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PHYSICIAN TO THE NORFOLK AND NORWICH HOSPITAL;

CONSULTING PHYSICIAN TO THE EASTERN COUNTIES' ASYLUM FOR IDIOTS;
MEDICO-PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF

FOREIGN ASSOCIATE OF THE

PARIS;

AUTHOR OF "APHASIA AND THE LOCALISATION OF THE FACULTY OF LANGUAGE."

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PREFACE.

There are two contrary intellectual tendencies, which characterize minds of different orders, and, when indulged to excess, become intellectual vices. The one is the tendency to see a distinction where there is no real difference. This is the snare of cultivated (or perhaps of over-cultivated) minds, whose constitution may never have been robust, and what vigour they once had has been refined away by speculation. To see a distinction without a difference is the vice of the

trained and subtle thinker. Opposed to this is the tendency to ignore real differences; to bring rapidly under the same category two cases which have one

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or more superficial features of resemblance, but which are so fundamentally unlike that they cannot with any justice be classed together. It may have often happened to us to meet with a stranger, who has some one common feature with a person of our acquaintance. In virtue of his having such a feature he reminds us for a moment of that person; but, when we take a second look, we see that the resemblance is only on the surface; the whole head and bust are of a different type altogether. But in matters intellectual, a resemblance sometimes seems so captivating (especially if our own researches have brought it to light), that we do not take the trouble to look at the plain and deep-seated differences, but treat it as a real analogy, and rest the weight of a whole theory upon it. It must be, one

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would think, under the power of some hallucination of this kind, that the disciples

of Evolution venture to deny the existence in man of a new and distinguishing element, over and above the nature which he has in common with the lower animals. How this distinction can be matter of doubt to any one, except under the fascination of a favourite theory which blinds the mind to every thing subversive of itself, is truly surprising. The prerogative of man is not an assertion of theology merely. It is written not more clearly on the pages of the Bible than on the common sense and experience of all the world. There seems to be a wide gulf even between vegetable life and brute matter; a wider still between the sensibility and instinct of animals and vegetable life; and a gulf perfectly impassable

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