an act of sense the differences of articulate speech and of musical notes?
Yet how small a part of speech or of music is produced by the impression of
the ear compared with that which is furnished by the mind!

Again: the more refined faculty of sense, as in animals so also in man,
seems often to be transmitted by inheritance. Neither must we forget that
in the use of the senses, as in his whole nature, man is a social being,
who is always being educated by language, habit, and the teaching of other
men as well as by his own observation. He knows distance because he is
taught it by a more experienced judgment than his own; he distinguishes
sounds because he is told to remark them by a person of a more discerning
ear. And as we inherit from our parents or other ancestors peculiar powers
of sense or feeling, so we improve and strengthen them, not only by regular
teaching, but also by sympathy and communion with other persons.

2. The second question, namely, that concerning the relation of the mind
to external objects, is really a trifling one, though it has been made the
subject of a famous philosophy. We may if we like, with Berkeley, resolve
objects of sense into sensations; but the change is one of name only, and
nothing is gained and something is lost by such a resolution or confusion
of them. For we have not really made a single step towards idealism, and
any arbitrary inversion of our ordinary modes of speech is disturbing to
the mind. The youthful metaphysician is delighted at his marvellous
discovery that nothing is, and that what we see or feel is our sensation
only: for a day or two the world has a new interest to him; he alone knows
the secret which has been communicated to him by the philosopher, that mind
is all--when in fact he is going out of his mind in the first intoxication
of a great thought. But he soon finds that all things remain as they were
--the laws of motion, the properties of matter, the qualities of
substances. After having inflicted his theories on any one who is willing