Miscellanies (Volume 1) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ESSAYS ON THE ART OF THINKING. I. So much has been written and said on the importance of habits of accurate thought, that scholars and wise men have had enough of the subject. But it is not for them that we write. It is possible that we may be aware of errors of judgment to which they are liable, and into which we apprehend they frequently fall. We may occasionally take notice of the perverted ingenuity of the acute theorist, or smile at the difficulties which the skeptic labors to accumulate, or wonder at the strange interpretations which the biblical critic puts upon motives and actions, or sigh over the partial delusions to which the moral philosopher is himself subject. But our wonder and regret we keep to ourselves, and are far from the thought of offering any observations worthy to occupy intellects of a rank so much higher than our own. They have Bacon, Newton, Locke, and a host of advisers besides. We take up the pen in the service of those who have never studied nor are likely to study under these masters in the art of thinking. Of all the multitudes who have never been taught to think, or who have learned the art but imperfectly, there may be some who, laboring under 'a fellow-feeling of infirmity with ourselves, may turn to these pages with a hope of assistance and consolation. To such we address ourselves; and, taught by our own difficulties to appreciate theirs, we assure them that we feel deep compassion for that painful consciousness of deficient observation, perverted judgment, unchastened imagination, indolent attention, treacherous memory, and all intellectual faults and deficiencies whatever, which is a daily subject of regret and shame to a reflecting mind. We invite them to accompany us in a brief inquiry into some of the causes of these evils, and the bes...