ke a thickening of the
skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But culture, revealing the
high origin of the apparent world and aiming at the perfection of the
man as the end, degrades every thing else, as health and bodily life,
into means. It sees prudence not to be a several faculty, but a name for
wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and its wants. Cultivated men
always feel and speak so, as if a great fortune, the achievement of
a civil or social measure, great personal influence, a graceful and
commanding address, had their value as proofs of the energy of the
spirit. If a man lose his balance and immerse himself in any trades or
pleasures for their own sake, he may be a good wheel or pin, but he is
not a cultivated man.

The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and
cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and
therefore literature's. The true prudence limits this sensualism by
admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world. This recognition
once made, the order of the world and the distribution of affairs and
times, being studied with the co-perception of their subordinate place,
will reward any degree of attention. For our existence, thus apparently
attached in nature to the sun and the returning moon and the periods
which they mark,--so susceptible to climate and to country, so alive to
social good and evil, so fond of splendor and so tender to hunger and
cold and debt,--reads all its primary lessons out of these books.

Prudence does not go behind nature and ask whence it is. It takes the
laws of the world whereby man's being is conditioned, as they are, and
keeps these laws that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects space
and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity, growth and death.
There revolve, to give bound and period to his being on all sides,
the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky: here lies stubborn
matter, and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here is a planted
globe, pierced and belted with natural laws and fenced and distributed
externally with civil partitions and properties which impose new
restraints on the young inhabitant.

We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which
blows around us and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too
hot, too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible and
divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatte