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CHAPTER XVI.

Of enlarging the capacity of the Mind.

THERE are three things which in an especial manner go to make up that amplitude or capacity of mind, which is one of the noblest characters belonging to the understanding. 1. When the mind is ready to take in great and sublime ideas without pain or difficulty. 2. When the mind is free to receive new and strange ideas, upon just evidence, without great surprise or aversion. 3. When the mind is able to conceive or survey many ideas at once without confusion, and to form a true judgment derived from that extensive survey. The person who wants either of these characters may in that respect be said to have a narrow genius. Let us diffuse our meditations a little upon this subject.

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I. That is an ample and capacious mind which is ready to take in vast and sublime ideas without pain or difficulty. Persons who have never been used to converse with any thing but the common, little and obvious affairs of life, have acquired a narrow or contract. ed habit of soul, that they are not able to stretch their intellect wide enough to admit large, and noble thoughts; they are ready to make their domestic, daily and familiar images of things, the measure of all that is, and all that can be.

Talk to them of the vast dimensions of the planetary worlds; tell them that the star called Jupiter is a solid globe, two hundred and twenty times bigger than our earth; that the sun is a vast globe of fire above a thousand times bigger than Jupiter; that is, two hundred and twenty thousand times bigger than the earth; that the distance from the earth to the sun is eighty-one millions of miles ; and that a cannon bullet shot from the earth would not arrive at the nearest of the fixed stars in some hundreds of years; they cannot bear the belief of it, but hear all these glorious labours of astronomy as a mere idle romance.

Inform them of the amazing swiftness of the motion of some of the smallest or the biggest bodies in nature; assure them, according to the best philosophy, that the planet Venus (i. e. our morning or evening star, which is near as big as our earth,) though it seems to move from its place but a few yards in a month, does really fly seventy thousand miles in an hour; tell them that the rays of light shoot from the sun to our earth at the rate of one hundred and eighty thousand miles in the second of a minute they stand aghast at such sort of talk, and believe it no more than the tales of giants fifty yards high, and the rabinical fables of leviathan, who every day swallows a fish of three miles long, and is thus preparing himself to be the food and entertainment of the blessed at the feast of paradise.

These unenlarged souls are in the same manner disgusted with the wonders which the microscope has discovered concerning the shape, the limbs, and motions of ten thousand little animals, whose united bulk would not

equal a pepper-corn: they are ready to give the lie to all the improvements of our senses by the invention of a variety of glasses, and will scarce believe any thing beyond the testimony of their naked eye without the assistance of art.

Now if we would attempt in a learned manner to relieve the minds that labour under this defect,

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1. It is useful to begin with some first principles of ge ometry, and lead them onward by degrees to the doctrine of quantities which are incommensurable, or which will admit of no common measure, though it be never so small. By this means they will see the necessity of admitting the infinite divisibility of quantity or matter.

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This same doctrine may also be proved to their understandings, and almost to their senses, by some easier arguments in a more obvious manner. As the very opening and closing of a pair of compasses will evidently prove that if the smallest supposed part of matter or quantity be put between the points, there will be still less and less distances or quantities all the way between the legs, till you come to the head or joint; wherefore there is no such thing possible as the smallest quantity. But a little acquaintance with true philosophy and mathematical learning would soon teach them that there are no limits either as to the extention of space, or to the division of body, and would lead them to believe there are bodies amazingly great or small beyond their present imagination.

2. It is proper also to acquaint them with the cireumference of our earth, which may be proved by very easy

principles of geometry, geography and astronomy, to be about twenty-four thousand miles round, as it has been actually found to have this dimension by mariners who have sailed round it. Then let them be taught that in every twenty-four hours either the sun and stars must all move round this earth, or the earth must turn round upon its own axis. If the earth itself revolve thus, then each house or mountain near the equator must move at the rate of a thousand miles in an hour: but if (as they generally suppose) the sun or stars move round the earth, then (the circumference of their several orbits or spheres being vastly greater than this earth) they must have a motion prodigiously swifter than a thousand miles an hour. Such a thought as this will by degrees enlarge their minds, and they will be taught even upon their own principle of the diurnal revolutions of the heavens, to take in some of the vast dimensions of the heavenly bodies, their spaces and motions.

3. To this should be added the use of telescopes, to help them to see the distant wonders in the skies; and microscopes which discover the minutest parts of little animals, and reveal some of the finer and most curious works of nature. They should be acquainted also with some other noble inventions of modern philosophy, which have a great influence to enlarge the human understanding, of which I shall take occasion to speak more under the next head.

4. For the same purpose they may be invited to read those parts of Milton's admirable poem, entitled Paradise Lost, where he describes the armies and powers of

angels, the wars and the senate of devils, the creation of this earth, together with the descriptions of heaven, hell and paradise.

It must be granted that poesy often deals in these vast and sublime ideas. And even if the subject or matter of the poem doth not require such amazing and extensive thoughts, yet tropes and figures, which are some of the main powers and beauties of poesy, do so gloriously exalt the matter as to give a sublime imagination its prop er relish and delight.

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But especially where the subject is grand, the poet fails hot to represent it in all its grandeur.

So when the supremacy of a God is described,

He sees with equal eye, as God of all,

A hero perish, or a sparrow fall :

Atoms or systems, into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

A a

POPE.

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