same class as his own, works out his opinions with patient scrutiny,
returns to the investigation again and again, imagines that he had
examined the question on all sides, and at length arrives at what is to
him a satisfactory conclusion. He resumes the view of this conclusion
day after day; he finds in it an unalterable validity; he says in his
heart, "Thus much I have gained; this is a real advance in the search
after truth; I have added in a defined and palpable degree to what I
knew before." And yet it has sometimes happened, that this person, after
having been shut up for weeks, or for a longer period, in his sanctuary,
living, so far as related to an exchange of oral disquisitions with his
fellow-men, like Robinson Crusoe in the desolate island, shall come into
the presence of one, equally clear-sighted, curious and indefatigable
with himself, and shall hear from him an obvious and palpable statement,
which in a moment shivers his sightly and glittering fabric into atoms.
The statement was palpable and near at hand; it was a thin, an almost
imperceptible partition that hid it from him; he wonders in his heart
that it never occurred to his meditations. And yet so it is: it was hid
from him for weeks, or perhaps for a longer period: it might have been
hid from him for twenty years, if it had not been for the accident that
supplied it. And he no sooner sees it, than he instantly perceives that
the discovery upon which he plumed himself, was an absurdity, of which
even a schoolboy might be ashamed.

A circumstance not less curious, among the phenomena which belong to
this subject of belief, is the repugnance incident to the most ingenuous
minds, which we harbour against the suddenly discarding an opinion
we have previously entertained, and the adopting one which comes
recommended to us with almost the force of demonstration. Nothing can
be better founded than this repugnance. The mind of man is of a peculiar
nature. It has been disputed whether we can entertain more than one idea
at a time. But certain it is, that the views of the mind at any one time
are considerably narrowed. The mind is like the slate of a schoolboy,
which can contain only a certain number of characters of a given size,
or like a moveable panorama, which places a given scene or landscape
before me, and the space assigned, and which comes within the limits
marked out to my perception, is full. Many things are therefore almost
inevitably shut out, wh