114 THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE MIND. thus may have an unhappy influence to overwhelm the colder- standing, with darkness, and a pervert the judgment. A Mile black paint will shamefully tincture and spoil twenty gay colours. Consider yet further, that if you content yourself frequently . with words instead of ideas, or with cloudy and confused notions of things, how impenetrable will,that darkness be, and how vast and endless that confusion which must surround and involve the understanding, when many of these obscure and confused ideas come to be set before the soul at once ? and how impossible will it be to form a clear and just judgment about them. III. Use all diligence to acquire and treasure up a large store of ideas and notions: take every opportunity to add something.to your stock ; and by frequent recollection fix them in your memory : nothing tends to confirm and enlarge the memory like a frequent review of its possessions, then the brain being well furnished with various traces, signatures and images, will have a rich treasure always ready to be proposed or offered to the soul, when it directs its thoughts towards any particular subject. This will gradually give the mind a faculty of survey- ing many objects at once ; as a room that is richly adorned and hung round with a great variety of pictures, strikes the eye almost at once with all that variety, especially if they have been well surveyed one by one at first : this makes it habitual and more easy to the inhabitants to take in many of those painted scenes with a single glance or two. Here note, that by acquiring a rich treasure of notions, I do not mean only single ideas, but also propositions, observations and experiences, with reasonings, and arguments upon the various subjects that occur among na- tural or moral, common or sacred affairs; that when you arc called to judge concerning any question, you will have some principles of truth, some useful axioms and observations always. ready at hand to direct and assist your judgment. IV. It is necessary that we should as far as possible en- tertain and lay up our daily new ideas, in a regular order, and range the acquisitions of oursouls under proper heads, whe... ther of divinity, law, physics, mathematics, morality, politics, trade, domestic life, civility, dencency, &c. whether of cause,, effect, substance, mode, power, property, body, spirit, &c. we should inure our minds to method and order continually ; and, when we take in any fresh ideas, occurrences and observations, we should dispose of them in their proper places, and see how they stand and agree with the rest of our notions on the saine subject : as a scholar would dispose of a new book on a proper shelf among its kindred authors; or as an officer at the post house in London disposes of every letter he takes in, placing it in thebox that belongs to tite proper road or county. In any of these cases if things lay in a heap, the addition of any new
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