Why should we fret at particular events? For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something. Our education goes on, whether we dig or saw or read. And even sleep reflects the image of action as water the trees and mountains on the banks. When you act, you lose no time from your book, because you still study and still learn, so that you have a right mind and a right heart. If not, you still learn though all is mislearned. What is a grown man but a knower of laws? What is a good judgment but a knowledge of laws in that particular province in which the praise is attributed, got by experience in that province? Or can a man forget anything which he truly knows? No, for a man knows no more to any purpose than he practises, and that which he knows, that is he. The more knower, the more man. We learn as we advance to correct our first estimates of the value of time and to reckon those hours and days often at the very highest rate which we had set at the least. At the close of a day, at the close of a week, we are scarce yet competent to say if it have been well or ill spent. Often when we have least to show for our time, no accounts settled, no contracts made or discharged, no books read, we have yet philosophised best, and arrived at solid conclusions that become conspicuous thoughts in the following months and years. And the only true economy of time seems to be to rely without interval on your own judgment. Keep the eye open to all impressions, but deepen no impression by effort. Keep the upright position. Resign yourself to your thoughts and then every object will make that mark, that modification of your character which it ought. All the time will be lived; the journey; the meal; the waiting in antechambers, will not need to be subtracted. The ship beating at sea gains a small commission of miles for her true course on every tack: So in life our profession, our amusements, our errors even give us with much parade, or with our own blushes, a little solid wisdom. Amidst them all a few days and hours,—the days and hours of Reason, shine with steady light as the life of life, and all the other days and years appear as hyphens to join these.

But to proceed from life to the laws of life,—one fact all just observation will teach,—the absolute self-sufficiency of the mind.

The laws of the mind transcend all positive rules and take effect themselves. The mind wants nothing but to be aroused from sleep. Its checks are complete. Wake the mind and it will be vocation, ear, judge, apology, guard, physician, prophet, paradise unto itself. Let me make a few steps into this region of absolute nature, that we may see how short and sublime are its laws, how closely they resemble each other. Let me select a few phenomena of the deep principles of which as they underlie all nature, every man sees some and every man different features.