We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power and
beauty of the body; there is the like pleasure, and higher benefit, from
witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as feats of memory, of
mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the transmutings
of the imagination, even versatility and concentration, as these acts
expose the invisible organs and members of the mind, which respond,
member for member, to the parts of the body. For we thus enter a new
gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their truest marks, taught, with
Plato, "to choose those who can, without aid from the eyes or any other
sense, proceed to truth and to being." Foremost among these activities
are the summersaults, spells, and resurrections wrought by the
imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a
thousand times his force. It opens the delicious sense of indeterminate
size, and inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the
gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book or a word dropped in
conversation sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed
with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the pit. And this benefit
is real, because we are entitled to these enlargements, and, once having
passed the bounds, shall never again be quite the miserable pedants we
were.
The high functions of the intellect are so allied that some imaginative
power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of
the first class, but especially in meditative men of an intuitive habit
of thought. This class serve us, so that they have the perception of
identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakspeare,
Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception
of these laws is a kind of meter of the mind. Little minds are little,
through failure to see them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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