The usual phrases by which criticism discriminates vital from mechanical minds, are impassioned imagination and logical understanding. This vocabulary, though open to objections, as not going to the root of the matter, is still available for our purpose. It draws a definite line between genius and talent. The man of impassioned imagination is vital in every part. The primitive spiritual energy at the centre of his personality permeates, as with warm life-blood, the whole of his being, vivifying, connecting, fusing into unity, all his faculties, so that his thought comes from him as an act, and is endowed with a penetrating and animating as well as enlightening power. The thoughts of Plato, Dante, Bacon, Shakspeare, Newton, Milton, Burke, not to mention others, are actors in the world—communicating life, forming character, revealing truth, generating energy in recipient minds. These men possess understanding as far as that term expresses an operation of the mind, but understanding with them is in living connection with imagination and emotion; they never use it as an exclusive power in themselves, they never address it as an exclusive power in others. To understand a thing in its external qualities and internal spirit, requires the joint operation of all the faculties; and no fact is ever thoroughly understood by the understanding, for it is the person that understands not the faculty, and the person understands only by the exercise of his whole force and insight. The man of understanding, so called, simply perceives the forms of things and their relations; the man of impassioned imagination perceiving forms and divining spirit, conceives the life of things and their relations. The antithesis runs through the whole realm of thought and fact. The man of understanding, when he rises out of sensations, simply reaches abstractions; and in the abstract there is no life. Ideas and principles belong as much to the concrete, to substantial existence, as the facts of sensation; the law of gravitation is a reality no less than the planet Jupiter; but to the man of mechanical understanding, ideas subside into mere opinions, and principles into generalities; and as by the very process of his thinking he disconnects, and deadens by disconnection, the powers by which he thinks, he cannot exercise, conceive or communicate life, cannot invent, discover, create, combine. This is evident from the nature of the mind, and it is proved by history. In art, religion, science, philosophy, politics, the minds that organize are organic minds, not mechanical understandings.