tion. We see not only
some external influence is necessary to awaken activity at all, but
that it is actually so powerful and so inevitable from the manner
in which man enters the world, and is brought up in it,--his long
years of dependence, absolute dependence, on the education which is
given him (and what an education it has ever been for the mass of the
race!),--that it makes all the difference, intellectually and morally,
between a New Zealand savage and an Englishman,--between the grossest
idolater and the most enlightened Christian. This fact affects alike
our intellectual and spiritual condition. The savage can use his
senses better than the civilized; but the interval is trifling
compared with that between the intellectual condition of a man can
appreciate Milton and Newman, and that of our Teutonic ancestors.
Its the sentiments of a nature there is the same wide gulf--or rather
wider--between a Hottentot and a Paul. Yet the same "susceptibilities"
and "potentialities" are in each human mind. The same remark applies
to the sense of the beautiful and sublime; the characteristic faculties
are in all mankind; it is education which elicits them. Nay, would you
not stare at a man who should affirm that education was not itself
a species of "revelation," simply because the truths thus communicated
were all "potentially" in the mind before? The fact is, that education
is of coordinate importance with the very faculties without which it
cannot be imparted.

Now we cannot break away from that law of development with which
our individual existence is involved, and which necessarily (as far
as any will of ours is concerned) is a most important, nay, the
most important, element in that tertium quid which man becomes in
virtue of the threefold elements which constitute him:--1st, a given
internal constitution of mind; 2d. the modifying effects of the
actual exercise of his faculties and their interaction with one another,
resulting in habits; and, 3d, that external world of influences which
supplies the materiel from which this strange plant extracts its
aliment, and ultimately derives its fair fruits or its poisonous
berries. All this is inevitable, upon the supposition that man was
to be a social, not a solitary being,--linked by an indissoluble chain
to those who came before and to those who come after him,--dependent,
absolutely dependent, upon others for his being, his training, his
whole condition, civil, social, int