ainst the earth's surface with an energy
measured by their weight avoirdupois, makes locomotion feasible; but by
the same attraction it may draw one into the pit, over the precipice, to
the bottom of the sea. What multitudes of lives does it yearly destroy!
Why has it never occurred to some ingenious victim of a sluggish liver
to represent Gravitation as a murderous monster revelling in blood?
Surely there are woful considerations here that might be used with the
happiest effect to enhance the sense of man's misery, and have been too
much neglected!

Probably there are few children to whom the fancy has not occurred, How
convenient, how fine were it to weigh nothing! We smile at the little
wiseacres; we know better. How much better do we know? That ancient
lament, that ever iterated accusation of the world because it opposes a
certain hindrance to freedom, love, reason, and every excellence which
the imagination of man can portray and his heart pursue,--what is it, in
the final analysis, but a complaint that we cannot walk without weight,
and that therefore climbing _is_ climbing?

Instead, however, of turning aside to applications, let us push forward
the central statement in the interest of applications to be made by
every reader for himself,--since he says too much who does not leave
much more unsaid. Observe, then, that objects which so utterly submit
themselves to man as to become testimonies and publications of his
inward conceptions serve even these most exacting and monarchical
purposes only by opposition to them, and, to a certain extent, in the
very measure of that opposition. The stone which the sculptor carves
becomes a fit vehicle for his thought through its resistance to his
chisel; it sustains the impress of his imagination solely through its
unwillingness to receive the same. Not chalk, not any loose and friable
material, does Phidias or Michel Angelo choose, but ivory, bronze,
basalt, marble. It is quite the same whether we seek expression or
uses. The stream must be dammed before it will drive wheels; the steam
compressed ere it will compel the piston. In fine, Potentiality combines
with Hindrance to constitute active Power. Man, in order to obtain
instrumentalities and uses, blends his will and intelligence with a
force that vigorously seeks to pursue its own separate free course; and
while this resists him, it becomes his servant.

But why not look at this fact in its largest light? For do we not h