Light and darkness, heat and cold,
hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid, and gas, circle us
round in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable quarrel, beguile
the day of life. The eye repeats every day the finest eulogy on
things--"He saw that they were good." We know where to find them; and
these performers are relished all the more, after a little experience
of the pretending races. We are entitled, also, to higher advantages.
Something is wanting to science, until it has been humanized. The table
of logarithms is one thing, and its vital play, in botany, music,
optics, and architecture, another. There are advancements to numbers,
anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little suspected at first, when, by
union with intellect and will, they ascend into the life, and re-appear
in conversation, character and politics.
But this comes later. We speak now only of our acquaintance with them
in their own sphere, and the way in which they seem to fascinate and
draw to them some genius who occupies himself with one thing, all his
life long. The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of
the observer with the observed.
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