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any knowledge of the present and of any prediction or expectation with regard to the future.

To every one a thing is neither more nor less than what he thinks it-in effect, a think; and to think a new thing he must first use the old thought. How can he do otherwise before new experience has enabled him to organize a new think? The old thing or think represents object plus subject; the new thing, therefore, is no thing to him until it is asselfed in a think, for until then it is object minus subject. And this is true also of all the properties and relations of the object. If he tells or foretells anything of it or of them, he must do it in terms of the language which he knows, obviously cannot do it in terms of a language which he has yet to learn. In applying, then, the old notion to a new fact, as he must necessarily apply some notion to it in order to observe it intelligently at all, he uses a notion which, not fitting the fact exactly, comes between him and it, in so far as it is unfit, and so hinders him from getting into exact and faithful converse with it; instead of being a completely fitting instrument to accomplish the adaptation, it is an interposing obstacle, to the extent of its unsuitableness, which hinders his mind from moulding itself plastically to the fact.

What, then, must he do? Putting himself reso

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lutely into close converse with the new experience, he must hold his notion loosely as of provisional use and susceptible of modification, or lay it clean aside, bringing other more serviceable notions to his assistance, in order to get a full and faithful impression of the facts in that wherein they disagree from or contradict his preposession; for, if not, the thing which he sees will not be the thing as it is, but the thing which he from his mental prepossession thinks it he will prejudge it as he is preinformed, which, if he is not preinformed rightly, is prejudice in its ill sense. The natural bent of the mind so preoccupied is, first of all, to resist the intrusion of the new notion with silent stubbornness; afterwards, when the passive barrier is forced, with angry prejudice, passion coming to the aid of the resistance; and, last of all, when the intruder has gained entrance, to mould it into the shapes of its own notions as much as possible, so forming it to its liking as oftentimes actually to deform it. When one tries frankly to realize the physical process underlying the mental process, the thing seems almost mechanically inevitable.

For a like reason it is that discoveries in science and inventions in the arts have a long and tedious gestation, although they seem most simple and easy, perhaps, when they are brought forth to light. So

obvious, once made, that one wonders they were overlooked for a day even, yet overlooked through so many generations of men that one wonders they were ever made at last. Naturally they were inconceivable before they were conceived. In conceiving what may be one cannot but proceed from the basis of what has been and what is, and so divine the new in the forms of the old. The new conception does not start out of the head, Minerva-like, fully formed and ready to undergo the test of any experiment; it is reached tentatively and by degrees, by modifications of old notions through impressions made by altered facts and relations, much of the modifying impression being unconscious in the first instance. The increments of experience saturate the mind silently until they crystallize consciously into a new conception of things; it is just as if, after much patient brooding over the subject, an electric circuit of discovery were suddenly closed. It is not by reasoning that we get knowledge-we only make the implicit explicit by that conscious process; the knowledge is latent in structural organization before it is self-revealed in conscious function. Accidents are oftentimes the happy occasions of inventions, as observations of animals have been sometimes, because, by presenting things to the mind under new aspects and in new relations, they startle thought

out of its deep grooves of habit, and so provoke new adjustments and reflections. No doubt there is sometimes as much new instruction to be had out of old and common things, were they only observed carefully and curiously with open sense and free mind, as can be obtained from the most ingenious experiments to devise new combinations of things; but the difficulty is to break the enthralling chain of unheeding habit and to stir attention to what one is not used to heed. So it becomes necessary to go about to make new experiments, or to await the happy thought-kindling accident, in order to discover that which a familiar instance lying close at hand might teach plainly if duly minded.

§ Laws of Assimilation and Discrimination.

In the strong impression made and left on the mind by coincidences and resemblances, whereby it happens that dissidences and differences are so easily overlooked and neglected, both in observation and reasoning, we have then at bottom an instance of the law of mental assimilation. Like takes to itself like as that which agrees with it, and naturally likes. to do so; and inasmuch as, while doing that, it occupies the attention, usurping consciousness, the contradictory instance or difference is inevitably left

much or entirely in the dark. To attend is literally to tend to, and one attention, when it is so strung as to be tension, necessarily excludes another attention. The perception of analogies and resemblances in nature leads easily to generalizations, which are afterwards verified or not. If the generalization be not verified because of the contradictory or irreconcilable instance presenting itself, then this dissentient experience, if taken sincerely home and registered faithfully in the mind, is organized there into a new organ or faculty, so to speak, and thereafter assimilates its likes. A new track of function is opened, to which associations or, as it were, junctions are formed in due course; a rich addition being thus made to the cerebral plexus of the mental organization. To see difference, that is, to discriminate— which was probably the primal condition of the origin of consciousness-certainly is as essential a part of mental development as to see resemblance, that is, to assimilate; the complementary aim and work of the functions being to reflect, as far as possible, in uniformities and varieties of mental growth, the uniformities and varieties of external nature-to develop a mental order in conformity with the order of things.

The order of notions in the best mind, and in the highest achievements of all the best minds together, is infinitely short of reflecting the order of things in

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