Elements of Mental Philosophy; Abridged and Designed as a Text Book for Academies and High Schools (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: life. This peculiarity in the operations of the memory is not unfrfiquently found among men of letters, especially if they possess a vivid imagination. But it must be considered a mental defect; one, which it is not only important to understand, but to try to remedy. Montaigne" is a striking instance of failure in one of the varieties of memory, and others fail equally in the power of reasoning, that is, in forming judgments or conclusions by combining together a number of consecuiive propositions. And this happens from a variety of causes, as from weakness of attention, or the influence of prejudices, or an ignorance of the nature and sources of evidence, or from other causes, which may be guarded against and controlled. In other cases the mind is thrown into confusion in consequence of such exceeding vividness in the conceptions, as to lead one to mis-take the mere objects of thought for real external objects. And again we have the still, more formidable evils of idiocy in its various forms of origin, and of partial and total insanity. Since then it must be admitted, that there are diseases and distortions of the mind no less than of the body, and that we cannot expect a restoration from those evils without an intimate acquaintance with the state and tendencies of our intellectual and sentient powers, such an acquaintance becomes exceedingiy desirable. .9. Is a help to those, who hare the charge of early education, This study, in the fourth place, furnishes many very valuable hints to those, who have the charge of early education. It is well known that children and youth adopt almost implicitly the manners and opinions of those, under whom they happen in Providence to be placed, or with whom they much associate, whether they be parents, in- structers, or others. ...