tive choice. When we descend to the brutes, all these
peculiarities are intensified. No reader of Schopenhauer can forget
his frequent allusions to the _trockener ernst_ of dogs and horses, nor
to their _ehrlichkeit_. And every noticer of their ways must receive a
deep impression of the fatally literal character of the few, simple,
and treadmill-like operations of their minds.

But turn to the highest order of minds, and what a change! Instead of
thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten
track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and
transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions
and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the
subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly
introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is
fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where
partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine
is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law. According to the
idiosyncrasy of the individual, the scintillations will have one
character or another. They will be sallies of wit and humor; they will
be flashes of poetry and eloquence; they will be constructions of
dramatic fiction or of mechanical device, logical or philosophic
abstractions, business projects, or scientific hypotheses, with trains
of experimental consequences based thereon; they will be musical
sounds, or images of plastic beauty or picturesqueness, or visions of
moral harmony. But, whatever their {249} differences may be, they will
all agree in this,--that their genesis is sudden and, as it were,
spontaneous. That is to say, the same premises would not, in the mind
of another individual, have engendered just that conclusion; although,
when the conclusion is offered to the other individual, he may
thoroughly accept and enjoy it, and envy the brilliancy of him to whom
it first occurred.

To Professor Jevons is due the great credit of having emphatically
pointed out[16] how the genius of discovery depends altogether on the
number of these random notions and guesses which visit the
investigator's mind. To be fertile in hypotheses is the first
requisite, and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience
contradicts them is the next. The Baconian method of collating tables
of instances may be a useful aid at certain times. But one might as
well expect