closet.

It was an unconscious brief advance from nothing to very little. Yes,
but still there must have been some dim features of the dawning
character. No doubt. The heedless, complying, unjudging benevolence, for
instance, that gave away _all_ my gingerbread to the young Anakim of
Parade Street, was one. It was liable afterwards to invert, by reacting
from such over-operation as that, into an equally unjudging disregard of
the wants and needs of others.

And now, What was it? This is no foolish nor unimportant inquiry. If I
could answer it sufficiently, I should at once supply the basis of whole
systems of mental and moral art and science. Such whole systems
indeed--for instance, the muddy distractions of the Scotch
metaphysicians--have already been based upon the phantasms of wiggy old
doctors who dived backward into themselves,--jumping down their own
throats, as it were, in their search after knowledge, as did the seventh
Arabian Brother in the Spectator (is it not?) "with seven candles in
each hand, lighted at both ends,"--and said, "When I began to think, I
must necessarily have thought thus and thus." This was all very
scientific. But for usefulness it would have been better to inquire, not
what they must have thought, but what they did think.

Indeed, hitherto the history of mental philosophy is the history of the
ignorance of man about himself; and since science must be built
upon induction, and since phrenology has now established a
classification--approximately correct and sufficient for working
purposes--of the mental faculties, it is now quite in order to review
the old inductions from the history of the individual, and to accumulate
new ones. Even the mere trifles of these recollections of mine, some of
them at least, must have an actual philosophical value, if only they are
true and well enough stated.

Thank goodness, that, at any rate, I was not a remarkable child! It is
the average record which has most value. The remarkable child is not a
magnified child, but a distorted one; not a young giant, but a young
monster.

No tract or little 24mo. would have been published about me by the
American Sunday-School Union, if I had died young. No brilliant
repartees by me are on record. No sweet remembrance is in blossom about
me of a grim, unchildish pleasure in preferring the convenience or
enjoyment of others to my own. In an instance where I remember to have
tried to do as the good boys do in the stor