ification begins.
To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by
it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three,
then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying
instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies,
discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote
things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that
since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and
classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that
these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which
is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry,
a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary
motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout
matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in
the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each
refractory fact; one after another reduces all strange constitutions,
all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on forever to
animate the last fiber of organization, the outskirts of nature, by
insight.

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is
suggested that he and it proceed from one Root; one is leaf and one is
flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that
root? Is not that the soul of his soul?--A thought too bold?--A dream
too wild? Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of
more earthly natures,--when he has learned to worship the soul, and to
see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first
gropings of its gigantic hand,--he shall look forward to an
ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator.[13] He shall see
that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for
part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his
own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes
to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is
ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in
fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself,"[14] and the modern precept,
"Study nature," become at last one maxim.

* * * * *

II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the
mind of the Past,--in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of
institu