Each day is a new life; regard it therefore, as an epitome of the world. Frugality is a fair fortune, and industry a good estate. Small faults indulged, are little thieves to let in greater.
Original.
FEMALE EDUCATION—INTELLECTUAL TRAINING.
BY REV. S.W. FISHER.
Let us now enter upon the second part of the field of education, the training of the intellect. It is obvious that we have in this, a much higher subject to deal with than that on which we have just dwelt. The physical form in a few years develops itself, and soon reaches its utmost limits of growth. It is then an instrument whose powers we seek to maintain but cannot increase. As time advances, indeed, those powers gradually yield to the influence of disease or age, until the senses begin to neglect their office, the brain declines in vigor, while the tongue, the eye, the hand, forget their accustomed work in the imbecility wrought by the approach of death. But no such limitation is manifest to us in the growth and future life of the intellect. Dependent upon the body for a healthful home in this world, and so far limited by the conditions of mortality, it yet seems to have in itself no absolute limitation bounding its prospective and possible attainments, save as the finite never can fully attain to the infinite. Granting it a congenial home, a fitting position, with full opportunity for progress, and there is scarcely a height this side infinity which in the ascent of ages it seems not capable of reaching. All creatures are finite, and as such, limited; but the horizon around the soul is so amazingly expansive, and the capacities of the mind for progress so immense, that to us, in our present state, it is almost as if there were no limitations at all.
The power of the intellect to acquire facts and relations, and from them to ascend to the laws which control; its power to advance in a daily ascending path into the region of intuition, where masses of things, once isolated or chaotic, range themselves into harmony, and move in numbers most musical; its power thus to rise into an enlarging vision of truths now latent, and behold directly laws, relations and facts which once evaded the sight, or were only seen dimly and after great toil, it is utterly beyond our sphere to limit. We know that what to us in childhood was a mystery, is now simple; that some of the grandest laws of the material world which a few years back were reached only after stupendous labor, are now become intuitive truths; and we can see no reason why the human mind is not capacitated for just such advances eternally; at every ascent sweeping its vision over a broader range of truth, and rising ever nearer that Omniscient Intellect to which all things open. The instinct and imperfect reason of the noblest brutes, are here in marked contrast to the mind of man. They reach the limit of knowledge with the ripening of their physical frame; a limit which no training, however protracted and ingenious, can overpass; which never varies, except as a cord drawn round a center may vary, by being enlarged on the one side and contracted on the other; and which prepares them without the acquisition of a particle of superfluous intelligence for their brute life as the servitors of man. While his mind, never wholly stationary for a long period, has capacities for development that seem to spurn a merely sensual life, and lift the spirit to a companionship with angels; which, instead of resting satisfied with the mere demands of the body, seeks to penetrate the deep springs of life, discern the exquisite organism of an insect's wing, measure the stars, and analyze the light that reveals them.
Possessing an intellect of so fine a nature, it is not to be questioned that, according to our opportunities, it is incumbent on us to carry forward its improvement from childhood to hoary age. A power like this, of indefinite expansion, in directions surpassingly noble, among subjects infinitely grand, has been conferred that it might be expanded, and go on expanding in an eternal progression; that it might sweep far beyond its present horizon and firmament, where the stars now shining above us, shall become the jeweled pavement beneath us, while above still roll other spheres of knowledge, destined in like manner to descend below us as the trophies of our victorious progress.
To bury such an intellect as this in the commonplaces of a life of mere sense; to confine it to the narrow circle of a brute instinct and reason; to live in such a world, with the infinite mind of Jehovah looking at us from all natural forms, breathing around us in all tones of music, shining upon us from all the host of heaven, and soliciting us to launch away into an atmosphere of knowledge and ascend to an acquaintance with the great First Cause, even as the bird challenges the fledgling to leave its nest, and be at home on the wing; to live amid such incitements to thought, yet never lift the eyes from the dull round of physical necessities, is treason toward our higher nature, the voluntary defacement of the grandest characteristic of our being. The education of the intellect is not a question to be debated with men who have the slightest appreciation of their noble capacities. The obligation to improve it is commensurate with its susceptibility of advancement and our opportunities. It is not limited to a few years in early life, it presses on us still in manhood and declining age. Such is a general statement of the duty of intellectual improvement.