faculty of rationality and the power of reflection and self-observation, is exposed, at the same time, to the danger of self-admiration, vanity, pride,—in a word, self-love, with the manifold evils to which it gives rise.
But there is another way, also, in which the reason of man was capable of producing evil,—namely, by its liability to error: and error, when acted upon, produces disorder, mental and physical, or, in other words, evil; for disorder, derangement, or perversion of mind is, as shown in the preceding Section, the immediate cause of what we term evil. Man's reason is liable and very liable to error—and this, chiefly by mistaking appearances for realities. This is a most important truth, and deserves to be carefully considered. Both in the world without us, and in the mental world within us, things appear very differently from what they are. For illustration, take an obvious case. The Sun appears to rise in the East in the morning, ascend the sky, descend again and go down in the West. This appearance is so palpable, and so regularly occurring, that a very advanced state of science, and ages of scientific investigation, were necessary, to show its fallacy, and to demonstrate that it was only an appearance, and that that appearance was caused by the earth's turning on its own axis. Suppose, then, that the human reason, taking this appearance for a truth, should attempt to build upon if a system of astronomy—would not such a system be fundamentally erroneous? And this, we know, was actually done: the Ptolemaic system, which was generally received before the time of Copernicus, was of this very character. Here, then, is a simple yet strik-
