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laft to form and bend the mind or organ to s E c T. that habitual mood and difpofition which fits them to receive its impreffion, without undergoing any very violent change.

SECT. II.

Of Wonder, or of the Effects of Novelty.

IT is evident that the mind takes pleasure in obferving the refemblances that are dif coverable betwixt different objects. It is by means of fuch obfervations that it endeavours to arrange and methodise all its ideas, and to reduce them into proper claffes and affortments. Where it can observe but one fingle quality, that is common to a great variety of otherwife widely different objects, that fingle circumftance will be fufficient for it to connect them all together, to reduce them to one common class, and to call them by one general name. It is thus that all things endowed with a power of felf-motion, beafts, birds, fishes, infects, are claffed under the general name of Animal; and that thefe again, along with thofe which want that power, are arranged under the still more general word Subftance: and this is the origin of thofe affortments of objects and ideas which

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in

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in the fchools are called Genera and Species, and of thofe abftract and general names, which in all languages are made use of to exprefs them.

The further we advance in knowledge and experience, the greater number of divifions and fubdivifions of thofe Genera and Species we are both inclined and obliged to make. We obferve a greater variety of particularities amongst those things which have a grofs refemblance; and having made new divifions of them, according to thofe newly-observed particularities, we are then no longer to be fatisfied with being able to refer an object to a remote genus, or very general clafs of things, to many of which it has but a loose and imperfect refemblance. A perfon, indeed, unacquainted with botany may expect to fatisfy your curiofity, by telling you, that fuch a vegetable is a weed, or, perhaps in ftill more general terms, that it is a plant. But a botanist will neither give nor accept of fuch an answer. He has broke and divided that great clafs of objects into a number of inferior affortments, according to those varieties which his experience has difcovered among them; and he wants to refer each individual plant to fome tribe of vegetables, with all of which it may have a more exact resemblance, than with many things comprehended under the extenfive genus of plants. A child imagines

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gines that it gives a fatisfactory answer when s E c T. it tells you, that an object whofe name it knows not is a thing, and fancies that it informs you of fomething, when it thus afcertains to which of the two moft obvious and comprehenfive claffes of objects a particular impreffion ought to be referred; to the clafs of realities or folid fubftances which it calls things, or to that of appearances which it calls nothings.

Whatever, in fhort, occurs to us we are fond of referring to fome fpecies or class of things, with all of which it has a nearly exact refemblance and though we often know no more about them than about it, yet we are apt to fancy that by being able to do fo, we fhow ourselves to be better acquainted with it, and to have a more thorough infight into its nature. But when fomething quite new and fingular is prefented, we feel ourselves incapable of doing this. The memory cannot, from all its ftores, caft up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance. If by fome of its qualities it feems to refemble, and to be connected with a fpecies which we have before been acquainted with, it is by others feparated and detached from that, and from all the other affortments of things we It stands have hitherto been able to make. alone and by itself in the imagination, and refuses to be grouped or confounded with any

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SEC T. fet of objects whatever. The imagination and memory exert themselves to no purpose, and in vain look around all their claffes of ideas in order to find one under which it may be arranged. They fluctuate to no purpose from thought to thought, and we remain still uncertain and undetermined where to place it, or what to think of it. It is this fluctuation and vain recollection, together with the emotion or movement of the fpirits that they excite, which constitute the fentiment properly called Wonder, and which occafion that staring, and fometimes that rolling of the eyes, that fufpenfion of the breath, and that fwelling of the heart, which we may all observe, both in ourfelves and others, when wondering at fome new object, and which are the natural symptoms of uncertain and undetermined thought. What fort of a thing can that be? What is that like? are the questions which, upon fuch an occafion, we are all naturally difpofed to afk. If we can recollect many fuch objects which exactly resemble this new appearance, and which present themselves to the imagination naturally, and as it were of their own accord, our Wonder is entirely at an end. If we can recollect but a few, and which it requires too fome trouble to be able to call up, our Wonder is indeed diminished, but not quite destroyed. If we can recollect none, but are quite at a lofs, it is the greatest poffible.

With what curious attention does a natu- s E c T. ralift examine a fingular plant, or a fingular

foffil, that is prefented to him? He is at no lofs to refer it to the general genus of plants or foffils; but this does not fatisfy him, and when he confiders all the different tribes or fpecies of either with which he has hitherto been acquainted, they all, he thinks, refuse to admit the new object among them. It stands alone in his imagination, and as it were detached from all the other fpecies of that genus to which it belongs. He labours, however, to connect it with fome one or other of them, Sometimes he thinks it may be placed in this, and fometimes in that other affortment; nor is he ever fatisfied, till he has fallen upon one which, in most of its qualities, it refembles. When he cannot do this, rather than it fhould ftand quite by itself, he will enlarge the precincts, if I may fay fo, of fome fpecies, in order to make room for it; or he will create a new species on purpose to receive it, and call it a Play of Nature, or give it fome other appellation, under which he ar ranges all the oddities that he knows not what elfe to do with. But to fome clafs or other of known objects he muft refer it, and betwixt it and them he must find out fome refemblance or other, before he can get rid of that Wonder, that uncertainty and anxious curiofity excited by its fingular appearance, and by its diffimi

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