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COMPLETE WORKS. Centenary Edition. 12 vols., crown 8vo. With Portraits, and copious notes by Ep- WARD WALDO EMERSON. Price per volume, $1.75.
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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, Boston AND NEw YORK Centenarp Edition THE COMPLETE WORKS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY EDWARD WALDO EMERSON AND A GENERAL INDEX VOLUME XII oN As i Lier fe “i he “ene hy ea te.
ag he FA f f hah ‘ NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT AND OTHER PAPERS BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY Che Wiverside Press, Cambridge 1go4 COPYRIGHT, 1893 AND 1904, BY EDWARD W. EMERSON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED “PREFACE N this volume, in addition to the papers which it contained in the Riverside Edition, five of Mr. Emerson’s lectures appear in print for the first time. They are “ Instinct and Inspiration,” “The Celebration of Intellect,” “Country Life,” “Concord Walks,” and “ Art and Criticism.” Some account of the origin, or the circum- stances attending the delivery of these lectures, will be found inthe Notes. The first of them belonged to the course on Natural History of Intellect and now follows the lecture which bears that name in the Riverside Edition, but is here called “ Powers and Laws of Thought.”’ These two, with “ Memory,” are grouped under the general name of that course. Important pass- ages from another lecture and from other ver- sions of the first here given, are introduced into the Notes to it.
The General Index, which first appeared in the Riverside Edition, has been enlarged and improved by Miss Laura Woolsey Lord, to whom and to many friends who have given valuable help in tracing quotations to their vi PREFACE sources, and for information used in the Notes, my thanks are due. I desire to make grateful acknowledgment also to Mr. Waldo Emerson Forbes for assistance given me in my work, and to the heirs of Mr. J. Elliot Cabot and to Mr. George Willis Cooke, Mr. Moncure D. Conway, Mr. Charles J. Woodbury, Mr. John Albee, Dr. Richard Garnett, Dr. William T. Harris, and Mr. F. B. Sanborn, from whose books I have quoted, as well as to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company for extracts from books of which they own the copyright. EDWARD WALDO EMERSON.
Concorp, October 12, 1904.
CONTENTS PAGE I, NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT I I. POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT 3 II. INSTINCT AND INSPIRATION 65 Ill. MEMORY go Il. THE CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT 111 III. COUNTRY LIFE 133 IV. CONCORD WALKS 169 ’ V. BOSTON 181 VI. MICHAEL ANGELO 213 VII. MILTON 245 VIII. ART AND CRITICISM 281 IX. PAPERS FROM THE DIAL 307 I. THOUGHTS ON MODERN LITERATURE 309 II. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 337 III. PRAYERS 350 IV. AGRICULTURE OF MASSACHUSETTS 358 V. EUROPE AND EUROPEAN BOOKS 365 VI. PAST AND PRESENT 379 VII. A LETTER 392 VIII. THE TRAGIC 405 NOTES 419g GENERAL INDEX 485 ty ey % 4 K Ars ae a Aa : NWN dd ee I NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT Bacon’s perfect law of inquiry after truth was that nothing should be in the globe of matter which was not also in the globe of crystal; that is, nothing should take place as event in life which did not also exist as truth in the mind.
Power that by obedience grows, Knowledge that its source not knows, Wave which severs whom it bears From the things which he compares, NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT I POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT HAVE used such opportunity as I have had, and lately in London and Paris, to attend scientific lectures; and in listening to Richard Owen’s masterly enumeration of the parts and laws of the human body, or Michael Faraday’s explanation of magnetic powers, or the botanist’s descriptions, one could not help admiring the irresponsible security and happiness of the atti- tude of the naturalist; sure of admiration for his facts, sure of their sufficiency." They ought to interest you; if they do not, the fault lies with you.
Then I thought—could not a similar enu- meration be made of the laws and powers of the Intellect, and possess the same claims on the student? Could we have, that is, the exhaustive accuracy of distribution which chemists use in their nomenclature and anatomists in their descriptions, applied to a higher class of facts; to 4 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT those laws, namely, which are common to chem- istry, anatomy, astronomy, geometry, intellect, morals and social life; — laws of the world?
Why not? These powers and laws are also facts in a Natural History. They also are objects of science and may be numbered and recorded, like stamens and vertebre. At the same time they have a deeper interest, as in the order of Nature they lie higher and are nearer to the mysterious seat of power and creation.’
For at last, it is only that exceeding and uni- versal part which interests us, when we shall read in a true history what befalls in that king- dom where a thousand years is as one day, and see that what is set down is true through all the sciences; in the laws of thought as well as of chemistry.’
