while, that there is a secretly pervading power in what he is managing, which makes him servant to that he rules over.

Knowledge, or the immediate and obvious uses of knowledge, rather than its final purposes, being his aim, acquiring takes the character of an indiscriminating passion, or more properly, appetite, and so the mind be well filled, he thinks not to ask himself, why all this jumble of things here? The near or remote, the like or the unlike, are all the same to him; and if not adapted to his nature, he has only to adapt his nature to them. And this, his process of working does for him speedily. For the objects of his mind lying in accidental juxtaposition, and not being united by any permanent relationship in the nature of things, the weak principle of unity within, is soon broken up, and he sees only parts, and thinks only of parts. There is truth, in more senses than one, in the term applied to a clever man—a man of parts for we scarcely think of him as an individual whole -a unit. Indeed, the term, a man of knowledge, does not describe him; for the singular, knowledge, gives the impression of oneness. So, seeing that we now have the plural, literatures, why not have another plural, and call him a man of knowledges?

This certainly is the tendency of the present upon the character, so that he who lives mainly in it, has but little acquaintance with the intuitive, the principal of spiritual life not having been awakened in him. In that life are included inward growth and action; but his action is outward, and his increase not that of a single internal expansive principle, but that of accretion; and he is little better than an aggregation of unchanged, foreign bodies, adhering to him and to one another not so much by any elective affinities, as by some external propulsion.

I know not how better to illustrate the two orders of minds, than by a piece of variegated marble, in which the delicately tinted branchings seem but the veins and arteries of one original body, the issues of its own life; and next, by an uncouth, dead mass of pudding-stone. Here it is! bulky enough, to be sure. But where its unity? A mere heap of stones, tumbled together by some rolling flood of fire or water, and left to cool down, or thicken, into this shapeless loose mass, from which one may take out piece after piece, without marring their beds. But can you unvein the marble? The present, by diminishing the inward life and action,

and of course, the sources of individual internal enjoyment, soon makes seclusion inert and wearisome, and drives men out, to congregate for the sake of sensation and action. This brings about not a social, but a gregarious state. For the life of the social principle springs not from inward vacuity, but from inward love-a living and a life-imparting quality of the soul. So that the more gregarious a man becomes, the less a social creature is he. He mixes not with men to make friendly interchange of rich things, or to bestow of the affluence of his own soul, but because of the poverty at home. He leaves his door a beggar of his daily bread, and hears said unto him, "Be ye warmed, and be ye clothed," and returns emptier, and nakeder, and colder, than he went : He goes, not to give but to get; and the root and the offspring of this is selfishness.

Going forth without a strong individuality of character, the growth of retired meditation and few and close attachments and habits that have worked into the constitution of the mind, men assimilate carelessly and unconsciously, with the circumstances, views and notions which happen to be in fashion at the time. A conventional uniformity gathers over the multitude; manners take the place of character; and how to bear one's self, and how to express one's self, and not how to think and feel, become the object of life :-conventional gratulations, conventional regrets, conventional indifference, conventional extasies, conventional smiles, andconventional tears? O, no; that would put one out of all conventions!

It is, thus, easy to see, that, to be a social creature, in the true sense of the term, a man must be the creature of seclusion for the larger portion of his time; so that what makes him to differ from other men, and constitutes his individuality, may be allowed to expand and strengthen from its own living energy. Else, that variety which breathes spirit into intercourse, must be tamed down into an insipid sameness, and that inanity of which men complain, and wonder why it is, must be the necessity and not the accident of such a state. To think of passing day after day in the world, and being doomed, in every face we look upon, to behold our own likeness; in every act of recognition, to see repeated our own smile and our own bow; and from every mouth to hear echoed back our own remarks and our own turn of words!-Would not the hermit's cell be more patiently borne with than this?

True it is, that nature is stronger than art, and being essentially various, art will never be able to bring society quite up to its notion of perfect similitude; yet the artificial is a process of assimilation, and as the social state departs from nature, it will always be approximating a sameness. Besides, where the resemblance in character does not exist in reality, it does in appearance, and real difference is hid under a seeming likeness; so that to the tendency toward the former evil, is added that of deception, and means and ends are both alike cursed.

True society, that which awakens life within us, and warms the heart, and stirs the intellect, that which is perpetually setting before us something to give healthful diversity to our thoughts, and something fresh to carry home with us for reflection, is made up of distinctly marked individuals, with just enough in common to understand one another, but with all else each man's own, and such as he, and he alone, would have thought of at all, or, at most, would have thought of or said in that particular way.

