“ The answer to this is a statement of the genesis, not merely of genius, but of every form of intellectual manhood; for such thoughts do not leap, _à la_ Minerva, full-grown from the head, but are struck off in those moments when the whole nature of the thinker is alive and aglow with an inspiration kindled long before in remote recesses of consciousness from one spark of immortal fire, and unweariedly burning, burning, burning, until it lit up the whole inert mass of surrounding mind in flame. ”

“ Do you purpose to play at living, or do you purpose to live?--to be a memory, a word-cistern, a feeble prater on illustrious themes, one of the world's thousand chatterers, or a will, a power, a man?" No varnish and veneer of scholarship, no command of the tricks of logic and rhetoric, can ever make you a positive force in the world. ”

“ There is, indeed, no more ludicrous sight than to see Mediocrity, perched on one of these resounding adjectives, strut and bluster, and give itself braggadocio airs, and dictate to all quiet men its maxims of patriotism or morality, and all the while be but a living illustration through what grandeurs of opinion essential meanness and poverty of soul will peer and peep and be disclosed. To be a statesman or reformer requires a courage that dares defy dictation from any quarter, and a mind which has come in direct contact with the great inspiring ideas of country and humanity. ”

“ If they have native stamina of animal constitution, they may become men of passions and opinions, but they never will become men of sentiments and ideas; they may know the truth as it is _about_ a thing, and support it with acrid and wrangling dogmatism, but they never will know the truth as it is in the thing, and support it with faith and insight. And the moment they come into collision with a really live man, they will find their souls inwardly wither, and their boasted acquisitions fall away, before one glance of his irradiating intelligence and one stroke of his smiting will. ”

“ A true method of culture makes drudgery beautiful by presenting a vision of the object to which it leads;--beware of the conceit that dispenses with it! How much better it is to delve for a little solid knowledge, and be sure of that, than to be a proper target for such a sarcasm as a great statesman once shot at a glib advocate, who was saying nothing with great fluency and at great length! ”

“ The moment he comes in contact with the stern and stubborn realities which frown on his entrance into practical life, he will find that power is the soul of knowledge, and character the condition of intelligence. He will discover that intellectual success depends primarily on qualities which are not strictly intellectual, but personal and constitutional. The test of success is influence,--that is, the power of shaping events by informing, guiding, animating, controlling other minds. ”

“ And he will also find that this purifying interaction of spiritual and mental forces will give the mind an abiding foundation of joy for its starts of rapture and flights of ecstasy;--a joy, in whose light and warmth languor and discontent and depression and despair will be charmed away;--a joy, which will make the mind large, generous, hopeful, aspiring, in order to make life beautiful and sweet;--a joy, in the words of an old divine, "which will put on a more glorious garment above, and be joy superinvested in glory!" ”

“ The characteristic of intellect is insight,--insight into things and their relations; but then this insight is intense or languid, clear or confused, comprehensive or narrow, exactly in proportion to the weight and power of the individual who sees and combines. It is not so much the intellect that makes the man, as the man the intellect; in every act of earnest thinking, the reach of the thought depends on the pressure of the will ”

“ Mental disgust "sicklies o'er" all the objects of thought, extinguishes faith in exertion, communicates a dull wretchedness to indolence in the very process by which it makes activity impossible, and drags into its own slough of despond, and discolors with its own morbid reveries, the objects which it should ardently seek and genially assimilate. It sees things neither as they are, nor as they are glorified and transfigured by hope and health and faith ”

“ It results from this doctrine of the mind's growth, that success in all the departments of life over which intellect holds dominion depends, not merely on an outside knowledge of the facts and laws connected with each department, but on the assimilation of that knowledge into instinctive intelligence and active power. Take the good farmer, and you will find that ideas in him are endowed with will, and can work. Take the good general, and you will find that the principles of his profession are inwrought into the substance of his nature, and act with the velocity of instincts. ”

“ But in a mind of any primitive power, intellectual indolence is sure to generate intellectual conceit,--a little Jack Horner, that ensconces itself in lazy heads, and, while it dwarfs every power to the level of its own littleness, keeps vociferating, "What a great man am I!" ”

“ There are others whom indolence deludes by some trash about "fits" of inspiration, for whose Heaven-sent spasms they are humbly to wait. There is, it seems, a lucky thought somewhere in the abyss of possibility, which is somehow, at some time, to step out of essence into substance, and take up its abode in their capacious minds,--dutifully kept unoccupied in order that the expected celestial visitor may not be crowded for room. Chance is to make them king, and chance to crown them, without their stir! ”

“ Their force, being proportioned to their intelligence, never issues in that wild and anarchical impulse, or that tough, obstinate, narrow wilfulness, which many take to be the characteristic of individualized power. They may, in fact, exhibit no striking individual traits which stand impertinently out, and yet from this very cause be all the more potent and influential individualities. Indeed, in the highest efforts of ecstatic action, when the person is mightiest, and amazes us by the giant leaps of his intuition, the mere peculiarities of his personality are unseen and unfelt. ”

“ Indeed, an educated man, who creeps along with an apologetic air, cringing to this name and ducking to that opinion, and hoping that it is not too presumptuous in him to beg the right to exist,--why, it is a spectacle piteous to gods and hateful to men! Yet think of the many knots of monitory truisms in which activity is likely to be caught and entangled at the outset,--knots which a brave purpose will not waste time to untie, but instantly cuts. ”

