tion. Our truth of thought is
therefore vitiated as much by too violent direction given by our will,
as by too great negligence. We do not determine what we will think.
We only open our senses, clear away as we can all obstruction from the
fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have little control over our
thoughts. We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments
into their heaven and so fully engage us that we take no thought for the
morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own. By
and by we fall out of that rapture, bethink us where we have been, what
we have seen, and repeat as truly as we can what we have beheld. As
far as we can recall these ecstasies we carry away in the ineffaceable
memory the result, and all men and all the ages confirm it. It is called
Truth. But the moment we cease to report and attempt to correct and
contrive, it is not truth.

If we consider what persons have stimulated and profited us, we shall
perceive the superiority of the spontaneous or intuitive principle over
the arithmetical or logical. The first contains the second, but virtual
and latent. We want in every man a long logic; we cannot pardon the
absence of it, but it must not be spoken. Logic is the procession or
proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent
method; the moment it would appear as propositions and have a separate
value it is worthless.

In every man's mind, some images, words and facts remain, without effort
on his part to imprint them, which others forget, and afterwards these
illustrate to him important laws. All our progress is an unfolding, like
the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a
knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to
the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By
trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into truth and you shall know why
you believe.

Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college
rules. What you have aggregated in a natural manner surprises and
delights when it is produced. For we cannot oversee each other's
secret. And hence the differences between men in natural endowment are
insignificant in comparison with their common wealth. Do you think the
porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for
you? Every body knows as much as the savant. The walls of rude minds are
scrawled all over with facts, with tho