fact. "It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder," said
Napoleon, speaking the language of the intellect. To it, the world is
a problem in mathematics or the science of quantity, and it leaves out
praise and blame and all weak emotions. All stealing is comparative. If
you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal? Saints are sad, because
they behold sin (even when they speculate), from the point of view of
the conscience, and not of the intellect; a confusion of thought.
Sin, seen from the thought, is a diminution, or less: seen from the
conscience or will, it is pravity or bad. The intellect names it
shade, absence of light, and no essence. The conscience must feel it as
essence, essential evil. This it is not; it has an objective existence,
but no subjective.

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall
successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject
enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see;
use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are;
Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Bonaparte, are the mind's ministers.
Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat
the new comer like a travelling geologist who passes through our estate
and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush
pasture. The partial action of each strong mind in one direction is a
telescope for the objects on which it is pointed. But every other part
of knowledge is to be pushed to the same extravagance, ere the soul
attains her due sphericity. Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily
her own tail? If you could look with her eyes you might see her
surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with
tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups
and downs of fate,--and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long
before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and
shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance? A subject and
an object,--it takes so much to make the galvanic circuit complete, but
magnitude adds nothing. What imports it whether it is Kepler and the
sphere, Columbus and America, a reader and his book, or puss with her
tail?

It is true that all the muses and love and religion hate these
developments, and will find a way to punish the chemist who publishes in
the parlor the secrets of the laboratory. And we cannot say too lit