To a hasty and injudicious application of the same belief, in anticipating the future course of human affairs, might be traced a variety of popular superstitions, which have prevailed, in a greater or less degree, in all nations and ages; those superstitions, for example, which have given rise to the study of charms, of omens, of astrology, and the different arts of divination. But the argument has been already prosecuted as far as its connexion with this part of the subject requires. For a fuller illustration of it, I refer to some remarks in my First Part, on the superstitious observances which, among rude nations, are constantly found blended with the practice of physic; and which, contemptible and ludicrous as they seem, have an obvious foundation, during the infancy of human reason, in those important principles of our nature, which, when duly disciplined by a more enlarged experience, lead to the sublime discoveries of inductive science. See pp. 216-219.

Nor is it to the earlier stages of society, or to the lower classes of the people, that these superstitions are confined. Even in the most enlightened and refined periods they occasionally appear; exercising, not unfrequently, over men of the highest genius and talents, an ascendant, which is at once consolatory and humiliating to the species.

"Ecce fulgurum monitus, oraculorum præscita, aruspicum prædicta, atque etiam parva dictu in auguriis sternutamenta et offensiones pedum. Divus Augustus lævum prodidit sibi calceum præpostere inductum, quo die seditione militari prope afflictus est." (Plin. Nat. Hist. lib. ii.)

"Dr. Johnson," says his affectionate and very communicative biographer, had another particularity, of which none of his friends ever ventured to ask an explanation. It appeared to me some superstitious habit, which he had contracted early, and from which he had never called upon his reason to disentangle him. This was his anxious care to go out or in at a door or passage, by a certain number of steps from a certain point, or at least so as that either his right or his left foot (I am not certain which) should constantly make the first actual movement when he came close to the door or passage. Thus I conjecture: for 1 have, upon innumerable occasions, observed him suddenly stop, and then seem to count his steps with a deep earnestness; and when he had neglected or gone wrong in this sort of magical movement, I have seen him go back again, put himself in a proper posture to begin the ceremony, and having gone through it, break from his abstraction, walk briskly on, and join his companion."-(Boswell's Johnson, vol. i. p. 264, 4to edit.)

The remark may appear somewhat out of place, but, after the last quotation, I may be permitted to say, that the person to whom it relates, great as his powers, and splendid as his accomplishments undoubtedly were, was scarcely entitled to assert, that "Education is as well known, and has long been as well known, as ever it can be." (Ibid. p. 514.) What a limited estimate of the objects of

education must this great man have formed! They who know the value of a well regulated and unclouded mind, would not incur the weakness and wretchedness exhibited in the foregoing description, for all his literary acquirements and literary fame.

III.-Continuation of the Subject.-General Remarks on the difference between the Evidence of Experience, and that of Analogy.

ACCORDING to the account of experience which has been hitherto given, its evidence reaches no farther than to an anticipation of the future from the past, in cases where the same physical cause continues to operate in exactly the same circumstances. That this statement is agreeable to the strict philosophical notion of experience, will not be disputed. Wherever a change takes place, either in the cause itself, or in the circumstances combined with it in our former trials, the anticipations which we form of the future cannot with propriety be referred to experience alone, but to experience co-operating with some other principles of our nature. In common discourse, however, precision in the use of language is not to be expected, where logical or metaphysical ideas are at all concerned; and therefore, it is not to be wondered at, that the word experience should often be employed with a latitude greatly beyond what the former definition authorizes. When I transfer, for example, my conclusions concerning the descent of heavy bodies from one stone to another stone, or even from a stone to a leaden bullet, my inference might be said, with sufficient accuracy for the ordinary purposes of speech, to have the evidence of experience in its favor; if indeed it would not savor of scholastic affectation to aim at a more rigorous enunciation of the proposition. Nothing at the same time, can be more evident than this, that the slightest shade of difference which tends to weaken the resemblance, or rather to destroy the identity of two cases, invalidates the inference from the one to the other, as far as it rests on experience solely, no less than the most prominent dissimilitudes which characterise the different kingdoms and departments of nature.

Upon what ground do I conclude that the thrust of a sword through my body, in a particular direction, would be followed by instant death? According to the popular use of language, the obvious answer would be,-upon experience, and experience alone. But surely this account of the matter is extremely loose and incorrect for where is the evidence that the internal structure of my body bears any resemblance to that of any of the other bodies which have been hitherto examined by anatomists? It is no answer to this question to tell me, that the experience of these anatomists has ascertained a uniformity of structure in every human subject which has as yet been dissected; and that therefore I am justified in concluding, that my body forms no exception to the general rule.

