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Through sensation, feeling may be directly occasioned, and activity immediately follow from it, yet this is of an involuntary character. Thought, also, unites feeling and volition, points out the present relation of things, and guides the mind in the right use of means. While the first movement is in the direction now indicated, there are reflex influences of an opposite character. The feelings affect strongly the thoughts. They direct attention to pleasing objects, fasten the faculties upon them, and thus intensify the emotions already established. The candor and fairness of the judgment are lost through this influence of the feelings, withdrawing attention from facts displeasing to them, and minutely and laboriously searching out those which maintain and justify their action. Unusual intellectual and moral development is required on the part of one possessed of strong feelings to reach even ordinary impartiality, and to give any considerable weight to reasons for action opposed to the inclinations. The intellect thus becomes the instrument of the feelings, using all its acuteness, its power of presentation and argument in behalf of conclusions already reached by the heart. When the intellect is thus the sagacious counsellor or the cunning attorney of the emotions, the distortions of truth are proportioned to its strength, and the most powerful thinking is productive only of misleading sophisms.

The feelings in the same way frequently engage the will, and the man becomes headstrong and willful in the line of action indicated by them. There is no defence against this but that quick moral sense, which responds with an adequate alternative to the selfish suggestions of the mind, and introduces a calm consideration of the claims of duty in each case. The only sufficient resistance to this domination which strong feelings are sure to assume over the intellect and the will, through the one evoking all the