I have not read them myself, but such is my opeenion,'[20] he was comparing the merely rational conclusion which might have resulted from a reading of Burns's works with the conviction about them which he found ready-made in his mind, and which was the more sacred to him and more intimately his own, because he did not know how it was produced.
[20] _Auld Licht Idylls_, p.

220.
Opinion thus unconsciously formed is a fairly safe guide in the affairs of our daily life.

The material world does not often go out of its way to deceive us, and our final convictions are the resultant of many hundreds of independent fleeting inferences, of which the valid are more numerous and more likely to survive than the fallacious.

But even in our personal affairs our memory is apt to fade, and we can often remember the association between two ideas, while forgetting the cause which created that association.

We discover in our mind a vague impression that Simpson is a drunkard, and cannot recollect whether we ever had any reason to believe it, or whether some one once told us that Simpson had a cousin who invented a cure for drunkenness.