Intellect

ESSAY XI Intellect

Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands
above it in the chemical tables, positively to that which stands below
it. Water dissolves wood, and iron, and salt; air dissolves water;
electric fire dissolves air, but the intellect dissolves fire,
gravity, laws, method, and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature,
in its resistless menstruum. Intellect lies behind genius, which is
intellect constructive. Intellect is the simple power anterior to
all action or construction. Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a
natural history of the intellect, but what man has yet been able to
mark the steps and boundaries of that transparent essence? The first
questions are always to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled
by the inquisitiveness of a child. How can we speak of the action of
the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of
its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception,
knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is. Its
vision is not like the vision of the eye, but is union with the
things known.

Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear
consideration of abstract truth. The considerations of time and
place, of you and me, of profit and hurt, tyrannize over most men's
minds. Intellect separates the fact considered from _you_, from all
local and personal reference, and discerns it as if it existed for
its own sake. Heraclitus looked upon the affections as dense and
colored mists. In the fog of good and evil affections, it is hard
for man to walk forward in a straight line. Intellect is void of
affection, and sees an object as it stands in the light of science,
cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual,
floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact, and not as
_I_ and _mine_. He who is immersed in what concerns person or place
cannot see the problem of existence. This the intellect always
ponders. Nature shows all things formed and bound. The intellect
pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness
between remote things, and reduces all things into a few principles.

The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. All that
mass of mental and moral phenomena, which we do not make objects of
voluntary thought, come within the power of fortune; they constitute
the circumstance of daily life; they are subject to change, to fear,
and hope. Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of
melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man,
imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events.
But a truth, separated by the intellect, is no longer a subject of
destiny. We behold it as a god upraised above care and