Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. By Dugald Stewart. Rev. and abridged, with critical and explanatory notes, for the use of colleges and schools. By Francis Bowen ...

REASONING AND DEDUCTIVE EVIDENCE. 479
his friends ever ventured to ask an explanation. It appeared
to me some superstitious habit, which he had contracted early,
and from which he had never called upon his reason to disentangle him. This was his anxious care to go out or in at a
door or passage, by a certain number of steps from a certain
point, or at least, so as that either his right or his left foot (I
am not certain which) should constantly make the first actual
movement when he came close to the door or passage. Thus I
conjecture; for I have, upon innumerable occasions, observed
him suddenly stop, and then seem to count his steps with a deep
earnestness; and when he had neglected or gone wrong in this
sort of magical movement, I have seen him go back again, put
himself in a proper posture to begin the ceremony, and having
gone through it, break from his abstraction, walk briskly on,
and join his companion."
The remark may appear somewhat out of place, but, after
the last quotation, I may be permitted to say, that the person
to whom it relates, great as his powers and splendid as his accomplishments undoubtedly were, was scarcely entitled to
assert, that " Education is as well known, and has long been as
well known, as ever it can be." What a linited estimate of
the objects of education must this great man have formed!
They who know the value of a well regulated and unclouded
mind, would not incur the weakness and wretchedness exhibited
in the foregoing. description, for all his literary acquirements
and literary fame.
3. General remarks on the defference between the evidence of
experience, and that of analogy. - According to the account of
experience which has been hitherto given, its evidence reaches
no fiurther than to an anticipation of the ftture from the past, in
cases where the same physical cause continues to operate in exactly
the same circumstances. That this statement is agreeable to the
strict philosophical notion of experience, will not be disputed.
Wherever a change takes place, either in the cause itself, or in
the circumstances combined with it in our former trials, the anticipations which we form of the future cannot with propriety
be referred to experience alone, but to experience cooperating