ch must discourse
with facts and grapple with men, and through strife and struggle, and
the sad wisdom of experience, must pass from the vague delights of
generous impulses to the assured joy of manly principles. The moment he
comes in contact with the stern and stubborn realities which frown on
his entrance into practical life, he will find that power is the soul of
knowledge, and character the condition of intelligence. He will discover
that intellectual success depends primarily on qualities which are not
strictly intellectual, but personal and constitutional. The test
of success is influence,--that is, the power of shaping events by
informing, guiding, animating, controlling other minds. Whether this
influence be exerted directly in the world of practical affairs, or
indirectly in the world of ideas, its fundamental condition is still
force of individual being, and the amount of influence is the measure
of the degree of force, just as an effect measures a cause. The
characteristic of intellect is insight,--insight into things and their
relations; but then this insight is intense or languid, clear or
confused, comprehensive or narrow, exactly in proportion to the weight
and power of the individual who sees and combines. It is not so much the
intellect that makes the man, as the man the intellect; in every act of
earnest thinking, the reach of the thought depends on the pressure of
the will; and we would therefore emphasize and enforce, as the primitive
requirement of intellectual success, that discipline of the individual
which developes dim tendencies into positive sentiments, sentiments into
ideas, and ideas into abilities,--that discipline by which intellect
is penetrated through and through with the qualities of manhood, and
endowed with arms as well as eyes. This is Intellectual Character.

Now it should be thundered in the ears of every young man who has
passed through that course of instruction ironically styled education,
"What do you intend to be, and what do you intend to do? Do you purpose
to play at living, or do you purpose to live?--to be a memory, a
word-cistern, a feeble prater on illustrious themes, one of the world's
thousand chatterers, or a will, a power, a man?" No varnish and veneer
of scholarship, no command of the tricks of logic and rhetoric, can ever
make you a positive force in the world. Look around you in the community
of educated men, and see how many, who started on their career with
mi