In all sciences the student is discovering that Nature, as he calls it, is always working, in wholes and in every detail, after the laws of the human mind. Every creation, in parts or in particles, is on the method and by the means which our mind approves as soon as it is thoroughly acquainted with the facts; hence the delight. No matter how far or how high science explores, it adopts the method of the universe as fast as it appears; and this discloses that the POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT 5 mind as it opens, the mind as it shall be, com- prehends and works thus; that is to say, the Intellect builds the universe and is the key to all it contains. It is not then cities or moun- tains, or animals, or globes that any longer commands us, but only man; not the fact, but so much of man as is in the fact.
In astronomy, vast distance, but we never go intoa foreign system. In geology, vast dura- tion, but we are never strangers. Our meta- physics should be able to follow the flying force through all transformations, and name the pair identical through all variety.
I believe in the existence of the material world as the expression of the spiritual or the real, and in the impenetrable mystery which hides (and hides through absolute transparency) the mental nature, I await the insight which our advancing knowledge of material laws shall furnish.’
Every object in Nature is a word to signify some fact inthe mind. But when that fact is not yet put into English words, when I look at the tree or the river and have not yet definitely made out what they would say to me, they are by no means unimpressive. I wait for them, I enjoy them before they yet speak. I feel as if I stood by an ambassador charged with the 6 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT — message of his king, which he does not deliver because the hour when he should say it is not yet arrived.
Whilst we converse with truths as thoughts, they exist also as plastic forces; as the soul of a man, the soul of a plant, the genius or con- stitution of any part of Nature, which makes it what it is. The thought which was in the world, part and parcel of the world, has disengaged itself and taken an independent existence.
My belief in the use of a course on philosophy is that the student shall learn to appreciate the miracle of the mind; shall learn its subtle but immense power, or shall begin to learn it; shall come to know that in seeing and in no tradition he must find what truth is; that he shall see in it the source of all traditions, and shall see each one of them as better or worse statement of its revelations; shall come to trust it entirely, as the only true; to cleave to God against the name of God.* When he has once known the oracle he will need no priest. And if he finds at first with some alarm how impossible it is to accept many things which the hot or the mild sectarian may insist on his believing, he will be armed by his insight and brave to meet all POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT 7 inconvenience and all resistance it may cost him. He from whose hand it came will guide and direct it."
Yet these questions which really interest men, how few can answer. Here are learned faculties of law and divinity, but would questions like these come into mind when I see them? Here are learned academies and universities, yet they have not propounded these for any prize.
Seek the literary circles, the stars of fame, the men of splendor, of bon-mots, will they afford me satisfaction? I think you could not find a club of men acute and liberal enough in the world. Bring the best wits together, and they are so impatient of each other, so vulgar, there is so much more than their wit, — such follies, gluttonies, partialities, age, care, and sleep, that you shall have no academy.
There is really a grievous amount of unavail- ableness about men of wit. A plain man finds them so heavy, dull and oppressive, with bad jokes and conceit and stupefying individualism, that he comes to write in his tablets, Avoid the great man as one who is privileged to be an unprofitable companion. For the course of things makes the scholars either egotists or worldly and jocose. In so many hundreds of 8 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT superior men hardly ten or five or two from whom one can hope for a reasonable word.’
Go into the scientific club and harken. Each savant proves in his admirable discourse that he, and he only, knows now or ever did know anything on the subject: “ Does the gentleman speak of anatomy? Who peeped into a box at the Custom House and then published a draw- ing of my rat?’’ Or is it pretended discoveries | of new strata that are before the meeting? This professor hastens to inform us that he knew it all twenty years ago, and is ready to prove that he knew so much then that all further inves- tigation was quite superfluous; — and poor Nature and the sublime law, which 1s all that our student cares to hear of, are quite omitted in this triumphant vindication.
Was it better when we came to the philo- sophers, who found everybody wrong; acute and ingenious to lampoon and degrade mankind? And then was there ever prophet burdened with a message to his people who did not cloud our gratitude by a strange confounding in his own mind of private folly with his public wisdom?
But if you like to run away from this beset- ting sin of sedentary men, you can escape all this insane egotism by running into society, where POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT 9g the manners and estimate of the world have cor- rected this folly, and effectually suppressed this overweening self-conceit. Here each is to make room for others, and the solidest merits must exist only for the entertainment of all. We are not in the smallest degree helped. Great is the dazzle, but the gain is small. Here they play the game of conversation, as they play billiards, for pastime and credit.
