INTELLECT

Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands above it in

the chemical tables, positively to that which stands below it. Water

dissolves wood and iron and salt; air dissolves water; electric fire

dissolves air, but the intellect dissolves fire, gravity, laws, method,

and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature in its resistless

menstruum. Intellect lies behind genius, which is intellect

constructive. Intellect is the simple power anterior to all action or

construction. Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a natural history

of the intellect, but what man has yet been able to mark the steps and

boundaries of that transparent essence? The first questions are always

to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness

of a child. How can we speak of the action of the mind under any

divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so

forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each

becomes the other. Itself alone is. Its vision is not like the vision

of the eye, but is union with the things known.

Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear consideration of

abstract truth. The considerations of time and place, of you and me, of

profit and hurt tyrannize over most men’s minds. Intellect separates

the fact considered, from you, from all local and personal reference,

and discerns it as if it existed for its own sake. Heraclitus looked

upon the affections as dense and colored mists. In the fog of good and

evil affections it is hard for man to walk forward in a straight line.

Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the

light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the

individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact,

and not as _I_ and _mine_. He who is immersed in what concerns person

or place cannot see the problem of existence. This the intellect always

ponders. Nature shows all things formed and bound. The intellect

pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness

between remote things and reduces all things into a few principles.

The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. All that mass of

mental and moral phenomena which we do not make objects of voluntary

thought, come within the power of fortune; they constitute the

circumstance of daily life; they are subject to change, to fear, and

hope. Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of

melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man,

imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events. But

a truth, separated by the intellect, is no longer a subject of destiny.

We behold it as a god upraised above care and fear. And so any fact in

our life, or any record of our fancies or reflections, disentangled

from the web of our unconsciousness, becomes an object impersonal and

immortal. It is the past restored, but embalmed. A better art than that

of Egypt has taken fear and corruption out of it. It is eviscerated of

care. It is offered for science. What is addressed to us for

contemplation does not threaten us but makes us intellectual beings.

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind

that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that

spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual. Long

prior to the age of reflection is the thinking of the mind. Out of

darkness it came insensibly into the marvellous light of to-day. In the

period of infancy it accepted and disposed of all impressions from the

surrounding creation after its own way. Whatever any mind doth or saith

is after a law; and this native law remains over it after it has come

to reflection or conscious thought. In the most worn, pedantic,

introverted self-tormenter’s life, the greatest part is incalculable by

him, unforeseen, unimaginable, and must be, until he can take himself

up by his own ears. What am I? What has my will done to make me that I

am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this

connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my

ingenuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an

appreciable degree.

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot with your best

deliberation and heed come so close to any question as your spontaneous

glance shall bring you, whilst you rise from your bed, or walk abroad

in the morning after meditating the matter before sleep on the previous

night. Our thinking is a pious reception. Our truth of thought is

therefore vitiated as much by too violent direction given by our will,

as by too great negligence. We do not determine what we will think. We

only open our senses, clear away as we can all obstruction from the

fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have little control over our

thoughts. We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments

into their heaven and so fully engage us that we take no thought for

the morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own.

By and by we fall out of that rapture, bethink us where we have been,

what we have seen, and repeat as truly as we can what we have beheld.

As far as we can recall these ecstasies we carry away in the

ineffaceable memory the result, and all men and all the ages confirm

it. It is called Truth. But the moment we cease to report and attempt

to correct and contrive, it is not truth.

If we consider what persons have stimulated and profited us, we shall

perceive the superiority of the spontaneous or intuitive principle over

the arithmetical or logical. The first contains the second, but virtual

and latent. We want in every man a long logic; we cannot pardon the

absence of it, but it must not be spoken. Logic is the procession or

proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent

method; the moment it would appear as propositions and have a separate

value it is worthless.

In every man’s mind, some images, words and facts remain, without

effort on his part to imprint them, which others forget, and afterwards

these illustrate to him important laws. All our progress is an

unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an

opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust

the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to

hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into truth and you

shall know why you believe.

Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college

rules. What you have aggregated in a natural manner surprises and

delights when it is produced. For we cannot oversee each other’s

secret. And hence the differences between men in natural endowment are

insignificant in comparison with their common wealth. Do you think the

porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for

you? Every body knows as much as the savant. The walls of rude minds

are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day

bring a lantern and read the inscriptions. Every man, in the degree in

which he has wit and culture, finds his curiosity inflamed concerning

the modes of living and thinking of other men, and especially of those

classes whose minds have not been subdued by the drill of school

education.

