_Influence of the Feelings on the Intellect._--On the other hand, it is equally true that the state of the intellect in any case depends not a little on the nature and strength of the mind's capacities of feeling. A quick and lively sensibility is more likely to be attended with quickness and strength of intellectual conception; imagination, perception, fancy, and even reasoning, are quickened, and set in active play, by its electric touch. A man with sluggish and torpid sensibilities, is almost of necessity a man of dull and sluggish intellect. A man without feeling, if we can conceive so strange a phenomenon, would be a man, the measure of whose intellectual capacity would be little above that of the brutes. _Importance of this Department of the mental Faculties._--Such being the nature of the sensibilities, the _importance_ of this department of mental activity becomes obvious at a glance. The springs of human action lie here. We find here a clue to the study of human nature and of ourselves. To understand the complicated and curious problem of human life and action, to understand history, society, nations, ourselves, we must understand well the nature and philosophy of the sensibilities. Here we find the motives which set the busy world in action, the causes which go to make men what they are in the busy and ever changing scene of life's great drama. It is the emotions and passions of men which give, at once, the impulse, and the direction, to their energies, constitute their character, shape their history and their destiny. A knowledge of man and of the world is emphatically a knowledge of the human heart. _Extract from Brown._--The importance of this part of our nature is well set forth in the following passage from Dr. Thomas Brown: "We might, perhaps, have been so constituted, with respect to our intellectual states of mind, as to have had all the varieties of these, our remembrances, judgments, and creations of fancy, without our emotions. But without the emotions which accompany them, of how little value would the mere intellectual functions have been! It is to our vivid feelings of this class we must look for those tender regards which make our remembrances sacred, for that love of truth and glory, and mankind, without which to animate and reward us in our discovery and diffusion of knowledge, the continued exercise of judgment would be a fatigue rather than a satisfaction, and for all that delightful wonder which we feel when we contemplate the admirable creations of fancy, or the still more admirable beauties of the unfading model, that model which is ever before us, and the imitation of which, as has been truly said, is the only _imitation_ that is itself _originality_. By our other mental functions, we are mere spectators of the machinery of the universe, living and inanimate; by our _emotions_, we are admirers of nature, lovers of man, adorers of God....