Before, they took things as they came, and thought no more
of one thing than another. But now every event has a meaning; they have
their own estimate of whatever happens to them; they are mindful of times
and seasons, and compare the present with the past; and the world, no
longer dull, monotonous, unprofitable, and hopeless, is a various and
complicated drama, with parts and an object, and an awful moral.

5.

Now from these instances, to which many more might be added, it is plain,
first, that the communication of knowledge certainly is either a condition
or the means of that sense of enlargement or enlightenment, of which at
this day we hear so much in certain quarters: this cannot be denied; but
next, it is equally plain, that such communication is not the whole of the
process. The enlargement consists, not merely in the passive reception
into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto unknown to it, but in the
mind's energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards and among those
new ideas, which are rushing in upon it. It is the action of a formative
power, reducing to order and meaning the matter of our acquirements; it is
a making the objects of our knowledge subjectively our own, or, to use a
familiar word, it is a digestion of what we receive, into the substance of
our previous state of thought; and without this no enlargement is said to
follow. There is no enlargement, unless there be a comparison of ideas one
with another, as they come before the mind, and a systematizing of them.
We feel our minds to be growing and expanding _then_, when we not only
learn, but refer what we learn to what we know already. It is not the mere
addition to our knowledge that is the illumination; but the locomotion,
the movement onwards, of that mental centre, to which both what we know,
and what we are learning, the accumulating mass of our acquirements,
gravitates. And therefore a truly great intellect, and recognized to be
such by the common opinion of mankind, such as the intellect of Aristotle,
or of St. Thomas, or of Newton, or of Goethe, (I purposely take instances
within and without the Catholic pale, when I would speak of the intellect
as such,) is one which takes a connected view of old and new, past and
present, far and near, and which has an insight into the influence of all
these one on another; without which there is no whole, and no centre. It
possesses the knowledge, not only of things, but also of their mutu