d is emancipated, and its
independence commences: we cease to be espaliers, and become standards.
Hitherto we have been principally trained according to the ancient
models. The Greek and Latin historians, orators, and poets, have
consumed, to a great extent, the docile season of youth: when perception
is active, and memory most permanently retains its various deposits, to
the dereliction of the great presentations of Nature, the operations of
numbers, the foundations of science, and more especially the exercise of
thought. After we have quitted school, and commenced our career of
profitable employment, these studies are seldom continued, and from
desuetude are soon forgotten; or only revived, perhaps unaptly, in an
occasional quotation. Even a living language, when not exercised, fades
from the recollection. The indirect location of words which prevails in
Latin, can be no model for English composition, where regular and
consecutive meaning constitute the perspicuity of the sentence; and
according to the reasoning that has been adopted, of the thought itself.
Words, and the meaning which resides in each individual, are the only
media by which our thoughts can be conveyed; and if these, which are
connected by sense and subject, are so separated, or dislocated, that it
becomes a puzzle to reduce them to their natural order, such distraction
ought not to be considered an example for the process of thinking, and
its development by composition or construction of sentences in the
English language. The connexion that exists in a perspicuous sentence,
is the conjunction of meaning, a further proof of the individual
signification of words, and which bearing a definite sense, are selected
for the purpose of that composition, which we term the process of
thinking. To this connexion we are directed by the knowledge we possess
of any particular subject, when we are intently occupied in its
investigation, with a view to confute or confirm it, or by a more
successful effort to arrive at discovery: and these acts of thought
involve the continuation of meaning by the addition of words adapted to
fulfil such intention.

Connexion, in a great degree, is the contrivance of our own minds, and
has been frequently confounded with successive occurrences, many of
which, on examination, are detected to be in no manner related; most
persons link together circumstances that ought to be kept apart, and
which often prove the source of unsurmountable