emes; they stop where the human mind is disposed also to
stop--short of a manifest absurdity. Their inconsistency is not observed
by their authors or by mankind in general, who are equally inconsistent
themselves. They leave on the mind a pleasing sense of wonder and
novelty: in youth they seem to have a natural affinity to one class of
persons as poetry has to another; but in later life either we drift
back into common sense, or we make them the starting-points of a higher
philosophy.

We are often told that we should enquire into all things before we
accept them;--with what limitations is this true? For we cannot use
our senses without admitting that we have them, or think without
presupposing that there is in us a power of thought, or affirm that all
knowledge is derived from experience without implying that this first
principle of knowledge is prior to experience. The truth seems to be
that we begin with the natural use of the mind as of the body, and
we seek to describe this as well as we can. We eat before we know the
nature of digestion; we think before we know the nature of reflection.
As our knowledge increases, our perception of the mind enlarges also. We
cannot indeed get beyond facts, but neither can we draw any line which
separates facts from ideas. And the mind is not something separate
from them but included in them, and they in the mind, both having a
distinctness and individuality of their own. To reduce our conception of
mind to a succession of feelings and sensations is like the attempt to
view a wide prospect by inches through a microscope, or to calculate a
period of chronology by minutes. The mind ceases to exist when it loses
its continuity, which though far from being its highest determination,
is yet necessary to any conception of it. Even an inanimate nature
cannot be adequately represented as an endless succession of states or
conditions.

Paragraph II. Another division of the subject has yet to be considered:
Why should the doctrine that knowledge is sensation, in ancient times,
or of sensationalism or materialism in modern times, be allied to the
lower rather than to the higher view of ethical philosophy? At
first sight the nature and origin of knowledge appear to be wholly
disconnected from ethics and religion, nor can we deny that the ancient
Stoics were materialists, or that the materialist doctrines prevalent
in modern times have been associated with great virtues, or that both
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