The dead letter takes the place of the living
understanding; and a practised memory becomes a surer guide than genius
and sensibility. Doubtless the power of genius, as we all know, will not
fetter itself within the limits of its occupation; but talents of
mediocrity are all exhausted in the monotony of the employment allotted to
them; and that man must have no common head who brings with him the
geniality of his powers unstripped of their freshness by the ungenial
labors of life to the cultivation of the genial.' After insisting at some
length on this wise, Schiller passes to the other side of the
contemplation, and proceeds thus:--'It suited my immediate purpose to
point out the injuries of this condition of the species, without
displaying the compensations by which nature has balanced them. But I will
now readily acknowledge--that, little as this practical condition may suit
the interests of the individual, yet the species could in no other way
have been progressive. Partial exercise of the faculties (literally
"_one-sidedness_ in the exercise of the faculties") leads the individual
undoubtedly into error, but the species into truth. In no other way than
by concentrating the whole energy of our spirit, and by converging our
whole being, so to speak, into a single faculty, can we put wings as it
were to the individual faculty and carry it by this artificial flight far
beyond the limits within which nature has else doomed it to walk.
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