Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/277

 course; at least the consideration of it would involve some real or apparent repetitions. But we may find an open field in eliciting the sense of ANALOGY; or that more refined discernment of resemblances which embraces general physical laws, identities of principle, or modes of action, the sameness of final causes, and those agreements, or points of harmony, that are discoverable between the material and the spiritual and moral worlds. A very large portion of that sort of incidental exercise of the facultiesthat incessant, intellectual communion, which should be the characteristic of home education, turns upon the diversified methods that are employed in developing the sense of analogy. All courses of mental exertion are opened to the mind that is already alive to this class of perceptions; and it may be said that a keen and active perception of analogy involves every kind of mental power.

Instances adduced just as they present themselves, may serve well enough to illustrate a method of treatment which, in its own nature, must be desultory, and dependent upon occasions, accidentally presented. I do not know that it would be possible, even if it seemed desirable, to follow a prescribed plan, or a logical order, in carrying forward this species of culture.

No instance is more fit for giving exercise to the early developed sense of analogy, or better exemplifies the agreeable emotion which, by the conformation of our minds, attends this perception, than that furnished when we bring the labours, politics, and passions, of some of the insect tribes into comparison with the economy of human life. The insect edifices, the insect police, the insect social sentiments, furnish a lively and stimulating species of instructive entertainment; and the pleasure, and the excitement, in such instances, turn upon this propensity of the human mind to catch, and to please itself with, analogies.