104 THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE MIND., I. That is an ample and capacious mind which is «ready to take in vast and sublime ideas without pain or difficulty." Persons who have never been used to converse with any thing but the common, little and obvious affairs of life, have acquired a narrow or contracted habit of soul, that they are not able to stretch their intellects wide enough to admit large and noble thoughts ; they are ready to make their domestic, daily and familiar images of things the measure of all that is, and all that can be. Talk to them of the vast dimensions of the planetary worlds ; tell them that the star called Jupiter is a solid globe, two hundred and twenty times bigger tban our earth ; that the sun is a vast globe of fire above a thousand times bigger than Jupiter; that is, two hundred and twenty thousand times bigger than the earth ; that the " distance from the earth to the sun" is eighty -one millions of miles ; and that a cannon bullet shot from the earth would not arrive at the " nearest of the fixed stars" in some hundreds of years : theycannot bear the belief of. it, but hear all these glorious labours of astronomy as a mere' idle romance. Inform themof the amazing swiftness of the motion ofsome of the smallest or the biggest bodies in nature ; assure them, according to the best philosophy, that the planet Venus (that is, our morning or evening star, which is near as big as our earth,) though it seems to move from its place but a few yards in a month, does really fly seventy thousand miles in an hour, tell them that the rays of light shoot from the sun to our earth at the rate of one hundred and eighty thousand miles in the second of a minute, they stand aghast at such sort of talk, and believe it no more than the tales of giantsfifty yards high, and the rabbinical fables of leviathan, who every day swallows a fish of three miles long, and is thus preparing himself to be the foodand entertainment of the blessed at the feast of Paradise. These unenlarged souls are in the same manner disgusted with the wonders which the microscope has discovered concerning the shape, the limbs, and motions of ten thousand little animals, whose united bulk would not equal a pepper corn : They are ready to give the lie to all the improvements of our senses by the invention of a variety of glasses, and will scarcely believe any thing beyond the testimony of their naked eye without the assist- ance of art. Now if we would attempt in a learned manner to relieve the minds that labour under this defect, (I.) It is useful to begin with somefirst principlesof Geome- try, and lead them onward by degrees to the doctrine of quanti- ties which are incommensurable, or which will admit of no com- men measure, though it be never so small. By this means they will see the necessity of admitting the "infinite divisibility of
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