s, measures,
and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene.
Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of
thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.

1. Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths.
Our dealing with sensible objects is a constant exercise in the
necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of order, of being and
seeming, of progressive arrangement; of ascent from particular to
general; of combination to one end of manifold forces. Proportioned
to the importance of the organ to be formed, is the extreme care with
which its tuition is provided,--a care pretermitted in no single case.
What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending,
to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of
annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of
little men; what disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest,
--and all to form the Hand of the mind;--to instruct us that "good
thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed!"

The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems
of debt and credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow,
the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate;--debt, which
consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great
spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons
cannot be forgone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it
most. Moreover, property, which has been well compared to snow,
--"if it fall level to-day, it will be blown into drifts to-morrow,"--is
the surface action of internal machinery, like the index on the face of a
clock. Whilst now it is the gymnastics of the understanding, it is
hiving in the foresight of the spirit, experience in profounder laws.

The whole character and fortune of the individual are affected by the
least inequalities in the culture of the understanding; for example, in
the perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and therefore
Time, that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped,
but sundered and individual. A bell and a plough have each their use,
and neither can do the office of the other. Water is good to drink,
coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water
spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in separation,
in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as
nature. The foolish