Yes, ’t is a great vice in all countries, the sacri- fice of scholars to be courtiers and diners-out, to talk for the amusement of those who wish to be amused, though the stars of heaven must be plucked down and packed into rockets to this end. What with egotism on one side and levity on the other, we shall have no Olympus.
But there is still another hindrance, namely, practicality. We must havea special talent, and bring something to pass. Ever since the Norse heaven made the stern terms of admission that a man must do something excellent with his hands or feet, or with his voice, eyes, ears, or with his whole body, the same demand has been made in Norse earth.* Yet what we really want is not a haste to act, but a certain piety toward the source of action and knowledge. In fact we have to say that 10 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT there is a certain beatitude, —I can call it no- thing less, — to which all men are entitled, tasted by them in different degrees, which is a perfec- tion of their nature, and to which their entrance must be inevery way forwarded. Practical men, though they could lift the globe, cannot arrive at this. Something very different has to be done, —the availing ourselves of every impulse of genius, an emanation of the heaven it tells of, and the resisting this conspiracy of men and material things against the sanitary and legitimate inspirations of the intellectual nature.’
What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is think- ing of all day? This is his fate and his em- ployer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.”
The laws and powers of the Intellect have, however, a stupendous peculiarity, of being at once observers and observed. So that it is diffi- cult to hold them fast, as objects of examination, or hinder them from turning the professor out of his chair. The wonder of the science of Intellect is that the substance with which we deal is of that subtle and active quality that it POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT 11 intoxicates all who approach it. Gloves on the hands, glass guards over the eyes, wire-gauze masks over the face, volatile salts in the nostrils, are no defence against this virus, which comes in as secretly as gravitation into and through all barriers.
Let me have your attention to this dangerous subject, which we will cautiously approach on different sides of this dim and perilous lake, so attractive, so delusive. We have had so many guides and so many failures. And now the world is still uncertain whether the pool has been sounded or not.
My contribution will be simply historical. I write anecdotes of the intellect; a sort of Farmer's Almanac of mental moods. I con- fine my ambition to true reporting of its play in natural action, though I should get only one new fact in a year.’
I cannot myself use that systematic form which is reckoned essential in treating the science of the mind. But if one can say so without arrogance, I might suggest that he who contents himself with dotting a fragmentary curve, recording only what facts he has observed, without attempting to arrange them within one outline, follows a system also,—a system as 12 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT grand as any other, though he does not in- terfere with its vast curves by prematurely forc- ing them into a circle or ellipse, but only draws that arc which he clearly sees, or perhaps at a later observation a remote curve of the same orbit, and waits for a new opportunity, well assured that these observed arcs will consist with each other.
I confess toa little distrust of that com- pleteness of system which metaphysicians are apt toaffect. *T'is the gnat grasping the world. All these exhaustive theories appear indeed a false and vain attempt to introvert and analyze the Primal Thought. That is upstream, and what a stream! Can you swim up Niagara Falls?
We have invincible repugnance to introver- sion, to study of the eyes instead of that which the eyes see; and the belief of men is that the attempt is unnatural and is punished by loss of faculty. I share the belief that the natural direction of the intellectual powers is from within outward, and that just in proportion to the activity of thoughts on the study of outward objects, as architecture, or farming, or natural history, ships, animals, chemistry, —in that proportion the faculties of the mind had a POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT 13 healthy growth; but a study in the opposite direction had a damaging effect on the mind.
Metaphysics is dangerous as asingle pursuit. We should feel more confidence in the same results from the mouth of a man of the world. The inward analysis must be corrected by rough experience. Metaphysics must be perpetually reinforced by life; must be the observations of a working man on working men; must be biography, — the record of some law whose working was surprised by the observer in natural action.
I think metaphysics a grammar to which, once read, we seldom return. ’IT' is a Manila full of pepper, and I want only a teaspoonful in a year. I admire the Dutch, who burned half the harvest to enhance the price of the remainder.
I want not the logic, but the power, if any, which it brings into science and literature; the man who can humanize this logic, these syl- logisms, and give me the results. The adepts value only the pure geometry, the aérial bridge ascending from earth to heaven with arches and abutments of pure reason. I am fully contented if you tell me where are the two termini.
My metaphysics are to the end of use. I 14 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT wish to know the laws of this wonderful power, that I may domesticate it. I observe with curiosity its risings and its settings, illumination and eclipse; its obstructions and its provoca- tions, that I may learn to live with it wisely, court its aid, catch sight of its splendor, feel its approach, hear and save its oracles and obey them. But this watching of the mind, in sea- son and out of season, to see the mechanics of the thing, is a little of the detective. The analytic process is cold and bereaving and, shall I say it? somewhat mean, as spying. There is something surgical in metaphysics as we treat it. Were not an ode a better form? The poet sees wholes and avoids analysis; the meta- physician, dealing as it were with the math- ematics of the mind, puts himself out of the way of the inspiration; loses that which is the miracle and creates the worship.
