nowise alters rank in the scale of nature,
but serves to pass the time, the life of sensation going on as before. At
last, these hints and tendencies are fixed in one, or in a succession.
Each absorbs so much food and force as to become itself a new centre. The
new talent draws off so rapidly the vital force, that not enough remains
for the animal functions, hardly enough for health; so that, in the second
generation, if the like genius appear, the health is visibly deteriorated,
and the generative force impaired.

People are born with the moral or with the material bias; uterine brothers
with this diverging destination; and I suppose, with high magnifiers, Mr.
Frauenhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to distinguish in the embryo at
the fourth day, this is a Whig, and that a Free-soiler.

It was a poetic attempt to lift this mountain of Fate, to reconcile this
despotism of race with liberty, which led the Hindoos to say, "Fate is
nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence." I find the
coincidence of the extremes of eastern and western speculation in the
daring statement of Schelling, "There is in every man a certain feeling,
that he has been what he is from all eternity, and by no means became
such in time." To say it less sublimely--in the history of the individual
is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party
to his present estate.

A good deal of our politics is physiological. Now and then, a man of
wealth in the heyday of youth adopts the tenet of broadest freedom. In
England, there is always some man of wealth and large connection planting
himself, during all his years of health, on the side of progress, who, as
soon as he begins to die, checks his forward play, calls in his troops,
and becomes conservative. All conservatives are such from personal
defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and
blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act
on the defensive. But strong natures, backwoodsmen, New Hampshire giants,
Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams, Websters, Kossuths, are inevitable patriots,
until their life ebbs, and their defects and gout, palsy and money, warp
them.

The strongest idea incarnates itself in majorities and nations, in the
healthiest and strongest. Probably, the election goes by avoirdupois
weight, and, if you could weigh bodily the tonnage of any hundred of the
Whig and the Democratic party in a town,