words we have it in our power to make such COMBINATIONS as we cannot
possibly do otherwise. By this power of combining, we are able, by the
addition of well?chosen circumstances, to give a new life and force to
the simple object. In painting we may represent any fine figure we
please; but we never can give it those enlivening touches which it may
receive from words. To represent an angel in a picture, you can only
draw a beautiful young man winged: but what painting can furnish out
anything so grand as the addition of one word, "the angel of the LORD?"


SECURITY OF TRUTH.

I then thought, and am still of the same opinion, that error, and not
truth of any kind, is dangerous; that ill conclusions can only flow from
false propositions; and that, to know whether any proposition be true or
false, it is a preposterous method to examine it by its apparent
consequences.


IMITATION AN INSTINCTIVE LAW.

For as sympathy makes us take a concern in whatever men feel, so this
affection prompts us to copy whatever they do; and consequently we have
a pleasure in imitating, and in whatever belongs to imitation merely as
it is such, without any intervention of the reasoning faculty, but
solely from our natural constitution, which Providence has framed in
such a manner as to find either pleasure or delight, according to the
nature of the object, in whatever regards the purposes of our being. It
is by imitation far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and
what we learn thus, we acquire not only more effectually, but more