“ Every step, indeed, of the student's progress calls for energy and effort, and every step is beset by some soft temptation to abandon the task of developing power for the delight of following impulse. The appetites, for example, instead of being bitted, and bridled, and trained into passions, and sent through the intellect to quicken, sharpen, and intensify its activity, are allowed to take their way unmolested to their own objects of sense, and drag the mind down to their own sensual level. ”

“ There are others still, who, while sloth is sapping the primitive energy of their natures, expect to scale the fortresses of knowledge by leaps and not by ladders, and who count on success in such perilous gymnastics, not by the discipline of the athlete, but by the dissipation of the idler. Indolence, indeed, is never at a loss for a smooth lie or delicious sophism to justify inaction, and, in our day, has rationalized it into a philosophy of the mind, and idealized it into a school of poetry, and organized it into a "hospital of incapables." ”

“ See, too, the wide disconnection between knowledge and life;--heaps of information piled upon little heads; everybody speaking,--few who have earned the right to speak; maxims enough to regenerate a universe,--a woful lack of great hearts, in which reason, right, and truth, regal and militant, are fortified and encamped! ”

“ And thus, mistaking his slab-sidedness for many-sidedness, and forgetting that there is no insight without force to back it,--bedizened in conceit and magnificent in littleness,--he is thrown on society, walking in a vain show of knowledge, and doomed to be upset and trampled on by the first brawny concrete Fact he stumbles against. ”

“ He certainly can do no good to himself, his country, or his race, by being the slave and echo of the heads of a clique. Besides, as most organizations are constituted on the principles of a sort of literary socialism, and each member lives and trades on a common capital of phrases, there is danger that these phrases may decline from signs into substitutes of thought, and both intellect and character evaporate in words. Thus, a man may be a Union man and a National man, or an Anti-Slavery man and a Temperance man and a Woman's-Rights' man, and still be very little of a man. ”

“ Now in men of this stamp, who have so organized knowledge into faculty that they have attained the power of giving Thought the character of Fact, we notice no distinction between power of intellect and power of will, but an indissoluble union and fusion of force and insight. Facts and laws are so blended with their personal being, that we can hardly decide whether it is thought that wills or will that thinks. Their actions display the intensest intelligence ”

“ There is no escape from slavery, or the mere pretence of freedom, but in radical individual power; and all solid intellectual culture is simply the right development of individuality into its true intellectual form. ”

“ Look around you in the community of educated men, and see how many, who started on their career with minds as bright and eager and hearts as hopeful as yours, have been mysteriously arrested in their growth,--have lost all the kindling sentiments which glorified their youthful studies, and dwindled into complacent echoes of surrounding mediocrity,--have begun, indeed, to die on the very threshold of manhood, and stand in society as tombs rather than temples of immortal souls. ”

“ If, on the contrary, they are guided by good or great sentiments, which are the souls of good or great ideas, these sentiments will be sure to organize all the capacity there is in them into positive intellectual character; but let them once divorce love from their occupations in life, and they will find that labor will degenerate into drudgery, and drudgery will weaken the power to labor, and weakness, as a last resort, will intrench itself in pretence and deception. ”

“ Youth, to be sure, is his,--youth, in virtue of which he is free of the universe,--youth, with its elastic vigor, its far-darting hopes, its generous impatience of prudent meanness, its grand denial of instituted falsehood, its beautiful contempt of accredited baseness,--but youth which must now concentrate its wayward energies, which must discourse with facts and grapple with men, and through strife and struggle, and the sad wisdom of experience, must pass from the vague delights of generous impulses to the assured joy of manly principles. ”

“ The mischief of intellectual conceit in our day consists in its arresting mental growth at the start by stuffing the mind with the husks of pretentious generalities, which, while they impart no vital power and convey no real information, give seeming enlargement to thought, and represent a seeming opulence of knowledge. ”

“ Now this disposition to skulk the austere requirements of intellectual growth in an indolent surrender of the mind's power of self-direction must be overcome at the outset, or, in spite of your grand generalities, you will be at the mercy of every bullying lie, and strike your colors to every mean truism, and shape your life in accordance with every low motive, which the strength of genuine wickedness or genuine stupidity can bring to bear upon you. ”

“ The ordinary forms of conceit, it is true, cannot well flourish in any assemblage of young men, whose plain interest it is to undeceive all self-deception and quell every insurrection of individual vanity, and who soon understand the art of burning the nonsense out of an offending brother by caustic ridicule and slow-roasting sarcasm. But there is danger of mutual deception, springing from a common belief in a false, but attractive principle of culture. ”

“ It is evident, that, when a young man leaves his school or college to take his place in the world, it is indispensable that he be something as well as know something; and it will require but little experience to demonstrate to him that what he really knows is little more than what he really is, and that his progress in intellectual manhood is not more determined by the information he retains, than by that portion which, by a benign provision of Providence, he is enabled to forget. ”

“ It has its source in a violation of that law which makes the health of the mind depend on its activity being directed to an object. When directed on itself, it becomes fitful and moody; and moodiness generates morbidness, and morbidness misanthropy, and misanthropy self-contempt, and self-contempt begins the work of self-dissolution. Why, every sensible man will despise himself, if he concentrates his attention on that important personage! The joy and confidence of activity come from its being fixed and fastened on things external to itself. ”

“ Idleness and Conceit, however, are not more opposed to that out-springing, reverential activity which makes the person forget himself in devotion to his objects, than Fear. A bold heart in a sound head,--that is the condition of energetic thinking, of the thought that thinks round things and into things and through things; but fear freezes activity at its inmost fountains. ”