The fact that we modify our opinions suggests that our ideas are formed not so much in involuntary self-adjusting mimetic correspondence with the objects that we believe to give rise to them, as by what was in the outset voluntary, conventional arrangement in whatever way we found convenient, of sensation and perception-symbols, which had nothing whatever to do with the objects, and were simply caught hold of as the only things we could grasp. It would seem as if, in the first instance, we must have arbitrarily attached some one of the few and vague sensations which we could alone at first command, to certain motions of outside things as echoed by our brain, and used them to think and feel the things with, so as to docket them, and recognise them with greater force, certainty, and clearness—much as we use words to help us to docket and grasp our feelings and thoughts, or written characters to help us to docket and grasp our words. If this view be taken we stand in much the same attitude towards our feelings as a dog may be supposed to do towards our own reading and writing. The dog may be supposed to marvel at the wonderful instinctive faculty by which we can tell the price of the different railway stocks merely by looking at a sheet of paper; he supposes this power to be a part of our nature, to have come of itself by luck and not by cunning, but a little reflection will show that feeling is not more likely to have “come by nature” than reading and writing are. Feeling is in all probability the result of the same kind of slow laborious development as that which has attended our more recent arts and our bodily organs; its development must be supposed to have followed the same lines as that of our other arts, and indeed of the body itself, which is the _ars artium_—for growth of mind is throughout coincident with growth of organic resources, and organic resources grow with growing mind. Feeling is the art the possession of which differentiates the civilised organic world from that of brute inorganic matter, but still it is an art; it is the outcome of a mind that is common both to organic and inorganic, and which the organic has alone cultivated. It is not a part of mind itself; it is no more this than language and writing are parts of thought. The organic world can alone feel, just as man can alone speak; but as speech is only the development of powers the germs of which are possessed by the lower animals, so feeling is only a sign of the employment and development of powers the germs of which exist in inorganic substances. It has all the characteristics of an art, and though it must probably rank as the oldest of those arts that are peculiar to the organic world, it is one which is still in process of development. None of us, indeed, can feel well on more than a very few subjects, and many can hardly feel at all.