the spiritual body of the person, and represents the individualization of vital experience, the conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men.  Sir Thomas Browne, in quaint reference to the building up of our physical frame through the food we eat, declares that we have all been on our own trenchers; and so, on the same principle, our spiritual faculties can be analyzed into impersonal facts and ideas, whose life and substance we have converted into personal reason, imagination, and passion.  The fundamental characteristic of man is spiritual hunger; the universe of thought and matter is spiritual food.  He feeds on Nature; he feeds on ideas; he feeds, through art, science, literature, and history, on the acts and thoughts of other minds; and could we take the mightiest intellect that ever awed and controlled the world, and unravel his powers, and return their constituent particles to the multitudinous objects whence they were derived, the last probe of our analysis, after we had stripped him of all his faculties, would touch that unquenchable fiery atom of personality which had organized round itself such a colossal body of mind, and which, in its simple naked energy, would still be capable of rehabilitating itself in the powers and passions of which it had been shorn.

It results from this doctrine of the mind’s growth, that success in all the departments of life over which intellect holds dominion depends, not merely on an outside knowledge of the facts and laws connected with each department, but on the assimilation of that knowledge into instinctive intelligence and active power.  Take the good farmer, and you will find that ideas in him are endowed with will, and can work.  Take the good general, and you will find that the principles of his profession are inwrought into the substance of his nature, and act with the velocity of instincts.  Take the good judge, and in him jurisprudence seems impersonated, and his opinions are authorities.  Take the good merchant, and you will find that commerce, in its facts and laws, seems in him embodied, and that his sagacity appears identical with the objects on which it is exercised.  Take the great statesman, take Webster, and note how, by thoroughly individualizing his comprehensive experience, he seems to carry a nation in his brain; how, in all that relates to the matter in hand, he has in him as faculty what is out of him in fact; how between the man and the thing there occurs that subtile freemasonry of recognition which we call the mind’s intuitive glance; and how conflicting principles and statements, mixed and mingling in fierce confusion and with deafening war-cries, fall into order and relation, and move in the direction of one inexorable controlling idea, the moment they are grasped by an intellect which is in the secret of their combination:—­

  “Confusion hears his voice, and the wild uproar
  stills.”