are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have
conversed with is the show.

We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power and
beauty of the body; there is the like pleasure, and a higher benefit,
from witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as, feats of memory,
of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the
transmutings of the imagination, even versatility, and concentration,
as these acts expose the invisible organs and members of the mind,
which respond, member for member, to the parts of the body. For, we
thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their truest
marks, taught, with Plato, "to choose those who can, without aid from
the eyes, or any other sense, proceed to truth and to being." Foremost
among these activities, are the summersaults, spells, and resurrections,
wrought by the imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to multiply
ten times or a thousand times his force. It opens the delicious sense
of indeterminate size, and inspires an audacious mental habit. We are
as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a
word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our
heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the
Pit. And this benefit is real, because we are entitled to these
enlargements, and, once having passed the bounds, shall never again
be quite the miserable pedants we were.

The high functions of the intellect are so allied, that some imaginative
power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of
the first class, but especially in meditative men of an intuitive habit
of thought. This class serve us, so that they have the perception of
identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakespeare,
Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception