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Selection is impossible, he cannot distinguish between the important and the unimportant; everything strikes him with equal vividness. To change anything of this country, so clear, so precise, so characteristic, is to soften; to alleviate what is too rude, is to weaken; to generalise, is to disfigure.
An earnest consideration, therefore, of anything desired is apt to enlarge and generalise aspiration till it embraces an ideal life; for from almost any starting-point the limits and contours of mortal happiness are soon descried. Prayer, inspired by a pressing need, already relieves its importunity by merging it in the general need of the spirit and of mankind.
Having stated this, the question is simply to know whether this observation of fact should be generalised or not. We may, it seems to me, decline to generalise it without falling into a contradiction in terms. It may be conceived that the objects which we are looking at continue to exist, without change, during the moments when we have lost sight of them.
Here, therefore, are evident effects, which mankind in general attribute to the power of heat; and it is from those known effects that we are to investigate subterraneous fire, or to generalise the power of heat, as acting in the interior parts, as well as on the surface of this earth.
They would be apt perhaps to generalise a little too daringly respecting these remote tree systems, concluding too confidently that a shrub or a flower was a tree system like their own, or that a great tree, every branch of which was far larger than their entire tree system, belonged to the same order and bore similar fruit.
"No, no, madame," he quickly rejoined, "you are apt to jump from one extreme to the other. It does not do to generalise thus. The young monks at Sainte Amandine showed themselves to be my enemies, I admit, and for this I shall punish them as they deserve, but the poor old monks merely desired my success and advantage.
And these are the self-same men! Never was there a more complete vindication of the policy of pegging away. So much for the effect of its training upon the regiment as a whole. But when you come to individuals, certain of whom we have encountered and studied in this rambling narrative, you find it impossible to generalise. Your one unshakable conclusion is that it takes all sorts to make a type.
In like manner, we sometimes fall in with persons who have seen much of the world, and of the men who, in their day, have played a conspicuous part in it, but who generalise, nothing, and have no observation, in the true sense of the word.
Things fall for us into a sort of natural perspective when we see them for a moment in going by; we generalise boldly and simply, and are gone before the sun is overcast, before the rain falls, before the season can steal like a dial-hand from his figure, before the lights and shadows, shifting round towards nightfall, can show us the other side of things, and belie what they showed us in the morning.
If we may generalise from the most perfect specimens of Phoenician town-walls that are still fairly traceable, as those of Eryx and Lixus, we may lay it down, that such walls were usually flanked, at irregular intervals, by square or rectangular towers, which projected considerably beyond the line of the curtain.
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