too irritable by pleasure and
pain, so that life stagnates from too much reception without due
outlet? Of what use to make heroic vows of amendment, if the same old
law-breaker is to keep them? What cheer can the religious sentiment
yield, when that is suspected to be secretly dependent on the seasons of
the year and the state of the blood? I knew a witty physician who found
the creed in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was
disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ
was sound, he became a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctant
experience that some unfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes the
promise of genius. We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily
and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die
young and dodge the account; or if they live they lose themselves in the
crowd.

Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts us
in a prison of glass which we cannot see. There is an optical illusion
about every person we meet. In truth they are all creatures of given
temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries
they will never pass: but we look at them, they seem alive, and we
presume there is impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse; in the
year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform tune
which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men resist the
conclusion in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that
temper prevails over everything of time, place, and condition, and is
inconsumable in the flames of religion. Some modifications the moral
sentiment avails to impose, but the individual texture holds its
dominion, if not to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure of
activity and of enjoyment.

I thus express the law as it is read from the platform of ordinary
life, but must not leave it without noticing the capital exception. For
temperament is a power which no man willingly hears any one praise but
himself. On the platform of physics we cannot resist the contracting
influences of so-called science. Temperament puts all divinity to rout.
I know the mental proclivity of physicians. I hear the chuckle of the
phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each
man the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by knowing the
law of his being; and by such cheap signboards as the color of his beard
or the slope of his