Similar in nature to the vow of seclusion and silence, and equally incompatible with a fulfilment of the obligations of reason and humanity, was the vow of silent contemplation assumed by many of the religious orders. Meditation, abstractly considered, is neither a virtue nor a vice. It derives its merit or demerit from the objects on which it dwells, and the manner in which it employs its faculties. The mind receiving its impression from external objects, and their vividness and profundity being in proportion to the constancy with which they are contemplated, we as naturally become enlightened by what is true, expanded by what is liberal, and animated by what is pleasing, as we are misguided by what is erroneous, contracted by what is illiberal, and depressed by what is gloomy. Amid objects of reality, amid scenes of grandeur, where the subjects are the most numerous and varied, and where the faculties are awakened to their severest and most rigid scrutiny, is the great college in which the understanding is invigorated and improved; in which the fancy is ennobled and chastened; in which the mind acquires those maxims of wisdom, and that ascendency over impulse and illusion which enable it to act in conformity with the principles of happiness and of the human organism. The process of meditation is the act of comparing facts, deducing conclusions, analyzing compounds, and tracing the chain of cause and effect. Knowledge is the material with which it works; and, in proportion to its accuracy and extent, will be the value and greatness of our elaborations. But the processes of meditation are not adapted to the acquisition of knowledge. None are so absurd as to expect to obtain a knowledge of grammar, arithmetic, history, astronomy, or of the laws and properties of matter, by the mere exercise of the contemplative powers. To retire into solitude, and endeavor by the guess-work of meditation to acquire even a knowledge of the alphabet, would be as ridiculous as to attempt to make our feet perform the office of our hands. Not less absurd would it be, were we to immure ourselves in the gloom and silence of perpetual confinement, avoiding the objects of Nature and an intercourse with society, with the expectation that by such means, though we possessed the penetration of a Locke, the intellect of a Gibbon, or the versatility of a Voltaire, to acquire anything but profound ignorance; or any ideas but what were unnatural, distorted and misshapen.