Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/229

RhPROP. VII.———— obs. 6); to wit, familiarity. The influence of this principle in deadening the activity and susceptibility of the mind is overwhelming to an extreme. Drugged with this narcotic, man's intellect turns with indifference from the common and the trite, and courts only the startling and the strange. Every one must have remarked, both in his own case and in that of others, how prone we are to suppose that little advantage, and no valuable result, can accrue from a careful study of that to which we are thoroughly habituated. "Perpetual custom," says Cicero, "makes the mind callous, and people neither admire nor require a reason for those things which they constantly behold." Rare events are the natural ailment of wonder; and, when it cannot be supplied with these, our inquisitiveness is apt to languish and expire. Abundant examples of this tendency—this proneness to prefer the unusual to the customary, and to conceive that things are marvellous in proportion to their rarity, and that the seldomer they appear the more are they entitled to our regard—might be drawn from the practice of mankind in the daily conduct of life, as well as from the history of science in all periods, but especially in the earlier stages of its development. The Science of an untutored age passes by unheeded the ordinary appearances of nature; but her interest is easily aroused, her attention is readily enchained, by such mysterious portents as the earthquake and the eclipse. She is blind to