we catch only partial sounds of the word, and fill up the rest of the sound to complete the words of a known language-for we cannot do it with a little-known language-from the internal reservoir of former experience.

If any one were to mark well and to take careful note of that which he does really see and hear in the course of a day, he would be not a little surprised to discover how small a part of what he thinks he sees and hears he does actually see and hear, and how often he thinks he sees and hears much that he never sees and hears at all. Passing glances or glimpses suggest objects, as passing sounds do words, which in most cases, no doubt, are the appropriate objects and words, but by no means always so; for, if careful attention be given on each occasion to the supposed perception, and it be pursued home to actual verification, it will be found in not a few instances that the object seen or the word heard was not really what it was thought to be, and in some instances was not perhaps even the object or word at all. The healthiest mind, in the course of its daily experiences, has many passing illusions or

hallucinations of that sort, which it does not stay to test and correct because they are incidental and evanescent, and of no concern to its immediate purpose; as in like manner, when not seriously occupied, it has the strangest vagaries of thought and fancy that come and go unheeded. Every one knows how many tricks the mind plays in sleep, but few persons realize, until they observe themselves closely and reflect on what they observe, how many like tricks it plays habitually in waking life.

If it were not more easy for every mind to perceive resemblances than to perceive differences, and to make generalizations than not to make them, it is hard to see how understanding could ever grow into continuity and unity of being; for if it were as eager and careful to note differences as to note resemblances, it might be occupied all its life with the function-such the infinite variety of nature-and so never get forward in development out of distracting plurality into fruitful unity. The tendency to unity is the condition and the exponent of its individuality. There is always a latent and seductive gratification in the feeling and the perception of an agreement; it is something which, being agreeable, assimilates easily and is a mental gain; whereas it is rather a trial, and may be even a pain, to perceive and register that which does not agree-that which, being in a

literal sense disagreeable, is not easily assimilable, but dissimilable. The perception or notion assimilates that which, being able to asself it-that is, to make of the same nature with itself-is suited to foster its growth, manifesting, like every living thing, its fundamental impulse to increase and the gratification of increasing; while it shrinks from and rejects for assimilation elsewhere that which it cannot make part of itself, and most of all that which is hostile to its nature and growth.

Suppose a person to be put in face of some new fact or relation which he is required to observe for the first time, or of a new feature of an old fact or relation, he comes to it necessarily with a mind preoccupied with notions of facts or relations which he has observed formerly and which do not fit it, and devoid of notions which fit it. How, then, can he truly mind it? It is impossible he can observe it rightly in the first instance, not having the suitable interpretation-notions. At the same time, he could not mind the fact at all, any more than he could recognize an acquaintance, if he had not the prepossession of some related notion. He cannot choose but think of the present and future as resembling the past; for thought is informed by experience, and cannot go beyond it until it has been reinformed by new experience: the past, the indispensable basis of