My question does not relate to the soundness of this inference, but to the principle of my nature, which leads me thus not only to reason from the past to the future, but to reason from one thing to another which, in its external marks, bears a certain degree of resemblance to it. Something more than experience, in the strictest sense of that word, is surely necessary to explain the transition from what is identically the same, to what is only similar; and yet my inference in this instance is made with the most assured and unqualified confidence in the infallibility of the result. No inference, founded on the most direct and long-continued experience, nor indeed any proposition established by mathematical demonstration, could more imperiously command my assent.

In whatever manner the province of experience, strictly so called, comes to be thus enlarged, it is perfectly manifest, that without some provision for this purpose, the principles of our constitution would not have been duly adjusted to the scene in which we have to act. Were we not so formed as eagerly to seize the resembling features of different things and different events, and to extend our conclusions from the individual to the species, life would elapse before we had acquired the first rudiments of that knowledge which is essential to the preservation of our animal existence.

This step in the history of the human mind has been little, if at all, attended to by philosophers; and it is certainly not easy to explain, in a manner completely satisfactory, how it is made. The following hints seem to me to go a considerable way towards a solution of the difficulty.

It is remarked by Mr. Smith, in his considerations on the formation of languages, that the origin of genera and species, which is commonly represented in the schools as the effect of an intellectual process peculiarly mysterious and unintelligible, is a natural consequence of our disposition to transfer to a new object the name of any other familiar object which possesses such a degree of resemblance to it, as to serve the memory for an associating tie between them. It is in this manner, he has shown, and not by any formal or scientific exercise of abstraction, that, in the infancy of language, proper names are gradually transformed into appellatives; or, in other words, that individual things come to be referred to classes or assortments.*

* A writer of great learning and ability (Dr. Magee of Dublin,) who has done me the honor to animadvert on a few passages of my works, and who has softened his criticisms by some expressions of regard, by which I feel myself highly flattered, has started a very acute objection to this theory of Mr. Smith, which I think it incumbent on me to submit to my readers in his own words.

"The power of designating an individual object by an appropriate articulation, is a necessary step in the formation of language, but very far removed indeed from its consummation. Without the use of general signs, the speech of man would differ little from that of brutes; and the transition to the general terms from the name of the individual is a difficulty which remains still to be surmounted. Condillac, indeed, proposes to show, how this transition may be made in the natural

This remark becomes, in my opinion, much more luminous and important, by being combined with another very original one, which is ascribed to Turgot by Condorcet, and which I do not recollect to have seen taken notice of by any later writer on the human mind. According to the common doctrine of logicians, we are led to sup

course of things. Un enfant appelle du nom d'arbre le premier arbre que nous lui montrons. Un second arbre qu'il voit ensuite lui rappelle la méme idée; il lui donne le même nom; de meme à un troisième, à un quatrième, et voilà le mot d'arbre, donné d'abord à un individu, qui devient pour lui un nom de classe ou de genre, une idée abstraite qui comprend tous les arbres en general.' In like manner, Mr. Adam Smith, in his 'Dissertation on the Origin of Languages,' and Mr. Dugald Stewart, in his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind,' endeavor to explain this process, by representing those words which were originally used as the proper names of individuals, to be successively transferred to other individuals, until at length each of them became insensibly the common name of a multitude. This, however, is more ingenious than solid. The name given to an individual, being intended exclusively to designate that individual, it is a direct subversion of its very nature and design, to apply it to any other individual, known to be different from the former. The child, it is true, may give the name of father to an individual like to the person it has been taught to call by that name: but this is from mistake, not from design; from a confusion of the two as the same person, and not from a perception of resemblance between them whilst known to be different. In truth, they whose thoughts are occupied solely about individual objects, must be the more careful to distinguish them from each other and accordingly, the child will most peremptorily retract the appellation of father, so soon as the distinctness is observed. The object with those whose terms or signs refer only to individuals, must naturally be to take care, that every such term or sign shall be applied to its appropriate individual, and to none else. Resemblance can produce no other effect, than to enforce a greater caution in the application of the particular names, and therefore has no natural tendency to lead the mind to the use of general terms.' Discourses and Disserations on the Scriptural Doctrines of Atonement and Sacrifice. By William Magee, D. D. Senior Fellow of Trinity College, and Professor of Mathematics in the University of Dublin. Vol. ii. pp. 63, 64. 3d Edit.