This instinctive action never ceases in a healthy mind, but becomes

richer and more frequent in its informations through all states of

culture. At last comes the era of reflection, when we not only observe,

but take pains to observe; when we of set purpose sit down to consider

an abstract truth; when we keep the mind’s eye open whilst we converse,

whilst we read, whilst we act, intent to learn the secret law of some

class of facts.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think. I would put myself in

the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I

blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he

meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live. For example,

a man explores the basis of civil government. Let him intend his mind

without respite, without rest, in one direction. His best heed long

time avails him nothing. Yet thoughts are flitting before him. We all

but apprehend, we dimly forebode the truth. We say I will walk abroad,

and the truth will take form and clearness to me. We go forth, but

cannot find it. It seems as if we needed only the stillness and

composed attitude of the library to seize the thought. But we come in,

and are as far from it as at first. Then, in a moment, and unannounced,

the truth appears. A certain wandering light appears, and is the

distinction, the principle, we wanted. But the oracle comes because we

had previously laid siege to the shrine. It seems as if the law of the

intellect resembled that law of nature by which we now inspire, now

expire the breath; by which the heart now draws in, then hurls out the

blood,—the law of undulation. So now you must labor with your brains,

and now you must forbear your activity and see what the great Soul

showeth.

The immortality of man is as legitimately preached from the

intellections as from the moral volitions. Every intellection is mainly

prospective. Its present value is its least. Inspect what delights you

in Plutarch, in Shakspeare, in Cervantes. Each truth that a writer

acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts

lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had

littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private

biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the

day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where

did he get this? and think there was something divine in his life. But

no; they have myriads of facts just as good, would they only get a lamp

to ransack their attics withal.

We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in

art. I knew, in an academical club, a person who always deferred to me;

who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my experiences had

somewhat superior; whilst I saw that his experiences were as good as

mine. Give them to me and I would make the same use of them. He held

the old; he holds the new; I had the habit of tacking together the old

and the new which he did not use to exercise. This may hold in the

great examples. Perhaps if we should meet Shakspeare we should not be

conscious of any steep inferiority; no, but of a great equality,—only

that he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying, his facts,

which we lacked. For notwithstanding our utter incapacity to produce

anything like Hamlet and Othello, see the perfect reception this wit

and immense knowledge of life and liquid eloquence find in us all.

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or hoe corn, and

then retire within doors and shut your eyes and press them with your

hand, you shall still see apples hanging in the bright light with

boughs and leaves thereto, or the tasselled grass, or the corn-flags,

and this for five or six hours afterwards. There lie the impressions on

the retentive organ, though you knew it not. So lies the whole series

of natural images with which your life has made you acquainted, in your

memory, though you know it not; and a thrill of passion flashes light

on their dark chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit

image, as the word of its momentary thought.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure,

is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our

wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood,

and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond;

until by and by we begin to suspect that the biography of the one

foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature

paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

In the intellect constructive, which we popularly designate by the word

Genius, we observe the same balance of two elements as in intellect

receptive. The constructive intellect produces thoughts, sentences,

poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the

marriage of thought with nature. To genius must always go two gifts,

the thought and the publication. The first is revelation, always a

miracle, which no frequency of occurrence or incessant study can ever

familiarize, but which must always leave the inquirer stupid with

wonder. It is the advent of truth into the world, a form of thought now

for the first time bursting into the universe, a child of the old

eternal soul, a piece of genuine and immeasurable greatness. It seems,

for the time, to inherit all that has yet existed and to dictate to the

unborn. It affects every thought of man and goes to fashion every

institution. But to make it available it needs a vehicle or art by

which it is conveyed to men. To be communicable it must become picture

or sensible object. We must learn the language of facts. The most

wonderful inspirations die with their subject if he has no hand to

paint them to the senses. The ray of light passes invisible through

space and only when it falls on an object is it seen. When the

spiritual energy is directed on something outward, then it is a

thought. The relation between it and you first makes you, the value of

you, apparent to me. The rich inventive genius of the painter must be

smothered and lost for want of the power of drawing, and in our happy

hours we should be inexhaustible poets if once we could break through

the silence into adequate rhyme. As all men have some access to primary

truth, so all have some art or power of communication in their head,

but only in the artist does it descend into the hand. There is an

inequality, whose laws we do not yet know, between two men and between

two moments of the same man, in respect to this faculty. In common

hours we have the same facts as in the uncommon or inspired, but they

do not sit for their portraits; they are not detached, but lie in a

web. The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the power of picture or

expression, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture

of will, a certain control over the spontaneous states, without which

no production is possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the

rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgment, with a strenuous

exercise of choice. And yet the imaginative vocabulary seems to be

spontaneous also. It does not flow from experience only or mainly, but

from a richer source. Not by any conscious imitation of particular

forms are the grand strokes of the painter executed, but by repairing

to the fountain-head of all forms in his mind. Who is the first

drawing-master? Without instruction we know very well the ideal of the

human form. A child knows if an arm or a leg be distorted in a picture;

