Just as
certain as it is that all human beings could never, by clubbing their
visual powers together, have arrived at the power of seeing what the
telescope discovers to the astronomer; just so certain it is that
the human intellect would never have arrived at an analysis of the
infinite or a _Critical Analysis of the Pure Reason_ (the principal
work of Kant), unless individuals had dismembered (as it were) and
insulated this or that specific faculty, and had thus armed their
intellectual sight by the keenest abstraction and by the submersion of the
other powers of their nature. Extraordinary men are formed then by
energetic and over-excited spasms as it were in the individual faculties;
though it is true that the equable exercise of all the faculties in
harmony with each other can alone make happy and perfect men.' After this
statement, from which it should seem that in the progress of society
nature has made it necessary for man to sacrifice _his own_ happiness
to the attainment of _her_ ends in the development of his species,
Schiller goes on to inquire whether this evil result cannot be remedied;
and whether 'the totality of our nature, which art has destroyed, might
not be re-established by a higher art,'--but this, as leading to a
discussion beyond the limits of my own, I omit.
ENGLISH DICTIONARIES.
It has already, I believe, been said more than once in print that one
condition of a good dictionary would be to exhibit the _history_ of
each word; that is, to record the exact succession of its meanings.
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