and they find
themselves, now in Europe, now in Asia; they see visions of great cities
and wild regions; they are in the marts of commerce, or amid the islands
of the South; they gaze on Pompey's Pillar, or on the Andes; and nothing
which meets them carries them forward or backward, to any idea beyond
itself. Nothing has a drift or relation; nothing has a history or a
promise. Every thing stands by itself, and comes and goes in its turn,
like the shifting scenes of a show, which leave the spectator where he
was. Perhaps you are near such a man on a particular occasion, and expect
him to be shocked or perplexed at something which occurs; but one thing is
much the same to him as another, or, if he is perplexed, it is as not
knowing what to say, whether it is right to admire, or to ridicule, or to
disapprove, while conscious that some expression of opinion is expected
from him; for in fact he has no standard of judgment at all, and no
landmarks to guide him to a conclusion. Such is mere acquisition, and, I
repeat, no one would dream of calling it philosophy.

6.

Instances, such as these, confirm, by the contrast, the conclusion I have
already drawn from those which preceded them. That only is true
enlargement of mind which is the power of viewing many things at once as
one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the
universal system, of understanding their respective values, and
determining their mutual dependence. Thus is that form of Universal
Knowledge, of which I have on a former occasion spoken, set up in the
individual intellect, and constitutes its perfection. Possessed of this
real illumination, the mind never views any part of the extended
subject-matter of Knowledge without recollecting that it is but a part, or
without the associations which spring from this recollection. It makes
every thing in some sort lead to every thing else; it would communicate
the image of the whole to every separate portion, till that whole becomes
in imagination like a spirit, every where pervading and penetrating its
component parts, and giving them one definite meaning. Just as our bodily
organs, when mentioned, recall their function in the body, as the word
"creation" suggests the Creator, and "subjects" a sovereign, so, in the
mind of the Philosopher, as we are abstractedly conceiving of him, the
elements of the physical and moral world, sciences, arts, pursuits, ranks,
offices, events, opinions, individua