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overlook it, and regard the complex result as immediate and direct. For the same reason we hardly expend a thought on the ways in which spoken language is secured by the child, and look upon education as commencing with the learning of the letters the written alphabet. Yet the first acquisition, though imitative and spontaneous, involves a more fundamental training and penetrates deeper into the physical powers by far than the second.

The intellect, once in possession of itself, finds chief occasion to expand its knowledge under the notion of resemblance. It is through this that it traces and interprets the lines of force; and by these that it gains power. Yet we cannot accept the statement, that all judgments can be analyzed into resemblance, into agreement and disagreement; and yet more do we not assent to the assertion, that these resemblances are sought for their own sake. Each regulative idea furnishes the ground of a distinct predication, not to be resolved in its very essence by the most subtle analysis into any other. Moreover, resemblances are of value, and only of value, as they are the indices of agreeing forces, as they are the surface marks which disclose the concealed lines of connection between objects and events.

Power is the fundamental element of knowledge, that which makes its search pleasant, and its acquisition profitable. The desire for knowledge which gives no power is like avarice, the morbid play of a just impulse. To know the exact number of leaves on a tree, their position and form, the precise way in which some ancient but insignificant event happened, the very words in which some second rate poet expressed himself, is to know to no good purpose, is to have the semblance, not the substance of wisdom, the shell, not the kernel of truth. Resemblances which are accidental, which betray no relationship, as the size and form of a boy's marble when compared with the pebbles on