Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Evening thoughts / by a physician. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![poet paints more heroic deeds, accommodating the images of earthly things to the aspirations of the mind, not submitting the mind to things. Now, if the mind is superior in dignity to the outer world, the impressions which that outer world produces on the senses could never have produced the mind. And do not our novels, the heroic prose- poetry of our day, prove the same thing ? Is not the universal craving after such food, fi’om the errand-boy who buys his penny tale of horror, up to the reader of the fi-esh three- volume novel, a proof that something more is desired than experience can furnish, and that the reUsh is for higher events, more exalted aims, more ideal personages than every- day hfe affords? The reader’s ideal may not be a high one, hut it is something beyond his own experience. Recently the two theones have been prac- tically tested in this way. The Mosaic His- tory tells us that the first man was created a complete man, that he was endowed at once with language, as a gift, and did not ac(iuire it by the slow process of instruction ; that he was created with the ])owcr of naming](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2172975x_0020.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
