In the case of many instincts, it would seem that the craving for the object precedes the distinct cognition of it; that the object is only ascertained when, after various tentative gropings, it is stumbled upon, almost, it might seem, by chance.

Hartley's explanation, incomplete as in many points it is, of the more complex mental phenomena by the law of association, commended itself to me at once as a real analysis, and made me feel by contrast the insufficiency of the merely verbal generalizations of Condillac, and even of the instructive gropings and feelings about for psychological explanations, of Locke.

What I suggest is, that in this, as in every other Fine Art, instinct does mostly find itself in accordance with rule; and a knowledge of rules helps to direct the blind gropings of feeling, and to correct the occasional mistakes of instinct.

All through his youth he had felt blind yearnings and gropings for he knew not what.

With vision unsealed, we watch the gropings of purblind mortals after happiness, and smile at their stumblings, their blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced exultations, their groundless panics.

Nor frown, if, in next week's review, His gropings after the artistic Should crop out into verse, and take The form of some SWINBURNIAN distich.

The red man felt out after God with like childish gropings as his white brother in Central Asia.

It lighted the depths of the hearts whose outer pain and passion men were keen to read in the unpitying sunshine, and bared in those depths the feeble gropings for the right, the loving hope, the unuttered prayer.

Brutal as their blind gropings were, the Flagellants of the Dark Ages plied their whips to some dim purpose.

Christ never speaks as one giving the results of long and painful gropings after truth, but rather as one who is at home in the world to which God and the things of the spirit belong.

The blind gropings and intestine struggles of the rival possessors of monopolies were soon succeeded by united action.

Countless villages of the Seven Palms; countless schools badly equipped and poorly taught; countless Arulsfeeling within them dim gropings, half-formed ambitions.

Far from establishing the existence of a law of æsthetics among the Greeks, he simply remarks upon the extreme simplicity of their beginnings, and shows by what gropings they came from Hermes to the most perfect works of Phidias and Praxiteles.

"Abra was present when they named her name," and, after a few gropings after trutha few experiments that ended in nothinga voice was heard in the city, that streets could be paved with wood.

What would you have the stumbling and unanchored do with what has been thrust upon him?" "Man, in his gropings down through the centuries, has concocted, shivered, and patched certain social conditions well enough calculated to develop the best and the worst that is in us, making it easier for us to be bad than good, that good might be the standard.

He went on from this with many pauses and gropings after words and idiom, to tell, with a plaintiveness that seemed to Frowenfeld almost unmanly, the reasons why the people, a little of whose blood had been enough to blast his life, would never be free by the force of their own arm.

Evidently the door had been shut; then she heard a rustling of approaching feet and an awful whispering; then projected hands impeded her gropings toward safety.

This is her Book of Verseswren-like notes, Shy franknesses, blind gropings, haunting fears; At times across the chords abruptly floats A mist of passionate tears.

They represent the childish instincts of the human mind,its gropings after Truth,its dim ideals and shadowings forth of what it hopes will be.

It is then the skilled driver looks wise and does not betray his surprise to the gaping crowd, just looks as if the start were the anticipated result of his well-directed efforts instead of a chance hit amidst blind gropings.