The same reality pervades all teaching. The man may
teach by doing, and not otherwise. If he can communicate
himself he can teach, but not by words. He teaches who
gives, and he learns who receives. There is no teaching
until the pupil is brought into the same state or
principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place;
he is you and you are he; then is a teaching, and by no
unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite lose
the benefit. But your propositions run out of one ear
as they ran in at the other. We see it advertised that
Mr. Grand will deliver an oration on the Fourth of July,
and Mr. Hand before the Mechanics' Association, and we
do not go thither, because we know that these gentlemen
will not communicate their own character and experience
to the company. If we had reason to expect such a
confidence we should go through all inconvenience and
opposition. The sick would be carried in litters. But
a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an
apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech,
not a man.

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual works. We
have yet to learn that the thing uttered in words is
not therefore affirmed. It must affirm itself, or no
forms of logic or of oath can give it evidence. The
sentence must also contain its own apology for being
spoken.

The effect of any writing on the public mind is
mathematically measurable by its depth of thought. How