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I think the multitude of my changes has blunted my perceptions. I trudge along like a traveller between high hedgerows; my heart is blinkered so that I am scarcely aware of landscapes. My thoughts are always with you I make calculations for the differences of time that I may follow more accurately your doings.

The first circumstance, that strikes my eye, is the great resemblance betwixt our impressions and ideas in every other particular, except their degree of force and vivacity. The one seem to be in a manner the reflexion of the other; so that all the perceptions of the mind are double, and appear both as impressions and ideas.

There are, indeed, men who really take a tree for a throne, and issue royal commands: some believe themselves to be God, for "false perceptions," or the graver form, "illusions," are the beginning of false reasoning, and the concomitants of delirium.

We have seen in former Views that the whole Phenomenal Universe, as perceived by our senses, and all intellectual thoughts or concepts based on those perceptions, are, in reality, only mists or shadows; they have no existence apart from our physical senses, and may be likened to a thin film, which at death is pricked and passes away like a scroll, leaving us face to face with the Reality.

Year by year, day by day, he had made himself into this delicate register of perceptions and sensations as far above the ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific registering instrument is beyond the rough human senses only to find that the beauty which alone could satisfy him was unattainable that he was never to know the last deep identification which only possession can give.

Reason, exempted from the illusions of prejudice, is, without doubt, wounded by the supposition of a soul, that feels, that thinks, that is afflicted, that rejoices, that has ideas, without having organs; that is to say, destitute of the only known medium, wanting all the natural means, by which, according to what we can understand, it is possible for it to feel sensations, have perceptions, or form ideas.

And I did not believe that one could here listen to philosophers, competent in other respects, who produce a God, as it were, ex machina, to bring about the final solution of the piece, maintaining that God exerts himself deliberately to move bodies as the soul pleases, and to give perceptions to the soul as the body requires.

And yet, moreover, her faculty of imagination was such that, if she had written a history, her view of scenes and characters would have been so vivid, and so powerfully expressed, and supported by such a show of argument, that it would have dominated over the reader, whatever might have been his previous opinions, or his cooler perceptions of its truth.

There is an opposite school of critics which rather finds the difficulty in picturing a life which has keen perceptions, robust emotions, and a solid surrounding all constructed in so diaphanous a material. Let us remember that everything depends upon its comparison with the things around it.

The perceptions of the artist, what he sees and how he sees it, can be transmitted to others only through processes as various as themselves: hair seen as colour is best imitated with paint, hair seen as form with twisted metal wire. It is as impossible to embody certain perceptions in some stages of handicraft as it would be to construct a complex machine in a rudimentary condition of mechanics.