s of a
base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessed no
other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear;
a prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes,
which gives never, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of
any project,--Will it bake bread? This is a disease like a thickening
of the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But culture,
revealing the high origin of the apparent world and aiming at the
perfection of the man as the end, degrades everything else, as health
and bodily life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a several
faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and
its wants. Cultivated men always feel and speak so as if a great
fortune, the achievement of a civil or social measure, great personal
influence, a graceful and commanding address, had their value as
proofs of the energy of the spirit. If a man lose his balance and
immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may
be a good wheel or pin,[664] but he is not a cultivated man.

The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and
cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and
therefore literature's. The true prudence limits this sensualism by
admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world. This
recognition once made,--the order of the world and the distribution
of affairs and times being studied with the co-perception of their
subordinate place, will reward any degree of attention. For, our
existence, thus apparently attached in nature to the sun and the
returning moon and the periods which they mark; so susceptible to
climate and to country, so alive to social good and evil, so fond of
splendor and so tender to hunger and cold and debt,--reads all its
primary lessons out of these books.

Prudence does not go behind nature and ask whence it is? It takes the
laws of the world whereby man's being is conditioned, as they are, and
keeps these laws that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects
space and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity,[665] growth
and death. There revolve, to give bound and period to his being on all
sides, the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky: here lies
stubborn matter, and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here
is a planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws and fenced
and distributed externally with civil partitions an