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ness or health is in the material world. Joy and sorrow are our guides to truth, showing us where we are right, and where wrong, in the exploration of our being. Whereever we find joy, we should seek the cause and follow it; wherever sorrow, the reverse is our duty. It is now well known that the body never works its own destruction, but constantly seeks for its preservation; and thus, that all disease is an effort of Nature to regain health.

To talk of a healthy disease, is no contradiction to a philosophic mind. We are not, however, to overstep the limits of Nature. If we do, we endanger the safety of the whole economy. Sorrow may pass all healthy bounds, and become itself the main cause of disease. Fear, jealousy, anxiety, or ennui, are all signs to us that there is evil somewhere, of which we must seek out the cause, however obscure, and remove it, before the suffering mind can regain its health. Nay, more,—every error in judgment, every untruth of thought is, like every untruth of bodily conduct, a cause of disease. The mind and the body are inseparably linked together, so that the health and happiness of the one involves that of the other. But men in general do not recognise moral disease; they do not allow sorrow, fear, &c., to be diseases; and instead of wishing or feeling it their duty to escape from them, often hug then to their bosom, and glory in them. We pride ourselves in our woes, and glory in our contempt of them. Eheu! Dr. Johnson affirms man is not born for happiness. We are sorry to dissent from so great a man. If he wills it not, what can help him? To be happy, we must labour mentally and bodily. If the morbid Magnus Apollo who

libels the Deity by one stroke of his pen, had been weighed in physiological scales, he would have been found awfully light. Life is not inertness of mind: it is not to let our best faculties slumber. No-all our energies must be awake; the whole of the pre-named powers should be roused. "A vacant mind is a mind distressed." A stunted plant no one respects; and it is as unsatisfactory as insufficiency of light, heat, or air. We strangle our energies by the use and abuse of our corporeal powers -happiness depends upon right thinking. The hyp'd and super-sensitive dream, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, and their illusions can only be destroyed by action rousing them from the torpor that environs them. Such cannot live upon their sensations, and yet they die daily, aye, when pleasure and countless treasures are within their reach; and they will not, in despite of their numerous ailments, stretch out their hands to grasp them; all catholic and generous thought for the good of others is merged in themselves. What darkness! How in GOD's name can such persons (and their name is legion), expect happiness?

""Twas doing nothing was his curse;

Is there a vice can plague us worse?"

It is with the faculties of the soul as with those of the body;-when called into full exercise, the intellectual organ gains vigour; it languishes with too long repose. Well would it have been for poor Shenstone, and many other geniuses, had the angel of stern necessity driven them early in the day out of their paradise, and sent them into the work-day world beyond to eat the bread earned by

the sweat of their brow. If we exercise certain faculties only, they are greatly developed to the prejudice of the rest. It is thus in the study of mathematics, soundness of judgment is acquired, and precision of reasoning, to the extinction of imagination, which never rises to great strength without injury to the judging and reasoning powers. The descriptive sciences employ especially the memory; and it is seldom that they much enlarge the minds of those who study them exclusively. Whilst the study of the learned languages continues to form an indispensable part of a gentleman's education, many years must be devoted to their attainment. During these studies, the general cultivation of the understanding must be retarded. In such an exclusive system, all the intellectual powers are cramped, except memory, which is overloaded with words, and not always understood. "To clip fancy in youth," says Dickens, "for the sake of getting more wisdom from age, is about as wise a scheme of mental culture as it would be wise in horticulture to pick off the leaves of apple blossom in the spring, for the sake of getting monster apples in autumn."

We partly concur with Dr. Hook, in his opening address at Edinburgh, when he says-"Manual labour constitutes a trade; mental labour a profession. When a man devotes himself to any specialty of science, that science becomes to him a profession. Literature and book-making have in these days become a distinct profession. In like manner the commercial man, the manufacturer, acting as the living soul to the machinery which, by a practical application of science their genius has called into existence,-these,

too, must be regarded as professional men. And when we speak of the professions, I presume we shall all of us admit, that the highest eminence can only be attained by the concentration of the mind, with a piercing intensity and singleness of view, upon one field of action. Every one in order to excel, must have his specialty. He may know many things well, but there is one thing upon which he must be pre-eminently well informed. He must have a profession. Without this, he will have no end-no purpose in life; and as we often see to be the case, the most splendid powers will be wasted. The professional man may be compared to one whose eye is fixed upon a microscope; all the rest of the world is abstracted from his vision, and the eye, though narrowed to a little hole, sees what is indescribable by others; and by revealing his observations he becomes a benefactor of his kind.

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A man tells us that his son is to be a lawyer, or a physician, or a man of business; and that he shall therefore select a school where he will be at once initiated into the elements of law, physic, or commerce, and obtain the knowledge which will be of use hereafter. The position assumed by the advocates of academical culture, is the very opposite to this: they would delay a young man's professional education as long as possible,-or rather they would insist upon the importance of the concentrated education being preceded by a liberal education: and they would apply to the training of the mind a discipline analogous to that which common sense suggests in what relates to bodily exercise. When in ancient times a man was ambitious that his son should win the prize at the

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Olympian games or Pythean fields,' his attention was directed, not to the technicalities of the game, but to the general condition and morals of the youth; for the success of the athlete depended upon the fact of his becoming a healthy man. Precisely so we say-Educate the man before you educate the professional man: before you send your grain to the mill, look to the raw material: or, reverting to an illustration already employed, before the eye is narrowed to the microscope, be sure that the eye itself is in a healthy condition. Expand the mind before you contract it; educate the mind, as such, before you bend it to the professional point. It is not what we eat that supports the body, but what we digest; and instead of seeking to cram the mind with facts before it has power to digest its food, send it to a school where the mind itself shall be educated; where the object will be, not to impart professional or miscellaneous knowledge of any kind, but to give strength and activity to the mind itself; not to accumulate information in the memory, but to invigorate the powers which sum up the scientific capabilities of our nature, by habituating the mind to exactness of thought; where the mind is regarded, not as an animal to be fatted for the market, but as an instrument to be tuned-a metal to be refined—a weapon to be sharpened; where the object is not to form the divine, the physician, &c., but the thinker; where the soul is ploughed and harrowed, that when afterwards the professional seed is sown, it may produce not twenty-fold, or thirty, but a hundred-fold."

No one appreciates the intellectual wealth of Dr. Hook more than ourselves: his work on Education, irrespective

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