o nothing; at the utmost, by incessant nursing and
caudling, keeps itself alive. As the last stage of all, when Virtue,
properly so called, has ceased to be practised, and become extinct,
and a mere remembrance, we have the era of Sophists, descanting of its
existence, proving it, denying it, mechanically "accounting" for
it;--as dissectors and demonstrators cannot operate till once the body
be dead.

Thus is true Moral genius, like true Intellectual, which indeed is but
a lower phasis thereof, "ever a secret to itself." The healthy moral
nature loves Goodness, and without wonder wholly lives in it: the
unhealthy makes love to it, and would fain get to live in it; or,
finding such courtship fruitless, turns round, and not without
contempt abandons it. These curious relations of the Voluntary and
Conscious to the Involuntary and Unconscious, and the small proportion
which, in all departments of our life, the former bears to the
latter,--might lead us into deep questions of Psychology and
Physiology: such, however, belong not to our present object. Enough,
if the fact itself become apparent, that Nature so meant it with us;
that in this wise we are made. We may now say, that view man's
individual Existence under what aspect we will, under the highest
spiritual, as under the merely animal aspect, everywhere the grand
vital energy, while in its sound state, is an unseen unconscious one;
or, in the words of our old Aphorism, "the healthy know not of their
health, but only the sick."

* * * * *

To understand man, however, we must look beyond the individual man and
his actions or interests, and view him in combination with his
fellows. It is in Society that man first feels what he is; first
becomes what he can be. In Society an altogether new set of spiritual
activities are evolved in him, and the old immeasurably quickened and
strengthened. Society is the genial element wherein his nature first
lives and grows; the solitary man were but a small portion of himself,
and must continue forever folded in, stunted and only half alive.
"Already," says a deep Thinker, with more meaning than will disclose
itself at once, "my opinion, my conviction, gains _infinitely_ in
strength and sureness, the moment a second mind has adopted it." Such,
even in its simplest form, is association; so wondrous the communion
of soul with soul as directed to the mere act of Knowing! In other
higher acts, the wonder is still