To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius, a vital appropriating exercise of mind, closely allied to that which first created it.  In order to secure genuine profit here, the disciple must for himself repeat the processes of the teacher, reach the same conclusion, see the same truth.  Wisdom cannot be mechanically taken, but must be spiritually assimilated,—­cannot be put on as a coat or hat, used as a hammer or a sling, but must be intelligently grasped, digested, and organized into the mental structure and habits.  The truth of this is at once so palpable and so important that it has found embodiment in numerous proverbs known to almost every one:  “An ounce of mother-wit is worth a pound of school-wit”; “A pennyweight of your own wit is worth a ton of other people’s”; “Who cannot work out his salvation by heart will never do it by book.”

For the reason just indicated, we think the common estimate of the actual influence of even the costliest preceptive sayings is monstrously exaggerated.  That an aphorism should really be of use, it must virtually be reproduced by the faculties of your own soul.  But the mental energy and acquirement which thus recreate it in a great degree supersede the necessity of it, render it an expression not of a guidance you need from without, but of an insight and force already working within.  Your character determines what maxims you will select or create far more than the maxims you choose or make determine what your character will be.  Herbart says, “Characters with ruling plans are energetic; characters with ruling maxims are virtuous.”  This is true, since a continuous plan subsidizes the forces that would without it run to waste, and a deliberately chosen authority girds and guides the soul from perilous dallying and dissipation.  Nevertheless, it is not so much that characters are energetic or virtuous because they have ruling plans or maxims as it is that they have ruling plans or maxims because they are energetic or virtuous.  Say to a penurious, hard, grumpy man, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”  Will you thus make him liberal, sympathetic, affable?  No, his character will neutralize your precept, as vinegar receiving the sunshine into its bosom becomes more sour.  Some persons seem to imagine that a wise maxim is a sort of fairy’s wand, one touch of which will transform the loaded panniers of a donkey into the fiery wings of a Pegasus.  Surely, it is a great error.  Trench says, with an amusing naivete, “There is scarcely a mistake which in the course of our lives we have committed, but some proverb, had we known and attended to its lesson, might have saved us from it.”  The two comprehensive conditions, “had we known and attended to its lesson,” are discharging conductors, that empty the sentence of all proper meaning, and leave only a rank of hollow words behind.  He might as well say, “Had we never been tempted, we had never fallen,—­had we possessed all wisdom, we