"The first and favourite amusement of a child, even before it begins to play, is that of imitating the works of man. It builds bouses with cards or sticks, it navigates the little ocean of a bowl of water with a paper boat, or dams the stream of a gutter, and contrives something which it calls a mill, and it interests itself in the fate of its works with a care that resembles affection.

It afterwards goes to school, where its genius is killed by the barren study of a dead language, and the philosopher is lost in the linguist."

"When we think of the size of, a room, our ideas limit themselves to the walls, and there they stop. But when our eye, or our imagination darts into space, that is, when it looks upward into what we call the open air, we cannot conceive any walls or boundaries it can have, and if for the sake of resting our ideas we suppose a boundary, the question immediately renews itself,
and asks,
what is beyond that boundary?
and in the same manner, what beyond the next boundary? and so on till the fatigued imagination returns and says, there is no end."

Annons

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November 2010