The observations in pp. 470, &c. of this volume, to which I must request the attention of my readers before they proceed to the following remarks, appear to me to weaken considerably the force of this reasoning, as far as it applies to the substance of the theory in question. With respect to Mr. Smith's illustration, drawn from the accident of a child's calling a stranger by the name of father, ĺ readily acknowledge that it was unluckily chosen; and I perfectly assent to the strictures bestowed on it by Dr. Magee. In consequence of the habitual intercourse which this domestic relation naturally keeps up between the parties, the mistake of the child, as Dr. Magee very properly calls it, must, of course, be immediately corrected; and therefore, the example is of no use whatever in confirming the conclusion it is brought to support. It is to be regretted that, upon this occasion, Mr. Smith should not only have appealed to a period of infancy, when the notions of similarity and of identity cannot fail to be sometimes one and the same; but should have assumed, as a general fact, an accidental occurrence, which, if it ever has happened, may be justly regarded as an exception to the usual history of the species. While yet on the breast, a child is able to distinguish, with the utmost quickness and accuracy, between the face of an acquaintance and that of a stranger; and, when it is so far advanced, as to begin to utter articulate sounds, any tendency to transfer or to generalize the words mother or nurse seems scarcely conceivable. We are apt to suppose that the first attempts towards speech are coeval with the study of language; whereas the fact manifestly is, that these attempts are only the consequences of the progress previously and silently made in the interpretation of words. Long before this time,

* These remarks have a particular reference to the following sentence in Mr. Smith's Dissertation: "A child that is just learning to speak calls every person who comes to the house its papa or its mamma; and thus bestows upon the whole species those names which it had been taught to apply to two individuals."

pose that our knowledge begins in an accurate and minute acquaintance with the characteristical properties of individual objects; and that it is only by the slow exercise of comparison and abstraction, that we attain to the notion of classes or genera. In opposition to

many of the logical difficulties which appear so puzzling to the speculative grammarian, have been completely surmounted.*

But although this particular example has been ill chosen, it does not therefore follow that the author's theory is altogether unfounded. Whoever has paid any attention to the phenomena of the infant mind, must be satisfied of its strong bias, in the first development of the intellectual powers, to apply to similar objects a common name, without ever thinking of confounding them together Nor does this hold merely with respect to similar objects: it holds also, and at a surprisingly early period of life, with respect to similar relations. A child who has been accustomed to the constant attentions and caresses of its mother, when it sees another child in the arms of its nurse, will naturally and infallibly call the nurse the child's mother. In this instance, as in numberless others, its error arises from generalising too hastily; the distinction between the meanings of the two relative words mother and nurse being too complex to be comprehended, till the power of observation begins to be exercised with some degree of attention and accuracy. This disposition, however, to transfer names from one thing to another, the diversity of which is obvious even to sense, certainly affords no inconsiderable an argument in favor of the opinion disputed by Dr. Magee.

It is, indeed, wonderful, how readily children transfer or generalize the name of the maternal relation, that which of all others must necessarily impress their minds most strongly, not only in the case of their own species, but of the lower animals; applying with little or no aid from instruction, the word mother to the hen, the sheep, or the cow, whom they see employed in nurturing and cherishing their young.

To myself, I own, it appears that the theory of Condillac and Smith on this point, is confirmed by every thing I have been able to observe of children. Even generic terms will be found, on examination, if I be not much deceived, to be originally understood by them merely as proper names; insomuch that the notions annexed by an infant to the words denoting the different articles of its nurseryfurniture, or the little toys collected for its amusement, are, in its conceptions, as individually and exclusively appropriated, as the names of its father, mother, or nurse. If this observation be well-founded, the same gradual conversion of proper names into appellatives, which Mr. Smith supposed to have taken place in the formation of a language, is exemplified in the history of every infant while learning to interpret its mother-tongue. The case is nearly the same with the peasant, who has never seen but one town, one lake, or one river. All of these appellatives are to his ear precisely equivalent to so many proper names.

"Quo te, Mæri, pedes? An, quo via ducit, in Urbem?"

That resemblance is one of our most powerful associating principles will not be disputed; and that, even in the maturity of our reason, we have a natural disposition to generalize the meaning of signs, in consequence of apprehended similarities, both of things and of relations, is equally certain. Why then should it be apprehended, that there is any peculiar mystery connected with this step in the commencement of the progress, when it seems to admit of an explanation so satisfactory, from a law of the human mind, exemplified daily in facts falling within the circle of our own experience?

* The general fact with respect to children, assumed by Mr. Smith in the foregoing note, is stated still more strongly by Aristotle. Both of these philosophers have, I suspect, trusted more, in this instance to theory than to observation. Και τα παιδιά το μεν πρώτον προσαγορεύει πάντας τους ανδρος, πατέρας· και μητέρας, τας γυναικας· ύστερον δε διορίζει τούτων ἑκάτερον. "Ac pueri quoque primum omnes viros appellant patres, et omnes mulieres, matres: postea vero discernunt horum utrumque.-Arist. Nat Ausc. lib. i. cap. i.)

This passage, which I do not recollect to have seen quoted by any former writer, does honor to Aristotie's acuteness. The fact, indeed, asserted in it, is more than questionable; but, admitting the fact to be true, it must be owned that Aristotle has viewed it in a juster light than Mr. Smith, not as an instance of any disposition to generalize proper names, but merely of imperfect and undistinguishing perception.