if the attitude be natural or grand or mean; though he has never

received any instruction in drawing or heard any conversation on the

subject, nor can himself draw with correctness a single feature. A good

form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on

the subject, and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation,

prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the

features and head. We may owe to dreams some light on the fountain of

this skill; for as soon as we let our will go and let the unconscious

states ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are! We entertain

ourselves with wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals, of

gardens, of woods and of monsters, and the mystic pencil wherewith we

then draw has no awkwardness or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty;

it can design well and group well; its composition is full of art, its

colors are well laid on and the whole canvas which it paints is

lifelike and apt to touch us with terror, with tenderness, with desire

and with grief. Neither are the artist’s copies from experience ever

mere copies, but always touched and softened by tints from this ideal

domain.

The conditions essential to a constructive mind do not appear to be so

often combined but that a good sentence or verse remains fresh and

memorable for a long time. Yet when we write with ease and come out

into the free air of thought, we seem to be assured that nothing is

easier than to continue this communication at pleasure. Up, down,

around, the kingdom of thought has no inclosures, but the Muse makes us

free of her city. Well, the world has a million writers. One would

think then that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and

the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all

our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.

It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in

advance of the creative, so that there are many competent judges of the

best book, and few writers of the best books. But some of the

conditions of intellectual construction are of rare occurrence. The

intellect is a whole and demands integrity in every work. This is

resisted equally by a man’s devotion to a single thought and by his

ambition to combine too many.

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention on a

single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time,

the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood; herein

resembling the air, which is our natural element, and the breath of our

nostrils, but if a stream of the same be directed on the body for a

time, it causes cold, fever, and even death. How wearisome the

grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic, or

indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration

of a single topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison

also. I cannot see what you see, because I am caught up by a strong

wind and blown so far in one direction that I am out of the hoop of

your horizon.

Is it any better if the student, to avoid this offence, and to

liberalize himself, aims to make a mechanical whole of history, or

science, or philosophy, by a numerical addition of all the facts that

fall within his vision? The world refuses to be analyzed by addition

and subtraction. When we are young we spend much time and pains in

filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry,

Politics, Art, in the hope that in the course of a few years we shall

have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories

at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get

no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola,

whose arcs will never meet.

Neither by detachment neither by aggregation is the integrity of the

intellect transmitted to its works, but by a vigilance which brings the

intellect in its greatness and best state to operate every moment. It

must have the same wholeness which nature has. Although no diligence

can rebuild the universe in a model by the best accumulation or

disposition of details, yet does the world reappear in miniature in

every event, so that all the laws of nature may be read in the smallest

fact. The intellect must have the like perfection in its apprehension

and in its works. For this reason, an index or mercury of intellectual

proficiency is the perception of identity. We talk with accomplished

persons who appear to be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the

turf, the bird are not theirs, have nothing of them; the world is only

their lodging and table. But the poet, whose verses are to be spheral

and complete, is one whom Nature cannot deceive, whatsoever face of

strangeness she may put on. He feels a strict consanguinity, and

detects more likeness than variety in all her changes. We are stung by

the desire for new thought; but when we receive a new thought it is

only the old thought with a new face, and though we make it our own we

instantly crave another; we are not really enriched. For the truth was

in us before it was reflected to us from natural objects; and the

profound genius will cast the likeness of all creatures into every

product of his wit.

But if the constructive powers are rare and it is given to few men to

be poets, yet every man is a receiver of this descending holy ghost,

and may well study the laws of its influx. Exactly parallel is the

whole rule of intellectual duty to the rule of moral duty. A

self-denial no less austere than the saint’s is demanded of the

scholar. He must worship truth, and forego all things for that, and

choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby

augmented.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take

which you please,—you can never have both. Between these, as a

pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates

will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political

party he meets,—most likely his father’s. He gets rest, commodity, and

reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of

truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and

afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite

negations between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to

the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a

candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law

of his being.

The circle of the green earth he must measure with his shoes to find

the man who can yield him truth. He shall then know that there is

somewhat more blessed and great in hearing than in speaking. Happy is

the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man. As long as I hear truth I am

bathed by a beautiful element and am not conscious of any limits to my

nature. The suggestions are thousandfold that I hear and see. The

waters of the great deep have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I

speak, I define, I confine and am less. When Socrates speaks, Lysis and

Menexenus are afflicted by no shame that they do not speak. They also

are good. He likewise defers to them, loves them, whilst he speaks.