I think that philosophy is still rude and elementary. It will one day be taught by poets. The poet is in the natural attitude; he is believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons for believing.’
What I am now to attempt is simply some sketches or studies for such a picture; Mémoires POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT 15 pour servir toward a Natural History of In- tellect.
First I wish to speak of the excellence of that element, and the great auguries that come from it, notwithstanding the impediments which our sensual civilization puts in the way.
Next I treat of the identity of the thought with Nature; and I add a rude list of some by-laws of the mind.
Thirdly I proceed to the fountains of thought in Instinct and Inspiration, and I also attempt to show the relation of men of thought to the existing religion and civility of the present time.
I. We figure to ourselves Intellect as an ethe- real sea, which ebbs and flows, which surges and washes hither and thither, carrying its whole virtue into every creek and inlet which it bathes. To this sea every human house has a water front. But this force, creating nature, visiting whom it will and withdrawing from whom it will, making day where it comes and leaving night when it departs, is no fee or pro- perty of man or angel. It is as the light, public and entire to each, and on the same terms. What but thought deepens life, and makes us better than cow or cat? The grandeur of the 16 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT impression the stars and heavenly bodies make on us is surely more valuable than our exact perception of a tub or a table on the ground. To Be is the unsolved, unsolvable wonder. To Be, in its two connections of inward and outward, the mind and Nature. The wonder subsists, and age, though of eternity, could not approach a solution. But the suggestion is al- ways returning, that hidden source publishing at once our being and that it is the source of out- ward Nature. Who are we, and what is Nature, have one answer in the life that rushes into us. In my thought I seem to stand on the bank of a river and watch the endless flow of the stream, floating objects of all shapes, colors and natures; nor can I much detain them as they pass, except by running beside them a little way along the bank. But whence they come or whither they go is not told me. Only I. have a suspicion that, as geologists say every river makes its own valley, so does this mystic stream. It makes its valley, makes its banks and makes perhaps the observer too. Who has found the boundaries of human intelligence? Who has made a chart of its channel, or ap- proached the fountain of this wonderful Nile? * I am of the oldest religion. Leaving aside the POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT 17 question which was prior, egg or bird, I believe the mind is the creator of the world, and is ever. creating;—— that at last Matter is dead Mind; that mind makes the senses it sees with; that the genius of man is a continuation of the power that made him and that has not done making him.
I dare not deal with this element in its pure essence. It is too rare for the wings of words. Yet I see that Intellect is a science of degrees, and that as man is conscious of the law of vege- table and animal nature, so he is aware of an Intellect which overhangs his consciousness like a sky, of degree above degree, of heaven within heaven.
Every just thinker has attempted to indicate these degrees, these steps on the heavenly stair, until he comes to light where language fails him. Above the thought is the higher truth, — truth as yet undomesticated and therefore unformulated.
It is a steep stair down from the essence of Intellect pure to thoughts and intellections. As the sun is conceived to have made our system by hurling out from itself the outer rings of dif- fuse ether which slowly condensed into earths 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 —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.
So works the poor little blockhead manikin. He must arrange and dignify his shop or farm the best he can. At last he must be able to tell you it, or write it, translate it all clumsily enough into the new sky-language he calls thought." He cannot help it, the irresistible meliorations bear him forward.
II. Whilst we consider this appetite of the mind to arrange its phenomena, there is another fact which makes this useful. There is in Nature 20 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT a parallel unity which corresponds to the unity in the mind and makes it available. This meth- odizing mind meets no resistance in its attempts. The scattered blocks, with which it strives to form a symmetrical structure, fit. This design following after finds with joy that like design went before. Not only man puts things in a row, but things belong in a row.
It is certain that however we may conceive of the wonderful little bricks of which the world is builded, we must suppose a similarity and fitting and identity in their frame. It is necessary to suppose that every hose in Nature fits every hydrant; so only is combination, chemistry, vegetation, animation, intellection possible. Without identity at base, chaos must be for- ever.
And as mind, our mind or mind like ours, reappears to us in our study of Nature, Nature being everywhere formed after a method which we can well understand, and all the parts, to the most remote, allied or explicable, — therefore our own organization is a perpetual key, and a well-ordered mind brings to the study of every new fact or class of facts a certain divination of that which it shall find.
