no metaphysician would indorse the charge,--let us define what we
mean by individuality; for the word is commonly made to signify some
peculiarity or eccentricity, some unreasonable twist, of mind or
disposition. An individual, then, in the sense in which we use the term,
is a causative spiritual force, whose root and being are in eternity,
but who lives, grows, and builds up his nature in time. All the objects
of sense and thought, all facts and ideas, all things, are external to
his essential personality. But he has bound up in his personal being
sympathies and capacities which ally him with external objects, and
enable him to transmute their inner spirit and substance into his own
personal life. The process of his growth, therefore, is a development
of power from within to assimilate objects from without, the power
increasing with every vital exercise of it. The result of this
assimilation is character. Character is the spiritual body of the
person, and represents the individualization of vital experience, the
conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men. Sir Thomas
Browne, in quaint reference to the building up of our physical frame
through the food we eat, declares that we have all been on our own
trenchers; and so, on the same principle, our spiritual faculties can be
analyzed into impersonal facts and ideas, whose life and substance we
have converted into personal reason, imagination, and passion. The
fundamental characteristic of man is spiritual hunger; the universe of
thought and matter is spiritual food. He feeds on Nature; he feeds on
ideas; he feeds, through art, science, literature, and history, on
the acts and thoughts of other minds; and could we take the mightiest
intellect that ever awed and controlled the world, and unravel his
powers, and return their constituent particles to the multitudinous
objects whence they were derived, the last probe of our analysis, after
we had stripped him of all his faculties, would touch that unquenchable
fiery atom of personality which had organized round itself such a