wars of the middle of the seventeenth century would naturally deepen the influence of the new principle, and produce the Lockian rationalism of the end of that century, which almost instantaneously extended from the region of metaphysics into the region of theology. The historian of every kind of opinion, and the student of the great chiefs of intellectual movements, habitually do violence to actual circumstances, by imparting too systematic a connection to the various parts of belief, and by assuming an unreal degree of conscious logical continuity among the notions of individual thinkers. Critics fill in the frame with a completeness and exactitude that had no counterpart in the man’s own judgments, and they identify him with a multitude of deductions from his premisses, which may be fairly drawn, but which never at all entered into his mind, and formed no part of his character. The philosophy of the majority of men is nothing more shaped and incorporate than a little group of potential and partially incoherent tendencies. To stiffen these into a system of definite formulas is the most deceptive, as it is the most common, of critical processes. A few persons, with an exceptional turn for philosophy, consciously embody their metaphysical principles with a certain detail in all the rest of their thinking. With most people, however, even people of superior capacity, the relation between their ground-system, such as a critic might supply them with, and their manifestations of intellectual activity, is of an extremely indirect and general kind.