(1) And it is the reason why the expert cricketer, when he has occupied an hour in blocking ball after ball without making more than half a dozen lucky runs—which is now called admirable sound defence, as if sound defence was the right way to win a battle—and then attempts his only real stroke, whether a hard drive to the on or the off, or a hit to leg, he has got his mind and muscles so set by prolonged routine of practice that they are not immediately pliable enough to make the stroke rightly, and he is forthwith caught or bowled. He is not unlike a person who, thinking painfully too long and precisely on the event, cannot come to a decision, or, if he does, as likely as not makes a wrong decision. In the play of life, as in the play of cricket, a too self-conscious and exclusive heed to the individual score spoils the game. There may be some measure of truth in the reported saying of Cromwell that a man never rises so high as when he does not know where he is going, although Cardinal de Retz (in his Mémoires), when the saying was repeated to him, said, “S'il est de ce sentiment, il me paraît d'un fou.” Google Scholar

(2) The largest part of mind is usually quiescent in its habitual functioning and a large part of its mentality always undeveloped. Consider how easily a person who has been taught and trained to speak three or four languages can speak them without suffering any apparent deduction from his proper mentality; and, again, how readily one who has learnt long passages of poetry by heart as a child can, once they are well started, repeat them by rote in old age without the least thought or effort. How many, then, the unused mental tracts in most minds on which no register of function is ever made, and how few the tracts which ever function as they might do in them I It is not so much more mind that is wanted in the majority of mankind, who for the most part do not reason, not having the least notion that reason, like speech, needs to be learnt, as more use of the uncultivated mental tracts which are left derelict. However much is put into a mind, there is commonly room for more, if the contents are rightly packed.Google Scholar

(3) For purposes of worship a personalization of some kind is inevitable. How pray and praise otherwise? Hence such expressions as “Our Father,” “King of Kings,” “Lord of Lords,” “Almighty Wings,” and the like symbols of an ultimate reality. What would become of the spiritual feeling and melody of some of the Psalms, and of the fervent curses of others of them, if they were not addressed to a personal Being? It is related of Queen Victoria that, when a favourite lady-in-waiting was dilating on the joy it would be to meet in heaven, not only those who had been dear on earth but such biblical persons as Abraham Isaac, David, etc., the Queen curtly interjecred, “I do not wish to meet David.” Many devotional hymns in common use, if understood literally, would grossly shock feeling by their crudities of expression and utter absence of real poetry, were it not for the hallowed associations of custom and place of worship, and for the moving melody of the familiar tunes by which is uttered in song what cannot be expressed in words. The deepest and inmost utterances of nature are in cries and songs of discharged feeling, not in definite articulations of words, which are specific motor adaptations of expression: the deep feelings of religion and love, therefore exclamations of feeling inexpressible in words, ineffable. Symbols, metaphors, and ceremonials have always been necessary to give form to feeling, the mistake having been to count those befitting one stage of human development unchangeable and suitable to all succeeding generations.Google Scholar

(4) Cannot now heartily sympathize with the Bridgwater Treatise in its naïve admiration of “the infinite and ineffable wisdom with which the various instincts are planted in animals to fit them for the respective purposes they were designed for.” Although the fact is grateful to the understanding, it is grating to the aesthetic and moral sensibilities which nature is now evolving through human nature in its onward progress.Google Scholar