ence, the
conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men. Sir Thomas
Browne, in quaint reference to the building up of our physical frame
through the food we eat, declares that we have all been on our own
trenchers; and so, on the same principle, our spiritual faculties can be
analyzed into impersonal facts and ideas, whose life and substance we
have converted into personal reason, imagination, and passion. The
fundamental characteristic of man is spiritual hunger; the universe of
thought and matter is spiritual food. He feeds on Nature; he feeds on
ideas; he feeds, through art, science, literature, and history, on
the acts and thoughts of other minds; and could we take the mightiest
intellect that ever awed and controlled the world, and unravel his
powers, and return their constituent particles to the multitudinous
objects whence they were derived, the last probe of our analysis, after
we had stripped him of all his faculties, would touch that unquenchable
fiery atom of personality which had organized round itself such a
colossal body of mind, and which, in its simple naked energy, would
still be capable of rehabilitating itself in the powers and passions of
which it had been shorn.

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. Take the good judge, and in him jurisprudence seems
impersonated, and his opinions are authorities. Take the good merchant,
and you will find that commerce, in its facts and laws, seems in him
embodied, and that his sagacity appears identical with the objects on
which it is exercised. Take the great statesman, take Webster, and note
how, by thoroughly individualizing his comprehensive experience, he
seems to carry a nation in his brain; how, in all that relates to the
matter in hand, he has in him as _faculty_ what is out of him in _fact_;
how between the man and the thing there occurs that subtile freemasonry
of recognition which we call the mind's intuitive