there are more objects than he can possibly count he will think there are none, or that the word _flock_ will present to his mind a mere name without any idea corresponding to it. Every act of the attention, every object we see or think of, offers a proof of the same kind. The application of this view of the subject to explain the difference between the synthetical and analytical faculties, between generalization and abstraction in the proper acceptation of this last word, between common sense or feeling and understanding or reason, demands a separate essay. I do not think it possible ever to arrive at the truth upon these, or to prove the existence of general or abstract ideas, by beginning in Mr. Locke’s method with particular ones. This faculty of abstraction or generalization (to use the words indifferently) is indeed by most considered as a sort of artificial refinement upon our other ideas, as an excrescence, no ways contained in the common impressions of things, nor scarcely necessary to the common purposes of life; and is by Mr. Locke altogether denied to be among the faculties of brutes. It is the ornament and top-addition of the mind of man which proceeding from simple sensation upwards, is gradually sublimed into the abstract notions of things: ‘so from the root springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves more airy, last the bright consummate flower.’ On the other hand, I imagine that all our notions from first to last are, strictly speaking, general and abstract, not absolute and particular, and that this faculty mixes itself more or less with every act of the mind, and in every moment of its existence. Lastly, I conceive that the mind has not been fairly dealt with in this and other questions of the same kind. The difficulty belonging to the notion of abstraction or comprehension it is perhaps impossible ever to clear up: but that is no reason why we should discard those operations from the human mind any more than we should deny the existence of motion, extension, or curved lines in nature, because we cannot explain them. Matter alone seems to have the privilege of presenting difficulties and contradictions at any time, which pass current under the name of _facts_; but the moment any thing of this kind is observed in the understanding, all the petulance of logicians is up in arms. The mind is made the mark on which they vent all the modes and figures of their impertinence; and metaphysical truth has in this respect fared like the milk-white hind, the emblem of pure faith, in Dryden’s fable, which ‘Has oft been chased With Scythian shafts and many winged wounds Aimed at her heart, was often forced to fly, And doomed to death, though fated not to die.’ ON SELF-LOVE