raight macadamised roads. Not,
of course, that he denied the Divine incomprehensibility itself, with
certain heretics of old; but he maintained that in Revelation all that
was mysterious had been left out, and nothing given us but what was
practical, and directly concerned us. It was, moreover, to him a marvel,
that every one did not agree with him in taking this simple, natural
view, which he thought almost self-evident; and he attributed the
phenomenon, which was by no means uncommon, to some want of clearness of
head, or twist of mind, as the case might be. He was a popular preacher;
that is, though he had few followers, he had numerous hearers; and on
this occasion the church was overflowing with the young men of the
place.

He began his sermon by observing, that it was not a little remarkable
that there were so few good reasoners in the world, considering that the
discursive faculty was one of the characteristics of man's nature, as
contrasted with brute animals. It had indeed been said that brutes
reasoned; but this was an analogical sense of the word "reason," and an
instance of that very ambiguity of language, or confusion of thought, on
which he was animadverting. In like manner, we say that the _reason_ why
the wind blows is, that there is a change of temperature in the
atmosphere; and the _reason_ why the bells ring is, because the ringers
pull them; but who would say that the wind _reasons_ or that bells
_reason_? There was, he believed, no well-ascertained fact (an emphasis
on the word _fact_) of brutes reasoning. It had been said, indeed, that
that sagacious animal, the dog, if, in tracking his master, he met three
ways, after smelling the two, boldly pursued the third without any such
previous investigation; which, if true, would be an instance of a
disjunctive hypothetical syllogism. Also Dugald Stewart spoke of the
case of a monkey cracking nuts behind a door, which, not being a strict
imitation of anything which he could have actually seen, implied an
operation of abstraction, by which the clever brute had first ascended
to the general notion of nut-crackers, which perhaps he had seen in a
particular instance, in silver or in steel, at his master's table, and
then descending, had embodied it, thus obtained, in the shape of an
expedient of his own devising. This was what had been said: however, he
might assume on the present occasion, that the faculty of reasoning was
characteristic of the human species