The periods of mental change are not to be stated with equal certainty;
our bodies grow up under the care of nature, and depend so little on our
own management, that something more than negligence is necessary to
discompose their structure, or impede their vigour. But our minds are
committed in a great measure first to the direction of others, and
afterwards of ourselves. It would be difficult to protract the weakness
of infancy beyond the usual time, but the mind may be very easily
hindered from its share of improvement, and the bulk and strength of
manhood must, without the assistance of education and instruction, be
informed only with the understanding of a child.
Yet, amidst all the disorder and inequality which variety of discipline,
example, conversation, and employment, produce in the intellectual
advances of different men, there is still discovered, by a vigilant
spectator, such a general and remote similitude, as may be expected in
the same common nature affected by external circumstances indefinitely
varied. We all enter the world in equal ignorance, gaze round about us
on the same objects, and have our first pains and pleasures, our first
hopes and fears, our first aversions and desires, from the same causes;
and though, as we proceed farther, life opens wider prospects to our
view, and accidental impulses determine us to different paths, yet as
every mind, however vigorous or abstracted, is necessitated, in its
present state of union, to receive its informations, and execute its
purposes, by the intervention of the body, the uniformity of our
corporeal nature communicates itself to our intellectual operations; and
those whose abilities or knowledge incline them most to deviate from the
general round of life, are recalled from eccentricity by the laws of
their existence.
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