"Obviously the primal condition of all else must be found in a self-prompted activity or wakefulness of intellect. The time when the drifting faculties begin to feel the helm of will, when the youth passes from being merely receptive to become aggressive, marks the advent of the true human era. As in the history of our planet the first remove from the _tohu va-vohu_ was when the Spirit of God brooded on the deep, and, obedient to the command, light shot out from darkness, so in man the microcosm, the brooding spirit and commanding purpose mark the first step from chaos toward cosmos. The mechanical intellect becomes dynamical, and the automatic man becomes autonomic. It may be with a lower or a higher motion. The mind gropes round restlessly by a yearning instinct; it may be driven by the strong impulse of native genius; or, it may rise to the condition of being the facile servant of the forceful will. When the boy at Pisa curiously watches the oil lamp swinging by its long chain in the cathedral, a pendulum begins to vibrate in his brain, and falling bodies to count off their intervals; and when afterward he deliberately fits two lenses in a leaden tube, the moon's mountains, Jupiter's satellites, and Saturn's rings are all waiting to catch his eye. A thoughtful meditation on the spasms of a dead frog's leg in Bologna becomes galvanic. The gas breaking on the surface of a brewery vat, well watched by Priestley, bursts forth into pneumatic chemistry. A spider's web in the Duke of Devonshire's garden expands in the mind of my lord's gardener, Brown, into a suspension bridge. A sledge hammer, well swung in Cromarty, opened those New Walks in an Old Field. The diffraction of light revealed itself to Young in the hues of a soap-bubble. As the genie of the oriental tale unfolded his huge height from the bottle stamped with Solomon's seal, so the career of Davy first evolved itself out of old vials and gallipots. When the boy Bowditch was found in all his leisure moments snatching up his slate and pencil, when Cobbett grappled resolutely with the grammar, when Cuvier dissected the cuttlefish found upon the shore, or Scott was seen sitting on a ladder, hour after hour, poring over books, they will be further heard from. "If such instances illustrate the propulsive force of native genius, they also indicate what training must do when the impulsive genius is not there. No idler plea was ever entered for an idler than when he says,--'I have no bent for this, no interest in that, and no genius for the other.' The animal has his _habitat_, and stays fast. A complete man is intellectually and physically a cosmopolite. Till he has gained the power to throw his will-force wherever the work summons him, most of all to the weak points of his condition, till he has learned to be his own task-master and overseer, he is but a 'slave of the ring.'