nds 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. 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! 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. 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.

And first, at the risk of being considered metaphysical,--though we fear
no metaphysician would indorse the charge,--let us define what we
mean by individuality; for the word is commonly made to signify some
peculiarity or eccentricity, some unreasonable twist, of mind or
disposition. An individual, then, in the sense in which we use the term,
is a causative spiritual force, whose root and being are in eternity,
but who lives, grows, and builds up his nature in time. All the objects
of sense and thought, all facts and ideas, all things, are external to
his essential personality. But he has bound up in his personal being
sympathies and capacities which ally him with external objects, and
enable him to transmute their inner spirit and substance into his own
personal life. The process of his growth, therefore, is a development
of power from within to assimilate objects from without, the power
increasing with every vital exercise of it. The result of this
assimilation is character. Character is the spiritual body of the
person, and represents the individualization of vital experi