However all this may be, it is to individual things that we must refer the first beginnings of knowledge, the interest and the facility of acquisition. There are great inequalities in this interest and consequent facility; many individual objects inspire no interest at all in the first instance; while some of these become interesting afterward, in consequence of our discovering in them relationships to things of interest.
One notable distinction among the objects of knowledge is the distinction between movement or change, and stillness or inaction. It is movement that excites us most; still-life is rendered interesting by reference to movement. We are aroused and engrossed by all moving things; our attention is turned away from objects at rest to contemplate movements; and we imbibe with great rapidity the impressions of moving objects.
This brief survey of the sphere of individuality and of the various attractions presented by individuals is preparatory to the consideration of the most arduous part of knowledge—the knowledge of generals or generality. All the difficulties of the higher knowledge have reference to the generalizing process—the seeing of one in many. The arts of the teacher and the expositor are supremely requisite in sweetening the toil of this operation. At the present stage, however, the question is to assign the motives connected with general knowledge as distinct from individual knowledge.
General knowledge, represented by science, consists in holding together, by a single grasp, whole classes of objects, of facts, of operations. This must, by the very nature of the case, be more severe than holding an individual. To form an idea of one tree that we have repeatedly surveyed at leisure, round and round, is about the easiest exertion whether of attention or of memory. To form an idea of ten trees partly agreeing and partly differing among themselves is manifestly an entirely altered task; it is to exchange comparative simplicity for arduous complexity; yet this is what is needed everywhere in the higher knowledge.
The first emotional effect attendant on the process of generalizing facts, and serving to lighten the intellectual burden, is the flash of identity in diversity, an exhilarating charm that has been felt in every age by the searchers after truth. Many of the grandest discoveries in science have consisted, not in bringing to light any new individual fact, but in seeing a likeness between things formerly regarded as wholly unlike. Such was the great discovery of gravitation. The first flash of the recognition of a common power in the motions of the planets and the flight of a projectile on the earth was unutterably splendid; and, after a hundred repetitions, the emotional charm is unexhausted.
With the emotion of exhilarating surprise at the discovery of likeness among things seemingly unlike, there is another grateful feeling, the relief from an intellectual burden. This appears at first sight a