This reduction to a few laws, to one law, is POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT 21 not a choice of the individual, it is the tyran- nical instinct of the mind. There is no solitary flower and no solitary thought. It comes single like a foreign traveller, — but find out its name, and it is related to a powerful and numerous family. Wonderful is their working and relation each toeach. We hold them as lanterns to light each other and our present design. Every new thought modifies, interprets old problems. The retrospective value of each new thought is immense, like a torch applied to a long train of gunpowder. To be isolated is to be sick, and in so far, dead. The life of the All must stream through us to make the man and the moment great."
Well, having accepted this law of identity pervading the universe, we next perceive that whilst every creature represents and obeys it, there is diversity, there is more or less of power; that the lowest only means incipient form, and over it is a higher class in which its rudiments are opened, raised to higher powers; that there is development from less to more, from lower to superior function, steadily ascend- ing to man.
If man has organs for breathing, for sight, for locomotion, for taking food, for digesting, for 22 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT protection by house-building, by attack and defence, for reproduction and love and care of his young, you shall find all the same in the muskrat. There isa perfect correspondence; or tis only man modified to live in a mud-bank. A fish in like manner is man furnished to live in the sea; a thrush, to fly in the air; anda mollusk is a cheap edition with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.
If we go through the British Museum or the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, or any cabinet where is some representation of all the kingdoms of Nature, we are surprised with occult sympathies; we feel as if looking at our bone and flesh through coloring and distorting glasses. Is it nota little startling to see with what genius some people take to hunting, with what genius some people fish, — what knowledge they still have of the creature they hunt? The robber, as the police reports say, must have been intimately acquainted with the premises. How lately the hunter was the poor creature’s organic enemy; a presumption inflamed, as the lawyers say, by observing how many faces in the street still remind us of visages in the forest, — the escape POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT 23 from the quadruped type not yet perfectly accomplished.’
From whatever side we look at Nature we seem to be exploring the figure of a disguised man. How obvious is the momentum, in our mental history! The momentum, which in- creases by exact laws in falling bodies, increases by the same rate in the intellectual action. Every scholar knows that he applies himself coldly and slowly at first to his task, but, with the progress of the work, the mind itself becomes heated, and sees far and wide as it approaches the end, so that it is the common remark of the student, Could I only have begun with the same fire which I had on the last day, I should have done something.
The affinity of particles accurately translates the affinity of thoughts, and what a modern experimenter calls “‘ the contagious influence of chemical action”’ is so true of mind that I have only to tead the law that its application may be evident: ‘A body in the act of combination or decomposition enables another body, with which it may be in contact, to enter into the same state.’ And if one remembers how contagious are the moral states of men, how much we are 24 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT braced by the presence and actions of any Spar- tan soul, it does not need vigor of our own kind, but the spectacle of vigor of any kind, any prodigious power of performance wonderfully arms and recruits us. There are those who dis- puting will make you dispute, and the nervous and hysterical and animalized will produce a like series of symptoms in you, though no other persons ever evoke the like phenomena, and though you are conscious that they do not properly belong to you, but are a sort of exten- sion of the diseases of this particular persen into you.
The idea of vegetation is irresistible in con- sidering mental activity. Man seems a higher plant. What happens here in mankind is matched by what happens out there in the history of grass and wheat.‘ This curious re- semblance repeats, in the mental function, the germination, growth, state of melioration, cross- ings, blight, parasites, and in short all the acci- dents of the plant. Under every leaf is the bud of a new leaf, and not less under every thought is a newer thought. The plant absorbs much nourishment from the ground in order to repair its own waste by exhalation, and keep itself good. Increase its food and it becomes fertile.
POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT 25 The mind is first only receptive. Surcharge it with thoughts in which it delights and 1t becomes active. The moment a man begins not to be convinced, that moment he begins to convince.
In the orchard many trees send out a mod- erate shoot in the first summer heat, and stop. They look all summer as if they would pre- sently burst into bud again, but they do not. The fine tree continues to grow. The same thing happens in the man. Every man has material enough in his experience to exhaust the sagacity of Newton in working it out. We have more than we use. I never hear a good speech at caucus or at cattle-show but it helps me, not so much by adding to my knowledge as by apprising me of admirable uses to which what I know can be turned. The commonest remark, if the man could only extend it a little, would make him a genius; but the thought 1s pre- maturely checked, and grows no more. All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step inacontinuous line. Many aman had taken the first step. With every additional step you enchance immensely the value of your first.
The botanist discovered long ago that Nature 26 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT