to heaven, as equal in virtue to Arundhati." By such jargon is ignorance and innocence misled. Upon the death of her husband the deluded widow sacrifices herself; she places her dead husband's head on her lap, and, amidst the dancing of maidens and the blessings of priests, joyously lights her funeral pile.

Many years have not passed away since, under erroneous notions of piety, England abounded with nunneries and monasteries; and in countries where the Catholic religion prevails, they still abound, in defiance of the maxim that nature never says one thing, and wisdom another.* Such is the nature of error from misunderstanding the meaning of the word piety.

Thus error misunderstands the properties of inanimate creatures, as in the case of the camphor; or of animate, as in the case of the scorpion; and of man, as in the case of the Italian boy; or of the words used to express the institutions of society, as in the case of marriage; or of piety, as in the widows burning themselves in India, or nunneries and monasteries.

As knowledge consists in understanding the sequence of events, or cause and effect, so error consists in misunderstanding this sequence. A physician, who mistakes the consequence of ad

* Barton says, "The fishponds of nunneries always contained the skeletons of children.

ministering a particular medicine, when he calls the next morning in the expectation that his patient is better, finds that he is dead.

$2.

DIFFERENT SORTS OF ERROR.

Error, therefore, is of two sorts. 1st. Misun

derstanding the properties of things. understanding the meaning of words.

2nd. Mis

§. 3.

CAUSES OF THE EXISTENCE OF ERROR.

As our opinions are formed by impressions on our senses, by the communications of others, and by our own reasoning upon opinions formed by these two modes, error must be traceable to the operation of one or more of these causes. The questions, therefore, as to the causes error are, 1st. Do our senses mislead us? 2nd. Are we misled by the communications of others? 3rd. Do our own reasonings mislead us? or are we misled by the joint operation of two or more of these causes?

Our senses never mislead us. Who can doubt that if he put his hand into the fire it will burn him; or that if he jump into the river it will wet him? The philosopher, who contended that there was not any such thing as motion, was answered by his opponent walking across the room.

D

Our

senses may appear and do appear to mislead us. It is nothing but appearance. When sailing on a summer's day, the distance between the ship and the shore increases. This our sense of seeing tells us. Unaccustomed to this motion, we mislead ourselves by supposing that the shore This is not a deception of the senses but

moves.

of the reason. So when we

"Behold the wandering moon
Riding near her highest noon,

Like one that has been led astray

Through the heaven's wide pathless way

And oft as if her head she bow'd,

Stooping through a fleecy cloud"

Our senses tell us that the distance between the moon and the clouds varies. Unaccustomed to

this motion, we may mislead ourselves by imagining that the moon moves; this is not a deception of the senses but of the reason.

In one of Miss Burney's novels, it is stated that a ball of ice, painted to resemble a peach, was placed in a dish of peaches. An old sea officer, for whom the bait was laid, eagerly took and bit it. It is a painted snowball," he ex"It claimed, dashing it in agony to the ground. Was he misled by his senses, or was it a deception of his reasoning powers? is the question. His senses told him that the peaches resembled each other and nothing more. As far as his

senses were concerned, any one of the peaches might be poisonous; but, as they resembled in appearance, he erroneously inferred that they really resembled. This was an error not of the senses but of the reason. A Bristol stone, resembling a diamond, may mislead a person unaccustomed to the nature of this mineral; but a skilful lapidary will, by the exercise of his reason, instantly see the difference.

The communications of others constantly mislead us they teem with the errors of the communicators. This is the chief reason of the differences of opinion which exist in every part of the earth; why Turks take opium and two or more wives; and Christians alcohol. Why the child of a Jew is a Jew and recoils from swine's flesh; and the child of a Mahometan, a Mahometan; why the child of a Presbyterian is a Presbyterian; of a Catholic, a Catholic; of a Jumper, a Jumper; of a Muggletonian, a Muggletonian. This, to use the words of a celebrated divine,*" is the chief cause of the numerous litter of strange, senseless, absurd opinions that crawl about the world, to the disgrace of reason and the unanswerable reproach of a broken intellect."

Our own reasoning constantly misleads us.When a child puts a shell to his ear and hears

* Dr. South, in his noble sermon upon Adam in Paradise.

the murmuring, he will ascribe the noise to any but the real cause. When Eve first saw her. shadow in the water, she says,

"As I bent down to look, just opposite

A shape within the watery gleam appeared
Bending to look at me; I started back,
It started back."

The errors from this source extend to all men and are often most powerful in youthful genius, which transfers its own sweet thoughts and puts a glory upon the object of its affection: deluding itself with the imagination, that what is of the earth earthy is of the Lord from heaven.

The modes by which our reason is misled are almost infinite. To prevent these errors, to rectify our reason, Lord Bacon devoted his mind in his immortal Novum Organum, where he has explained "how our reason should be guided, that it be right, that it be not a blind guide, but direct us to the place where the star appears and point to the very house where the babe lies."

This subject of the causes of error is of such importance, that it may be well to illustrate it by a familiar instance. I gave to one of my grandchildren, a little girl of five years of age, a child of great life of mind, the toy of a magnetic swan, in a dish filled with water. On the attractive end of the magnet I placed a small piece of cake; I held it to the swan, who immediately approached;