itself a chain composed
of many links. Still, being elementary, it may occur to, and pass
through, the mind with extreme rapidity--with not less rapidity than an
intuition or instinct, for which therefore it may easily be mistaken, as
accordingly it has actually been by Hume. But that a reasoning from
experience is not really an instinct is certain, firstly, because
intuitive or instinctive reasoning, if not a phrase absolutely devoid of
meaning, is a contradiction in terms; and, secondly, because, if it were
instinctive, it would precede instead of following experience, and a
baby, instead of finding out that flame burns by touching it, would know
beforehand that flame burns, and would therefore not touch it.

From the species of Belief constituted by an inference from experience,
Hume, by an easy transition, passes on to Belief in general, which he
defines to be 'nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady
conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able
to attain,' referring, by way of illustration, to an animal with the
head of a man and the body of a horse, which anyone can imagine, but no
one can believe in, and desiring us apparently to suppose that if our
groom were to come and tell us that he had found a centaur feeding in
the paddock beside our favourite saddle-horse, our sole reason for
believing in the horse and for not believing in the centaur would be our
greater ability to conceive the one than the other. That such a
definition should for a moment have satisfied its author's curiosity, is
itself a psychological curiosity which must not, however, be suffered to
detain us. Whoever, not content with knowing perfectly well what belief
is, desires to have his knowledge of it set down in writing, should read
the admirable notes on the subject, with which Mr. John Mill and Mr.
Bain have enriched the last edition of Mr. James Mill's 'Analysis of the
Human Mind.' Most readers, however, will probably be disposed to avail
themselves here of a rather favourite phrase of Hume himself, and to
plead that, 'if we agree about the thing, it is needless to dispute
about terms;' and it is not unlikely that such of them as may have
formed their notion of metaphysical discussions in general from the
specimens given above, may go so far as to hint a doubt whether any of
the nice verbal distinctions which metaphysicians so much affect, are
really worth the trouble required to understand them. No