Page:Toleration and other essays.djvu/243

Rh flower of the field that one treads underfoot is an infinitely superior thing.

There comes at length a time when a greater or smaller number of perceptions, received in our mechanism, seem to present themselves to our will. We think that we are forming ideas. It is as if, when we turn the tap of a fountain, we were to think that we cause the water which streams out. We create ideas, poor creatures that we are! It is evident that we had no share in the former, yet we would regard ourselves as the authors of the latter. If we reflect well on this vain boast of forming ideas, we shall see that it is insolent and absurd.

Let us remember that there is nothing in external objects with the least analogy, the least relation, to a feeling, an idea, a thought. Let an eye or an ear be made by the best artisan in the world; the eye will see nothing, the ear will hear nothing. It is the same with our living body. The universal principle of action does everything in us. He has not made us an exception to the rest of nature.

Two experiences which are constantly repeated during the course of our life, and of which I have spoken elsewhere, will convince every thoughtful man that our ideas, our wills, and our actions do not belong to us.

The first is that no one knows, or can know, what