This was the aspect of Transcendentalism that fascinated Theodore Parker. His intellect was constructed on the English model. His acute observation; his passion for external facts; his faith in statistics; his hunger for information on all external topics of history and politics; his capacity for retaining details of miscellaneous knowledge; his logical method of reasoning; his ability to handle masses of raw mental material, to distribute and classify;--all indicate intellectual power of the English rather than of the German type. It was his custom to speak slightingly of the "Bridgewater Treatises" and works of a similar class, in which the processes of inductive argument are employed to establish truths of the "Pure Reason;" but he easily fell into the same habit, and pushed the inductive method as far as it would go. His discourses on Providence, the Economy of Pain and Misery, Atheism, Theism, in the volume entitled "Theism, Atheism, and The Popular Theology," are quite in the style of the "Bridgewater Treatises." Parker was, in many respects, the opposite of a Mystic; he was a realist of the most concrete description, entirely at home among sensible things, a good administrator, a safe investor of moneys, a wise counsellor in practical affairs. But along with this intellectual quality which he inherited from his father, was an interior, sentimental, devotional quality, derived from his mother. The two were never wholly blended; often they were wide apart, occupying different spheres, and engaged in different offices; sometimes they were in apparent opposition. Neither could subdue or overshadow the other; neither could keep the other long in abeyance. As a rule, the dominion was divided between them: the practical understanding assumed control of all matters pertaining to this world; the higher reason claimed supremacy in all matters of faith. But for the tendency to poetic idealism, which came to him from his mother, Parker might, from the constitution of his mind, have belonged to an opposite school. A passage in the letter from Santa Cruz, entitled "Theodore Parker's Experience as a Minister," is curious, as showing how the two tendencies of his mind overlapped; he is speaking of the two methods of developing the contents "of the instinctive intuitions of the divine, the just, and the immortal,"--the inductive and the deductive. After a few words respecting the inductive method of gathering facts from the history of mankind, he speaks thus of the deductive: "Next, from the primitive facts of consciousness given by the power of instinctive intuition, I endeavored to deduce the true notion of God, of justice, and futurity." Then, forgetting that the power of instinctive intuition must be self-authenticating--cannot, at any rate, be authenticated by miscellaneous facts in the religious history of mankind--he continues: