There is another consideration, connected with this portion of the subject, which well deserves attention. A conclusion may be a very correct one, and may have been reached by a very satisfactory process, although the person who has made it, may be unable to state the grounds upon which it rests, or meet the objections which may be made against it. This applies not only to those cases, where the conclusion mainly rests upon trust, but also to others. An eminent statesman recommended a person going out in an official capacity, to give his decisions confidently, but not to venture to declare the reasons. The decisions would probably be right, but the reasons, as _stated by him_, might not be. It need not be inferred from this that the reasons upon which he would really act were wrong, but rather that from want of practice, or power of analysis, or some other cause, he would be unable to bring them out correctly. The processes of thought pass so rapidly through the mind, that even the most practised thinkers often find it difficult to arrest them in their progress, and state the various steps by which they have arrived at their conclusions. The simplest and most certain grounds of our conclusions are, in fact, not unfrequently those which it is most difficult to bring out into distinct view. They have so often passed through the mind that we have ceased to notice them, although, all the while, they contribute essentially to the judgment which is formed; or they lie so far back, in the depths of our consciousness, that it is almost impossible to recover them. Necessarily, nothing can be so simple, or so certain, in one sense, as intuitions, that is, those things which we know or believe without any intermediate process of thought, and yet, down to the present time, those who have most deeply studied the subject hesitate to decide exactly as to what are intuitions, and what are not. We conclude then that, while, on the one hand, we should not discredit the rational powers of men, as if they were unequal to perform the task allotted to them; we must not, on the other, be easily shaken with regard to conclusions which have been made with care and consideration, because we may be unable to trace out accurately the arguments by which they are supported, or answer the objections which are made against them.