, how little there is of the _extempore_, the hap-hazard,
the hit-or-miss, in the character of creative thought, and how
completely the gladdest inspiration is earned, let us glance at the
psychological history of one of those imperial ideas which measure the
power, test the quality, and convey the life, of the minds that conceive
them. The progress of such an idea is from film to form. It has its
origin in an atmosphere of feeling; for the first vital movement of the
mind is emotional, and is expressed in a dim tendency, a feeble feeling
after the object, or the class of objects, related to the peculiar
constitution and latent affinities of its individual being. This
tendency gradually condenses and deepens into a sentiment, pervading the
man with a love of those objects,--by a sweet compulsion ordering his
energies in their direction,--and by slow degrees investing them,
through a process of imagination, with the attribute of beauty, and,
through a process of reason, investing the purpose with which he pursues
them with the attribute of intelligence. The object dilates as the mind
assimilates and the nature moves, so that every step in this advance
from mere emotion to vivid insight is a building up of the faculties
which each onward movement evokes and exercises,--sentiment,
imagination, reason increasing their power and enlarging their scope
with each impetus that speeds them on to their bright and beckoning
goal. Then, when the individual has reached his full mental stature, and
come in direct contact with the object, then, only then, does he "pluck
out the heart of its mystery" in one of those lightning-like _acts_ of
thought which we call combination, invention, discovery.

There is no luck, no accident, in all this. Nature does not capriciously
scatter her secrets as golden gifts to lazy pets and luxurious darlings,
but imposes tasks when she presents opportunities, and uplifts him whom
she would inform. The apple that she drops at the feet of Newton is but
a coy invitation to follow her to the stars.

Now this living process of developing manhood and building up mind,
while the person is on the trail of a definite object of intelligence,
is in continual danger of being devitalized into a formal process of
mere acquisition, which, though it may make great memories of students,
will be sure to leave them little men. Their thoughts will be the
_attaches_, not the offspring, of their minds. They will have a bowing