Smith, Sydney (1771-1845)

Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy: Delivered at the Royal Institution, in the Years 1804, 1805, and 1806

New York

Harper & Brothers

1850

"The relation discovered, must be something remote from all the common tracks and sheep-walks made in the mind."

Surprise is so essential an ingredient of wit, that no wit will bear repetition; -- at least the original electrical feeling produced by any piece of wit can never be renewed. There is a sober sort of approbation succeeds at hearing it the second time, which is as different from its original rapid, pungent volatility, as a bottle of champagne that has been open three days is, from one that has at that very instant emerged from the darkness of the cellar. To hear that the top of Mont Blanc is like an umbrella, though the relation be new to me, is not sufficient to excite surprise; the idea is so very obvious, it is so much within the reach of the most ordinary understandings, that I can derive no sort of pleasure from the comparison. The relation discovered, must be something remote from all the common tracks and sheep-walks made in the mind; it must not be a comparison of color with color, and figure with figure, or any comparison which, though individually new, is specifically stale, and to which the mind has been in the habit of making many [End Page 119] similar; but it must be, something removed from common apprehension, distant from the ordinary haunts of thought, -- things which are never brought together in the common events of life, and in which the mind has discovered relations by its own subtilty and quickness.
(pp. 119-20)

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Smith, Sydney (1771-1845). Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy: Delivered at the Royal Institution, in the Years 1804, 1805, and 1806. Royal Institution of Great Britain. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850. <Link to Google Books>

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05/14/2009