Aids To Reflection In The Form PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1854 edition. Excerpt: ...where it is not holden iu check by reason and reflection. We need not go to the savage tribes of North America, or the yet ruder natives of the Indian Isles, to learn how slight a degree of difference will, in uncultivated minds, call up a sense of diversity, and inward perplexity and contradiction, as if the strangers were, and yet were not, of the same kind with themselves. Who has not had occasion to observe the effect which the gesticulations and nasal tones of a Frenchman produce on our own vulgar t Here we may see the origin and primary import of our unkindness. It is a sense of wtkind, and not the mere negation but the positive opposite.f the sense of kind. Alienation, aggravated now by fear, now by contempt, and not seldom by a mixture of bothyeaversion, hatred, enmity, are so many successive shapes ofits growth and metamoi-phosis. In application to the present case, it is sufficient to say, that Pindar's remark on sweet music holds equally true of genius: as many as are not delighted by it are disturbed, perplexed, irritated. The beholder either recognises it as a projected form of his own being, that moves before him with a glory round its head, or recoils from it as from a spectre. But this speculation would lead me too far; I must be content with having referred to it as the ultimate ground of the fact, and pass to the more obvious and proximate causes. And as the first, I would rank the person's not understanding what yet he expects to understand, and as if he had a right to do so. An original mathematical work, or any other that requires peculiar and technical remarks and symbols, will excite no uneasy feelings--not iu the mind of a competent reader, for he understands it; and not with others, because they neither expect nor...