external objects. I do not think that there is ever
such absolute incapacity in the eye for distinguishing and receiving
pleasure from certain forms and colors, as there is in persons who are
technically said to have no ear, for distinguishing notes, but there is
naturally every degree of bluntness and acuteness, both for perceiving
the truth of form, and for receiving pleasure from it when perceived.
And although I believe even the lowest degree of these faculties can be
expanded almost unlimitedly by cultivation, the pleasure received
rewards not the labor necessary, and the pursuit is abandoned. So that
while in those whose sensations are naturally acute and vivid, the call
of external nature is so strong that it must be obeyed, and is ever
heard louder as the approach to her is nearer,--in those whose
sensations are naturally blunt, the call is overpowered at once by other
thoughts, and their faculties of perception, weak originally, die of
disuse. With this kind of bodily sensibility to color and form is
intimately connected that higher sensibility which we revere as one of
the chief attributes of all noble minds, and as the chief spring of real
poetry. I believe this kind of sensibility may be entirely resolved into
the acuteness of bodily sense of which I have been speaking, associated
with love, love I mean in its infinite and holy functions, as it
embraces divine and human and brutal intelligences, and hallows the
physical perception of external objects by association, gratitude,
veneration, and other pure feelings of our moral nature. And although
the discovery of truth is in itself altogether intellectual, and
dependent merely on our powers of physical perception and abstract
intellect, wholly independent of our moral nature, yet these
instruments (perception and judgment) are so sharpened and brightened,
and so far more swiftly and effectively used, when they have the energy
and passion of our moral nature to bring them into action--perception is
so quickened by love, and judgment so tempered by veneration, that,
practically, a man of deadened moral sensation is always dull in his
perception of truth, and thousands of the highest and most divine truths
of nature are wholly concealed from him, however constant and
indefatigable may be his intellectual search. Thus, then, the farther we
look, the more we are limited in the number of those to whom we should
choose to appeal as judges of truth, and the more we pe