To draw good or pleasure from a man, he must have that in him which, in form or matter, we had not been conscious of in ourselves, yet not so the contrary of what is in us, but that it shall touch some chord in our own souls, and call out sounds which had slept silent there, from the time the hand of God first strung the instrument. To adopt Coleridge's distinction between the words, while contraries repel, opposites combine. To be a social creature, then, man must be a solitary creature too; to fit men for each other, each must be much alone.

These evil effects seem to grow, not only naturally but unavoidably, from absorption in the present, and a consequent hankering for herding together in multitudes. And what a blight it is upon the heart. And with all its excitements, how joyless life is made by it. For, pray, who is the better off? He who has his thousand friends, or he who chances not to have one? Why, in very deed, the latter; for he has no part to play; and it may be that he has a heart yet for a friend. But the other!-his heart! Why, he has quite forgot what has become of that; some one, or all, of his thousand friends must have it-somewhere.

Truly, one would think that the end of coming together, was to give no offence, and to produce an impression, as it is termed. And what are called the courtesies of life, require

such looks of interest and concern, such protestations of sympathetic sorrow or delight, that should a tythe of them ever reach so far as the heart, it could not but burst with its emotions. The observing man, who mixes only occasionally with the world, sees, at a glance, this farce, or rather, this tragi-comedy of life, in which they who have parts, have nigh forgot they were acting, so long have they played in it, to and upon one another. But the effect is a sad one upon just penetration, free-heartedness, and a discriminating moral sense; and the looker-on goes home, with a melancholy shake of the head, repeating to himself the words of good bishop Hall, "I would fear that speaking well, without feeling, were the next way to procure habituall hypocrisie!"

If we follow out the influences of the present, it is plain enough how they should turn us to physical pursuits, and thus strengthen the power of the outward over us, rather than lead us to those operations which relate more inwardly to men; for there is something tangible about the former, and easy of apprehension to him who lives in the sensible, more than in the abstract. And if it be true, that the present produces a love and a feeling of power, and out of these, self-satisfaction; physical pursuits, more than the abstract and unseen, gratify and strengthen these feelings, for they put the results of our efforts visibly before our eyes. Chemical and mechanical principles, carried into act by us, give out new forms and combinations, and lo! there are standing before us the works of our own hands; and here arises the feeling that the moving power is in ourselves, and that we work upon the mere servants of our will, the unresisting subjects of our control.

In the way in which the man of the mere present, views the outward, there is no corrective to his pride, in these employments; for he is not the man to search out their relation to the infinite, and they will not remind him of it. But the study of the moral and intellectual nature, touches on every side upon the infinite and unsearchable; and, according to the expanse of the mind engaged in this pursuit, will be its consciousness of an infinite and an unknown; for the larger the circle of the mind's thoughts, the more is there to come in contact with that which lies around it. The tendency of the physical, is to make us feel our power; of the other, to teach us our weakness. And so it turns out in this age; and this is the age of mechanical inventions, and chemical dis

coveries; and steam power has more worshippers than moral power.

Absorption in the present, leading to an over-estimate of it, naturally runs again into an over-estimate of self. The sense of nearness is a cause of this; for nearness produces a feeling of rights in common, not only in ordinary interests and privileges, but even in distinguishing qualities and endowments sometimes. Being next door neighbor to a great man, imparts self-importance; and to laud or to defend him, why, that is standing to him in the relation of protector and patron, at once.

In this same present, which influences all, each one, as was sometime ago remarked, however seemingly insignificant, has some influence in return, and a part, that, in one way or another, acts upon what is going on. And therefore it is, that from palace to hovel, from the father to the prating youngone, we hear so much, even to very weariness, of the spirit of the age, the light of the age, the refinement of the age, and, last of all, of that march, to keep step to which, every man, woman and child is practising such contortions-the march of the mind.

Yes, in the present, man feels his self-consequence; for he has an influence in it; and it is in his nature, that he should feel this self-consequence growing in him, in the proportion that he magnifies that upon which he acts. The self-gratulatory manner in which men talk of this age in which we live, verifies this remark, and another, also, that we are under some powerful illusion as to the advances of our times. For great truths, while they ennoble man, make him thoughtful, sober-minded, not thinking of himself more highly than he ought to think. And well they may; for complete truths, whatsoever they concern, reach into eternity, and open immortality upon the soul. And shall not the spirit stand in awe, with eternity within it, and eternity round about it?

The thoughtful looker-on believes that all will finally work together for good. But he knows, too, that this spirit of vanity and self-satisfaction must first meet with some fearful rebuke; and that the spirit of pride which engenders high things, is unwittingly engendering that which shall by and by dash them. If there be any one thing in particular, which characterizes this age, it is over-weening self-complacency. And this comes of living so altogether in and for the present; and it is this self-complacency, again, which keeps us so