Now it should be thundered in the ears of every young man who has passed through that course of instruction ironically styled education, “What do you intend to be, and what do you intend to do?  Do you purpose to play at living, or do you purpose to live?—­to be a memory, a word-cistern, a feeble prater on illustrious themes, one of the world’s thousand chatterers, or a will, a power, a man?” No varnish and veneer of scholarship, no command of the tricks of logic and rhetoric, can ever make you a positive force in the world.  Look around you in the community of educated men, and see how many, who started on their career with minds as bright and eager and hearts as hopeful as yours, have been mysteriously arrested in their growth,—­have lost all the kindling sentiments which glorified their youthful studies, and dwindled into complacent echoes of surrounding mediocrity,—­have begun, indeed, to die on the very threshold of manhood, and stand in society as tombs rather than temples of immortal souls.  See, too, the wide disconnection between knowledge and life;—­heaps of information piled upon little heads; everybody speaking,—­few who have earned the right to speak; maxims enough to regenerate a universe,—­a woful lack of great hearts, in which reason, right, and truth, regal and militant, are fortified and encamped!  Now this disposition to skulk the austere requirements of intellectual growth in an indolent surrender of the mind’s power of self-direction must be overcome at the outset, or, in spite of your grand generalities, you will be at the mercy of every bullying lie, and strike your colors to every mean truism, and shape your life in accordance with every low motive, which the strength of genuine wickedness or genuine stupidity can bring to bear upon you.  There is no escape from slavery, or the mere pretence of freedom, but in radical individual power; and all solid intellectual culture is simply the right development of individuality into its true intellectual form.

And first, at the risk of being considered metaphysical,—­though we fear no metaphysician would indorse the charge,—­let us define what we mean by individuality; for the word is commonly made to signify some peculiarity or eccentricity, some unreasonable twist, of mind or disposition.  An individual, then, in the sense in which we use the term, is a causative spiritual force, whose root and being are in eternity, but who lives, grows, and builds up his nature in time.  All the objects of sense and thought, all facts and ideas, all things, are external to his essential personality.  But he has bound up in his personal being sympathies and capacities which ally him with external objects, and enable him to transmute their inner spirit and substance into his own personal life.  The process of his growth, therefore, is a development of power from within to assimilate objects from without, the power increasing with every vital exercise of it.  The result of this assimilation is character.  Character is