If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that, as into any that he publishes. If you pour water into a vessel ever so twisted into coils and angles, it is in vain for you to say, I will pour it only into this or that; it will find its level in all. Men feel and act the consequences of your doctrine without being able to show how they follow. Show us an arc of the curve and a good mathematician will find out the whole figure. We are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen. Hence the perfect intelligence that subsists between the wise men of remote ages. A man cannot bury his meanings so deep in his book but time and like-minded men will find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he? What secret can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon, of Montaigne, of Kant?

And as you publish all that you strive to conceal, so another property of your nature is that what you have within that only can you see without.

What can we see, read, acquire but what we are? You have seen a skilful man reading Plutarch. Well, that author is a thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two hands and read your eyes out. You will never find there what the other finds. If the wise man would have a monopoly of the wisdom or delight he gets he is as secure now the book is Englished as if it were imprisoned in the Pelews’ language. Or do you think you can possibly hear and bring away from any conversation more than is already in your mind born or ready to be born?

It is with a good book as it is with good company. Introduce a base person among gentlemen. It is all to no purpose; he is not their fellow. Every company protects itself. The company is perfectly safe and he is not one of them though his body is in the room.

No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however much the object is before him. A chemist may tell his most precious secrets to a carpenter and he shall be never the wiser,—the secrets he would not utter to a chemist for an estate. Thus God screens us evermore from premature ideas. Our eyes are holden and we cannot see things that stare us in the face; until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened,—then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not, is like a dream.

Another property of the soul is that like fire it will not be hidden but evermore it publishes its nature through action, word, countenance. A power quite superior to his private will forces every man to hang out his colors, to give a tongue in every action to his ruling thoughts; so sung old Gower,