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Page 18
And first, at the risk of being considered metaphysical,--though we fear
no metaphysician would indorse the charge,--let us define what we
mean by individuality; for the word is commonly made to signify some
peculiarity or eccentricity, some unreasonable twist, of mind or
disposition. An individual, then, in the sense in which we use the term,
is a causative spiritual force, whose root and being are in eternity,
but who lives, grows, and builds up his nature in time. All the objects
of sense and thought, all facts and ideas, all things, are external to
his essential personality. But he has bound up in his personal being
sympathies and capacities which ally him with external objects, and
enable him to transmute their inner spirit and substance into his own
personal life. The process of his growth, therefore, is a development
of power from within to assimilate objects from without, the power
increasing with every vital exercise of it. The result of this
assimilation is character. Character is the spiritual body of the
person, and represents the individualization of vital experience, the
conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men. Sir Thomas
Browne, in quaint reference to the building up of our physical frame
through the food we eat, declares that we have all been on our own
trenchers; and so, on the same principle, our spiritual faculties can be
analyzed into impersonal facts and ideas, whose life and substance we
have converted into personal reason, imagination, and passion. The
fundamental characteristic of man is spiritual hunger; the universe of
thought and matter is spiritual food. He feeds on Nature; he feeds on
ideas; he feeds, through art, science, literature, and history, on
the acts and thoughts of other minds; and could we take the mightiest
intellect that ever awed and controlled the world, and unravel his
powers, and return their constituent particles to the multitudinous
objects whence they were derived, the last probe of our analysis, after
we had stripped him of all his faculties, would touch that unquenchable
fiery atom of personality which had organized round itself such a
colossal body of mind, and which, in its simple naked energy, would
still be capable of rehabilitating itself in the powers and passions of
which it had been shorn.
It results from this doctrine of the mind's growth, that success in all
the departments of life over which intellect holds dominion depends, not
merely on an outside knowledge of the facts and laws connected with each
department, but on the assimilation of that knowledge into instinctive
intelligence and active power. Take the good farmer, and you will find
that ideas in him are endowed with will, and can work. Take the good
general, and you will find that the principles of his profession are
inwrought into the substance of his nature, and act with the velocity
of instincts. Take the good judge, and in him jurisprudence seems
impersonated, and his opinions are authorities. Take the good merchant,
and you will find that commerce, in its facts and laws, seems in him
embodied, and that his sagacity appears identical with the objects on
which it is exercised. Take the great statesman, take Webster, and note
how, by thoroughly individualizing his comprehensive experience, he
seems to carry a nation in his brain; how, in all that relates to the
matter in hand, he has in him as _faculty_ what is out of him in _fact_;
how between the man and the thing there occurs that subtile freemasonry
of recognition which we call the mind's intuitive glance; and how
conflicting principles and statements, mixed and mingling in fierce
confusion and with deafening war-cries, fall into order and relation,
and move in the direction of one inexorable controlling idea, the
moment they are grasped by an intellect which is in the secret of their
combination:--
"Confusion hears his voice, and the wild uproar
stills."
Mark, too, how, in the productions of his mind, the presence and
pressure of his whole nature, in each intellectual act, keeps his
opinions on the level of his character, and stamps every weighty
paragraph with "Daniel Webster, his mark." The characteristic, of all
his great speeches is, that the statements, arguments, and images have
what we should call a positive being of their own,--stand out as plainly
to the sight as a ledge of rocks or chain of hills,--and, like the works
of Nature herself, need no other justification of their right to exist
than the fact of their existence. We may detest their object, but we
cannot deny their solidity of organization. This power of giving a
substantial body, an undeniable external shape and form, to his thoughts
and perceptions, so that the toiling mind does not so much seem to pass
from one sentence to another, unfolding its leading idea, as to
make each sentence a solid work in a Torres-Vedras line of
fortifications,--this prodigious constructive faculty, wielded with the
strength of a huge Samson-like artificer in the material of mind, and
welding together the substances it might not be able to fuse, puzzled
all opponents who understood it not, and baffled the efforts of all who
understood it well. He rarely took a position on any political question,
which did not draw down upon him a whole battalion of adversaries, with
ingenious array of argument and infinite noise of declamation; but after
the smoke and dust and clamor of the combat were over, the speech loomed
up, perfect and whole, a permanent thing in history or literature,
while the loud thunders of opposition had too often died away into low
mutterings, audible only to the adventurous antiquary who gropes in the
"still air" of stale "Congressional Debates." The rhetoric of sentences
however melodious, of aphorisms however pointed, of abstractions however
true, cannot stand in the storm of affairs against this true rhetoric,
in which thought is consubstantiated with things.
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