Thus Cicero says, that Plato and Demosthenes, Aristotle and Isocrates, might have respectively excelled in each other's province, but that each was absorbed in his own.

Specimens of this peculiarity occur every day.

You can hardly persuade some men to talk about anything but their own pursuit; they refer the whole world to their own centre, and measure all matters by their own rule, like the fisherman in the drama, whose eulogy on his deceased lord was 'he was so fond of fish.'"[283] The same author further says:[284] "When anything, which comes before us, is very unlike what we commonly experience, we consider it on that account untrue; not because it really shocks our reason as improbable, but because it startles our imagination as strange.

Now, revelation presents to us a perfectly different aspect of the universe from that presented by the sciences.

The two informations are like the distinct subjects represented by the lines of the same drawing, which, accordingly as they are read {269} on their concave or convex side, exhibit to us now a group of trees with branches and leaves, and now human faces." ...