to avoid feeling with respect to this prevailing destruction, has so
effectually taught us how to maintain the exemption, by all the requisite
sleights of overlooking, diverting, forgetting, and admitting deceptive
maxims of palliation, that the art or habit is become almost mechanical.
When fully matured, it appears like a wonderful adventitious faculty--a
power of evading the sight, of _not seeing_, what is obviously and
glaringly presented to view on all sides. There is, indeed, a dim general
recognition that such things are; the hearing of a bold denial of their
existence, would give an instant sense of absurdity, which would provoke a
pointed attention to them, the more perfectly to verify their reality; and
the perception how real and dreadful they are, might continue distinct as
long as we were in the spirit of contradicting and exploding that absurd
denial; but, in the ordinary state of feeling, the mind preserves an easy
dulness of apprehension toward the melancholy vision, and sees it as if it
saw it not.

This fortified insensibility may, indeed, be sometimes broken in upon with
violence, by the sudden occurrence of some particular instance of human
destruction, in either import of the word, some example of peculiar
aggravation, or happening under extraordinary and striking circumstances,
or very near us in place or interest. An emotion is excited of pity, or
terror, or horror; so strong, that if the person so affected has been
habitually thoughtless, and has no wish to be otherwise, he fears he shall
never recover his state of careless ease; or, if of a more serious
disposition, thinks it impossible he can ever cease to feel an awful and
salutary effect. This more serious person perhaps also thinks it must be
inevitable that henceforward his feelings will be more alive to the
miseries of mankind. But how obstinate is an inveterate habitual state of
the mind against any single impressions made in contravention to it! Both
the thoughtless and the more reflective man may probably find, that a