COROLLARIES TO APHORISM XV.

I. The more consciousness in our thoughts and words, and the less in our impulses and general actions, the better and more healthful the state both of head and heart. As the flowers from an orange tree in its time of blossoming, that burgeon forth, expand, fall, and are momently replaced, such is the sequence of hourly and momently charities in a pure and gracious soul. The modern fiction which depictures the son of Cytherea with a bandage round his eyes, is not without a spiritual meaning. There is a sweet and holy blindness in Christian love even as there is a blindness of life, yea, and of genius, too, in the moment of productive energy.

II. Motives are symptoms of weakness, and supplements 65 for the deficient energy of the living principle, the law within us. Let them then be reserved for those momentous acts and duties in which the strongest and best balanced natures must feel themselves deficient, and where humility, no less than prudence, prescribes deliberation. We find a similitude of this, I had almost said a remote analogy, in organized bodies. The lowest class of animals or protozoa, the polypi for instance, have neither brain nor nerves. Their motive powers are all from without. The sun, light, the warmth, the air are their nerves and brain. As life ascends, nerves appear; but still only as the conductors of an external influence; next are seen the knots or ganglions, as so many foci of instinctive agency, that imperfectly imitate the yet wanting centre. And now the promise and token of a true individuality are disclosed; both the reservoir of sensibility and the imitative power that actuates the organs of motion, (the muscles) with the net-work of conductors, are all taken inward and appropriated; the spontaneous rises into the voluntary, and finally after various steps and a long ascent, the material and animal means and conditions are prepared for the manifestations of a free will, having its law within itself and its motive in the law--and thus bound to originate its own acts, not only without, but even against, alien stimulants. That in our present state we have only the dawning of this inward sun (the perfect law of liberty) will sufficiently limit and qualify die preceding position, if only it have been allowed to produce its two-fold consequence--the excitement of hope and the repression of vanity.