red to other things that had the qualities of one in
illustrative degree.

300. And even respecting the constant methods or laws of phenomena, he
cannot raise the statement of them into an act of conception. The
statement that two right lines can never inclose a space merely appears
to him another form of verbal definition, or, at the grandest, a
definition in prophetic extent, saying in other words that a line which
incloses, or ever may inclose, a space, is not, and never will be, a
right one. He would admit that what he now conceives as two things,
doubled, would always be what he now conceives as four things. But
assuming the existence of a world in which, whenever two things were
actually set in juxtaposition with other two things, they became
actually three times, or actually five, he supposes that the practice of
arithmetic, and laws of it, would change in relation to this new
condition in matter; and he accepts, therefore, the statement that twice
two are four only as an accident of the existing phenomena of matter.

301. A painter therefore may, I think, be looked upon as only
representing a high order of sensational creatures, incapable of any but
physical ideas and impressions; and I continue my paper, therefore, only
in the name of the docile, and therefore improvable, part of the Brute
Creation.

And in their name I would suggest that we should be much more docile
than we are if we were never occupied in efforts to conceive things
above our natures. To take an instance, in a creature somewhat lower
than myself. I came by surprise the other day on a cuttle-fish in a pool
at low tide. On being touched with the point of my umbrella, he first
filled the pool with ink, and then finding himself still touched in the
darkness, lost his temper, and attacked the umbrella with much psyche or
anima, hugging it tightly with all his eight arms, and making efforts,
like an impetuous baby with a coral, to get it into his mouth. On my
offering him a finger instead, he sucked that with two or three of his
arms with an apparently malignant satisfaction, and on being shaken off,
retired with an air of frantic misanthropy into the cloud of his ink.

302. Now, it seems to me not a little instructive to reflect how
entirely useless such a manifestation of a superior being was to his
cuttle-fish mind, and how fortunate it was for his fellow-octopods that
he had no command of pens as well as ink, nor any disposition to write
on