For suddenly he recollects himself, and stops short to express the fear that he may have written _something similar to this elsewhere_; and he gives you to understand--not all at once--but by a series of strokes, that too bold a repetition _here_, of what he has said _elsewhere_ might be attended, to him, with serious consequences; and he begs you to note, as he does in twenty other passages and stories here and elsewhere, that his _style_ is all hampered with considerations such as these--that instead of merely thinking of making a good book, and presenting his subjects in their clearest and most effective form for the reader;--a thing in itself sufficiently laborious, as other authors find to their cost, he is all the time compelled to weigh his words with reference to such points as this. He must be perpetually on his guard that the identity of that which he presents here, and that which he presents elsewhere, under other and very different forms (in much graver forms perhaps, and perhaps in others not so grave), shall no where become so glaring as to attract popular attention, while he is willing and anxious to keep that identity or connection constantly present to the apprehension of the few, for whom he tells us his book--that is, this book within the book--is written. 'I fear in these _reveries_ of mine,' he continues, suspending at last suddenly this bold and continuous application to the immediate political emergency of those philosophical principles which he has exhibited in the abstract, in their _common_ and _universal form_, elsewhere; 'I fear, in these reveries of the _treachery of my memory_, lest by inadvertence it should make me write the same thing twice. Now I here set down _nothing new_, these are _common_ thoughts, and having per-adventure conceived them a hundred times, _I am afraid_ I _have set them down somewhere else already_. Repetition is everywhere troublesome, though it were in Homer, _but 'tis ruinous in things that have only a superficial and transitory_ SHOW. I do not love inculcation, even in the most profitable things, as in Seneca, and the practice of his Stoical school displeases me of _repeating upon every subject and at length_, THE PRINCIPLES and PRESUPPOSITIONS THAT SERVE IN GENERAL, and _always_ to re-allege anew;' that is, under the particular divisions of the subject, _common and universal reasons_. 'What I cannot express I point out with my finger,' he tells you elsewhere, but it is thus that he continues here.