Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers

XII 18 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT and moons, by a higher force of the same law the mind detaches minds, and a mind de- taches thoughts or intellections. These again all mimic in their sphericity the first mind, and share its power. Life is incessant parturition. There are vivi- parous and oviparous minds; minds that pro- duce their thoughts complete men, like armed soldiers, ready and swift to go out to resist and conquer all the armies of error, and others that deposit their dangerous unripe thoughts here and there to lie still for a time and be brooded in other minds, and the shell not be broken until the next age, for them to begin, as new individuals, their career. The perceptions of a soul, its wondrous pro- geny, are born by the conversation, the marriage of souls; so nourished, so enlarged. They are detached from their parent, they pass into other minds; ripened and unfolded by many they hasten to incarnate themselves in action, to take body, only to carry forward the will which sent them out. They take to themselves wood and stone and iron; ships and cities and nations and armies of men and ages of duration; the pomps of religion, the armaments of war, the codes and heraldry of states ; agriculture, trade, commerce; POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT 19 POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT 19 —these are the ponderous instrumentalities into which the nimble thoughts pass, and which they animate and alter, and presently, antagon- ized by other thoughts which they first aroused, or by thoughts which are sons and daughters of these, the thought buries itself in the new thought of larger scope, whilst the old instru- mentalities and incarnations are decomposed and recomposed into new. Our eating, trading, marrying, and learning are mistaken by us for ends and realities, whilst they are properly symbols only ; when we have come, by a divine leading, into the inner firma- ment, we are apprised of the unreality or repre- sentative character of what we esteemed final.…