Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: other. If we attempt to listen to both, we can understand neither. The fact seems to be, that when we attend constantly to one of the speakers, the words spoken by the other make no impression on the mind, in consequence of our not attending to them ; and affect us as little as if they had not been uttered. This power, however, of the mind, to attend to either speaker at pleasure, supposes that it te, at one and the same time, conscious of the sensations which both produce. And the power of reflection, in like manner, turns the mind inward, to view and observe its own actions and operations ; but art and pains are requisite to set it at a distance, as it were, from itself, nnd make it an object of its own scrutiny. Vet art and pains will daily diminish this difficulty, and thereby enable us to think with precision and accuracy on many important subjects, wherein others must blindly follow a leader. CHAPTER VI. OF THE DIFFICULTY OF ATTENDING TO THE OPERATIONS OF OUK OWN MINDS, INTERSPERSED WITH OBSERVATIONS WHICH MAY ASSIST US IN OVERCOMING THIS DIFFICULTY. 89. The difficulty of attending to our mental operations ought to be well understood, and justly estimated, by those .who would make any progress in the ail of loic ; that they may neither, on the one hand, expect success without labour and application of thought; nor, on the other, be discouraged, by conceiving that the obstacles which lie in the way are insuperable, and that there is no certainty to be attained in the science of intellectual philosophy. OAs. The following dcvclopemcnt of the causes of this difficulty, and the effects which have arisen from it, will enable us to form a true judgment of these causes and effects. 90. The number and quick succession of the operations of the mind make it difficult...