If, as has been strongly affirmed, the science of mind be a science that is, by its very nature, insusceptible of improvement by discovery, it must have been so, before the time of Berkeley as now, and it might have been a sufficient answer to all the arguments which he adduced in support of his theory of vision, that the phenomena which he boasted to have analysed, were only the common and familiar phenomena of a sense that had been exercised by all mankind. “The vulgar,” I have said, “would gaze with astonishment, were they to perceive an electrician inflame gunpowder with an icicle; but they would not be less confounded by those dazzling subtleties with which metaphysicians would persuade them, that the very actions which they feel to be benevolent and disinterested, had their source in the same principle of selfishness, which makes man a knave or a tyrant. That this particular doctrine is false, is of no consequence; the whole theory of our moral sentiment presents results which are nearly as wonderful; and, indeed, the falseness of any metaphysical doctrine, if rightly considered, is itself one of the strongest proofs that the science of mind is a science which admits of discovery; for, if all men had equal knowledge of all the relations of all the phenomena of their mind, no one could advance an opinion on the subject, with real belief of it, which another could discover to be erroneous. In the different stages of the growth of a passion, what a variety of appearances does it assume; and how difficult is it often to trace, in the confusion and complication of the paroxysm, those calm and simple emotions, in which, in many cases, it originated!--The love of domestic praise, and of the parental smile of approbation, which gave excellence to the first efforts of the child, may expand, with little variation, into the love of honest and honourable fame; or, in more unhappy circumstances, may shoot out from its natural direction, into all the guilt and madness of atrocious ambition;--and can it truly be maintained, or even supposed, for a moment, that all this fine shadowing of feelings into feelings, is known as much to the rudest and most ignorant of mankind, as it is to the profoundest intellectual inquirer? How different is the passion of the miser, as viewed by himself, by the vulgar, and by philosophers! He is conscious, however, only of the accuracy of his reasonings on the probabilities of future poverty, of a love of economy, and of temperance, and certain too of strict and rigid justice. To common observers, he is only a lover of money. They content themselves with the passion, in its mature state; and it would not be easy to convince them, that the most self-denying avarice involves as its essence, or at least originally involved, the love of those very pleasures and accommodations, which are now sacrificed to it without the least apparent reluctance.”[40]