Page:Omniana.djvu/238

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
220
OMNIANA.

clock is out of its wits: it has struck one four times over.

This is a good exemplification of the nature of Bulls, which will be found always to contain in them a confusion of (what the Schoolmen would have called) Objectivety with Subjectivety, in plain English, the impression of a thing as it exists in itself and extrinsically, with the idea which the mind abstracts from the impression. Thus, number, or the total of a series, is a generalization of the mind, an ens rationis not an ens reale. I have read many attempts at a definition of a Bull, and lately in the Edinburgh Review, but it then appeared to me, that the definers had fallen into the same fault with Miss Edgeworth in her delightful essay on Bulls, and given the definition of the genus, Blunder, for that of the particular species, Bull. I venture therefore to propose the following: a Bull consists in a mental juxtaposition of incongruous ideas with the sen-