ettled by
rule--no spring within, from which living waters flow.

The difference between intellectual culture and intellectual life
appears in the fact, that in regard to those mastering ideas, which to
after times mark one age as in advance of the preceding, the classical
scholars, the scientific luminaries, the constitutional expounders of
the day, are quite as likely to be behind the general sense of the age,
as to be in advance.

The question, What is human life? arises on a contemplation like this:
There is no difficulty in determining the life of all the other tenants
of earth; unless, indeed, those which man has so long and so
universally subjected to his purposes, that the whereabouts, or indeed
the existence of the original stock, remains in doubt. The inferior
animals, left to themselves in favorable circumstances, manifest one
development, attain to one flourish, live the same life, from
generation to generation. Man may superinduce upon them what he
calls _improvements_, because they better fit them for _his_ purposes.
But said improvements are never transmitted from generation to its
successor; left to itself, the race reverts to proper life, the same it
has lived from the beginning.

Man here presents a singular exception to the general rule of earth's
inhabitants. The favorite pursuits of one age are abandoned in the
next. This generation looks back on the earnest occupations of a
preceding, as the adult looks back on the sports and toys of childhood.
It is more than supposable, that the planning for the chances of
office, the competition for making most gain out of the least
productiveness--these earnest pursuits of the men of this age--in the
next will be resigned to the children of larger growth; just as are
now resigned the trappings of military glory. Where then is the human
mind ultimately to fix? Where is man to find so essentially his good,
as to fix his earnest pursuit in one direction, in which the race is
still to hold on? Such seems to be the question, What is life?

The elements of that darkness, which excludes the light of life, may be
considered as these three: First, the excessive preponderance of
self-love, as the ruling motive of human conduct. Secondly, the
short-sightedness of self-love, in magnifying the present, at the cost
of the distant future. And, Thirdly, the grossness of self-love, in
preferring of present goods the vulgar and the sensible, to the refined
and more