Because a true and natural man contains and is the same truth which an

eloquent man articulates; but in the eloquent man, because he can

articulate it, it seems something the less to reside, and he turns to

these silent beautiful with the more inclination and respect. The

ancient sentence said, Let us be silent, for so are the gods. Silence

is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great

and universal. Every man’s progress is through a succession of

teachers, each of whom seems at the time to have a superlative

influence, but it at last gives place to a new. Frankly let him accept

it all. Jesus says, Leave father, mother, house and lands, and follow

me. Who leaves all, receives more. This is as true intellectually as

morally. Each new mind we approach seems to require an abdication of

all our past and present possessions. A new doctrine seems at first a

subversion of all our opinions, tastes, and manner of living. Such has

Swedenborg, such has Kant, such has Coleridge, such has Hegel or his

interpreter Cousin seemed to many young men in this country. Take

thankfully and heartily all they can give. Exhaust them, wrestle with

them, let them not go until their blessing be won, and after a short

season the dismay will be overpast, the excess of influence withdrawn,

and they will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more bright star

shining serenely in your heaven and blending its light with all your

day.

But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly to that which draws him,

because that is his own, he is to refuse himself to that which draws

him not, whatsoever fame and authority may attend it, because it is not

his own. Entire self-reliance belongs to the intellect. One soul is a

counterpoise of all souls, as a capillary column of water is a balance

for the sea. It must treat things and books and sovereign genius as

itself also a sovereign. If Æschylus be that man he is taken for, he

has not yet done his office when he has educated the learned of Europe

for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master of delight

to me also. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him nothing

with me. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand Æschyluses to my

intellectual integrity. Especially take the same ground in regard to

abstract truth, the science of the mind. The Bacon, the Spinoza, the

Hume, Schelling, Kant, or whosoever propounds to you a philosophy of

the mind, is only a more or less awkward translator of things in your

consciousness which you have also your way of seeing, perhaps of

denominating. Say then, instead of too timidly poring into his obscure

sense, that he has not succeeded in rendering back to you your

consciousness. He has not succeeded; now let another try. If Plato

cannot, perhaps Spinoza will. If Spinoza cannot, then perhaps Kant.

Anyhow, when at last it is done, you will find it is no recondite, but

a simple, natural, common state which the writer restores to you.

But let us end these didactics. I will not, though the subject might

provoke it, speak to the open question between Truth and Love. I shall

not presume to interfere in the old politics of the skies;—“The

cherubim know most; the seraphim love most.” The gods shall settle

their own quarrels. But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the

intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men

who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure

reason, the _Trismegisti_, the expounders of the principles of thought

from age to age. When at long intervals we turn over their abstruse

pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few, these great

spiritual lords who have walked in the world,—these of the old

religion,—dwelling in a worship which makes the sanctities of

Christianity look _parvenues_ and popular; for “persuasion is in soul,

but necessity is in intellect.” This band of grandees, Hermes,

Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus,

Synesius and the rest, have somewhat so vast in their logic, so primary

in their thinking, that it seems antecedent to all the ordinary

distinctions of rhetoric and literature, and to be at once poetry and

music and dancing and astronomy and mathematics. I am present at the

sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams the soul

lays the foundations of nature. The truth and grandeur of their thought

is proved by its scope and applicability, for it commands the entire

schedule and inventory of things for its illustration. But what marks

its elevation and has even a comic look to us, is the innocent serenity

with which these babe-like Jupiters sit in their clouds, and from age

to age prattle to each other and to no contemporary. Well assured that

their speech is intelligible and the most natural thing in the world,

they add thesis to thesis, without a moment’s heed of the universal

astonishment of the human race below, who do not comprehend their

plainest argument; nor do they ever relent so much as to insert a

popular or explaining sentence, nor testify the least displeasure or

petulance at the dulness of their amazed auditory. The angels are so

enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not

distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but

speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

XII.

ART

Give to barrows trays and pans

Grace and glimmer of romance,

Bring the moonlight into noon

Hid in gleaming piles of stone;

On the city’s paved street

Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet,

Let spouting fountains cool the air,

Singing in the sun-baked square.

Let statue, picture, park and hall,

Ballad, flag and festival,

The past restore, the day adorn

And make each morrow a new morn

So shall the drudge in dusty frock

Spy behind the city clock

Retinues of airy kings,

Skirts of angels, starry wings,

His fathers shining in bright fables,

His children fed at heavenly tables.

’Tis the privilege of Art

Thus to play its cheerful part,

Man in Earth to acclimate

And bend the exile to his fate,

And, moulded of one element

With the days and firmament,

Teach him on these as stairs to climb

And live on even terms with Time;

Whilst upper life the slender rill

Of human sense doth overfill.