than what he really is, and that his progress in intellectual manhood is not more determined by the information he retains, than by that portion which, by a benign provision of Providence, he is enabled to forget. Youth, to be sure, is his,—youth, in virtue of which he is free of the universe,—youth, with its elastic vigor, its far-darting hopes, its generous impatience of prudent meanness, its grand denial of instituted falsehood, its beautiful contempt of accredited baseness,—but youth which must now concentrate its wayward energies, which must discourse with facts and grapple with men, and through strife and struggle, and the sad wisdom of experience, must pass from the vague delights of generous impulses to the assured joy of manly principles. The moment he comes in contact with the stern and stubborn realities which frown on his entrance into practical life, he will find that power is the soul of knowledge, and character the condition of intelligence. He will discover that intellectual success depends primarily on qualities which are not strictly intellectual, but personal and constitutional. The test of success is influence,—that is, the power of shaping events by informing, guiding, animating, controlling other minds. Whether this influence be exerted directly in the world of practical affairs, or indirectly in the world of ideas, its fundamental condition is still force of individual being, and the amount of influence is the measure of the degree of force, just as an effect measures a cause. The characteristic of intellect is insight,—insight into things and their relations; but then this insight is intense or languid, clear or confused, comprehensive or narrow, exactly in proportion to the weight and power of the individual who sees and combines. It is not so much the intellect that makes the man, as the man the intellect; in every act of earnest thinking, the reach of the thought depends on the pressure of the will; and we would therefore emphasize and enforce, as the primitive requirement of intellectual success, that discipline of the individual which developes dim tendencies into positive sentiments, sentiments into ideas, and ideas into abilities,—that discipline by which intellect is penetrated through and through with the qualities of manhood, and endowed with arms as well as eyes. This is Intellectual Character.
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 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."
Mark, too, how, in the productions of his mind, the presence and pressure of his whole nature, in each intellectual act, keeps his opinions on the level of his character, and stamps every weighty paragraph with "Daniel Webster, his mark." The characteristic, of all his great speeches is, that the statements, arguments, and images have what we should call a positive being of their own,—stand out as plainly to the sight as a ledge of rocks or chain of hills,—and, like the works of Nature herself, need no other justification of their right to exist than the fact of their existence. We may detest their object, but we cannot deny their solidity of organization. This power of giving a substantial body, an undeniable external shape and form, to his thoughts and perceptions, so that the toiling mind does not so much seem to pass from one sentence to another, unfolding its leading idea, as to make each sentence a solid work in a Torres-Vedras line of fortifications,—this prodigious constructive faculty, wielded with the strength of a huge Samson-like artificer in the material of mind, and welding together the substances it might not be able to fuse, puzzled all opponents who understood it not, and baffled the efforts of all who understood it well. He rarely took a position
