sion not merely of perfect reason in its contrivances, nor merely of beneficence in its (apparent) purpose, but also of an attribute analogous to this impulse of the human mind of which now we are speaking, namely, the desire to imbody the conceptions of reason in actual organizations, and to see imbodied whatever may be conceived of as possible and good.

448. This same constructive impulse, of which only the most obvious products, such as tools and machines, have here been mentioned, shows its energy in many other departments of human labor. All those social, commercial, and political combinations, all those arrangements for the orderly transaction of business, private or public, all codes of law and schemes of polity, by means of which the wills and the interests of individual men are reduced to system, and are made to conduce to the greatest good of the many-all such contrivances and schemes of order, whether tangible or not so, are instances coming under the same general designation as products of the constructive faculty and the constructive impulse.

449. The mechanical inventor, laboring amid the roar and din of furnaces and forges, the Marlborough, the Napoleon, the Nelson, the Wellington, laboring amid the roar and din of battle, and the legislator in his closet or at the council-board, are all, in their several spheres, employing nearly the same intellectual powers, and these powers vivified by nearly the same intellectual impulses. The differences which distinguish them are much less in the elements than in the motives, and in those passions of a secondary kind which come to cluster around occupations so dissimilar.

450. In this section we have thus named what appear to be the leading or the most elementary of those impulses which, coming to bear upon the human intellect, give it their own direction, and impart to it not merely a never wearied activity, but a constantly accelerating force.

451. What, then, is the aggregate product? An answer in full to this question must be made to embrace every thing (short of that which belongs to the moral element of human nature) that constitutes the difference between the nations of western Europe and the aborigines of the Australian continent.

452. But now, when we come to look into the vast mass of what might be adduced in illustration of the immeasurable prerogatives of civilization, with its arts, its science, its philosophy, and when we trace these great products of Mind to their source in the constant elements of human nature, we are confronted with the perplexing fact, brought to view as it is by the comparison above stated, that these elements, these inborn energies, give evidence of their existence only in what must be regarded as exceptive instances. Take the human family-all races and in all times-and then the million to a few have lived and perished in the unknowing, the unthinking, the comfortless, and the precarious condition of a savage or of a semi-barbarous condition, certainly destitute of science and philosophy.

453. This fact, putting out of view just now whatever explications it might admit of on moral or theological grounds, demands some attention.

XIII.

CONTINGENT DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTELLECTUAL

FACULTIES.

454. It must by no means be imagined that man has achieved the great things which he has actually accomplished in science and in art, as if it were by breaking over his appointed bounds, or as if by an ambitious violence done to his nature. We must not suppose that the heights of philosophy have been scaled by man in defiance of the law of his being. This can not be thought; but if not, then we are confronted with the fact that those powers of mind which are rudimental in human nature, and upon the development of which the well-being of man individually and socially so much depends, are so lodged in his constitution, or are so conditioned there, that the probability of their ever being developed and coming into act are, at the best, only equal to the contrary probability.

455. If, as we have just now said, the history of the human family, in all times and in all lands, were to be summed up, and a report were to be prepared which might be received as the statistics of intellectual development, it would thence appear that this development has been the exception more than the rule. A development of some one of these faculties alone. has been less rare, but still the slumber of all has.

been, if we reckon the human race in the way census, the condition of the many in all times.

of a

456. On this ground, then, the contrast between human nature and the animal orders around us is marked and is extreme, and it is of a kind which it would be unphilosophical to dismiss as if it had no deep meaning, or as if it did not indicate, nay, conspicuously display a fundamental principle in the structure of the human mind.

457. Throughout all species in the animal orders Mind invariably completes its intention; it makes full use of its powers, neither more nor less; and it does so with an undeviating regard to the law of its structure in each species, and it does so from age to age, unchangeably; but it is not so with man.

458. To a certain extent, this anomalous condition of the human system may be shown to conform itself to law; or, in other words, it has its apparent reason, and it justifies itself in the result as affecting the welfare of the social system at large, as for instance:

459. When we bring into view a civilized and a cultivated community, including its several orders, the under and the upper, the more and the less educated -the laborers mechanically, the laborers intellectually-those who command their time, and those whose time is every day bartered for bread, then such facts as these are easily seen to belong to the structure of human nature, as intended to undergo, not a solitary, but a social development.

460. The first of these obvious facts is this, that the intellectual emotions, and the tastes, and the tendencies which concrete about them, are bestowed by

nature upon the social mass in far greater profusion than are those intellectual faculties or powers of reason which might yield any appreciable product. For one mind that is endowed as well with the power as with the emotional taste, a hundred minds, or a thousand, or many thousands, possess the feeling, the sensibility, the communicable soul which bring them within the influence of this, the gifted one in ten thousand.

461. The reason of this unequal distribution of the feeling and of the power it is not difficult to find. The product, the commodity that is needed for the benefit of the many, is of a communicable kind; it is what may be conveyed and transmitted, and gazed at, and used, and admired, and repeated, and copied, and indefinitely diffused. When light is needed, it is enough that one flame should be kindled, which will enkindle others, or will itself shine upon all. There would plainly be a waste if intellectual powers were as common as intellectual tastes, or aptitudes to use and enjoy the products of that power.

462. This unequal relationship of the faculty and the aptitude to use and enjoy has this further meaning, that it tends greatly to enhance the motive which bears upon the minds of the few gifted individuals. The gifted man, unless he be strangely anchoretic in his dispositions, knows and feels that in his solitude he is laboring for the many; that his excellent achievements will be accepted, and prized, and used by his contemporaries, and perhaps even by the men of distant times. Here, then, a provision is made for throwing in an intensity of productive force upon the faculty whence the needed product is to arise.