that the mind is said to be active, even by those who are unaccustomed to analytical inquiries, or to metaphysical nomenclature. The love of power, or the love of glory, when there is no opportunity of intellectual exertion, may, in the common acceptation of the word, be as passive as tranquillity itself. The passion is active only when, with intellectual action, it compares means with ends, and different means with each other, and deliberates, and resolves, and executes. Chain some revolutionary usurper to the floor of a dungeon, his ambition may be active still, because he may still be intellectually busy in planning means of deliverance and vengeance; and, on his bed of straw, may conquer half the world. But, if we could fetter his reason and fancy, as we can fetter his limbs, what activity would remain, though he were still to feel that mere desire of power or glory, which, though usually followed by intellectual exertion, is itself as prior to these exertions, all that constitutes ambition, as a passion? There would, indeed, still be in his mind the awful elements of that force, which bursts upon the world with conflagration and destruction; but, though there would be the _thunder_, it would be the thunder sleeping in its cloud. To _will_, is to act with desire; and, unless in the production of mere muscular motion, it is only _intellectually_ that we can act. To class the active powers, therefore, as distinct from the intellectual, is to class them, as opposed to that, without which, as active powers, they cannot even exist.