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For Lead dissolv'd in Spirit of Vinegar or Aqua-fortis gives a Solution cleer enough, and if the Menstruum be abstracted appears either Diaphanous or White. But here I must take notice, that of all the Metalls, there is not any which doth so easily and constantly disclose its unobvious colour as Copper doth.
The most thoroughgoing pessimists come from optimistic communities. Henry James, considered as a literary phenomenon, represented a sensitive mind's reaction against the obviousness of the life that one finds in most American "best sellers." I suppose that he reacted too far. I feel sure of it when he is so unobvious that I cannot understand him.
Now they were past, those days of feverish work and unexpected triumph and unaccountable failure; and in the dreariest of them St. George, dreaming wildly, had not dreamed all the unobvious joys which his fortune had brought to him.
If any one doubts the effectiveness of the unobvious alliterations here insisted on, let him read "jungle" for "desert," "maybe" for "perhaps," "tortured" for "mangled," "blown" for "thrown," and he will become sensible of the lack of the metrical support which the existing consonants give one another.
This, of course, supposes a comparison of the things, feature by feature and property by property, to ascertain what attributes they agree in; and not unfrequently an operation strictly inductive, for the purpose of ascertaining some unobvious agreement, which is the cause of the obvious agreements.
Even in purely experimental science, some inducement is necessary for trying one experiment rather than another; and though it is abstractedly possible that all the experiments which have been tried, might have been produced by the mere desire to ascertain what would happen in certain circumstances, without any previous conjecture as to the result; yet, in point of fact, those unobvious, delicate, and often cumbrous and tedious processes of experiment, which have thrown most light upon the general constitution of nature, would hardly ever have been undertaken by the persons or at the time they were, unless it had seemed to depend on them whether some general doctrine or theory which had been suggested, but not yet proved, should be admitted or not.
But, though a strong recommendation, this circumstance is not a sine qua non; since the most obvious properties of things may be of trifling importance compared with others that are not obvious. Our natural groups, therefore, must often be founded not on the obvious but on the unobvious properties of things, when these are of greater importance.
But I will rather observe, that not only when a man receives a great stroak upon his eye, or a very great one upon some other part of his head, he is wont to see, as it were, flashes of lightning, and little vivid, but vanishing flames, though perhaps his eyes be shut: But the like apparitions may happen, when the motion proceeds not from something without, but from something within the body, provided the unwonted fumes that wander up and down in the head, or the propagated concussion of any internal part in the body, do cause about the inward extremities of the Optick Nerve, such a motion as is wont to be there produc'd, when the stroak of the Light upon the Retina makes us conclude, that we see either Light, or such and such a Colour: This the most ingenious Des Cartes hath very well observ'd, but because he seems not to have exemplifi'd it by any unobvious or peculiar observation, I shall indeavour to illustrate this doctrine by a few Instances.
Besides, in those golden times of Indian delinquency, the arrival of a wealthy relative from the East was no very unobvious ingredient in a story. Nothing, indeed, can be more unlike than the manner in which the two scenes are managed.
It is only a disinterested regard for others, and especially for what comes after them, for the idea of posterity, of their country, or of mankind, whether grounded on sympathy or on a conscientious feeling, which ever directs the minds and purposes of classes or bodies of men towards distant or unobvious interests; and it can not be maintained that any form of government would be rational which required as a condition that these exalted principles of action should be the guiding and master motives in the conduct of average human beings.
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