34 'Wisco7isin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



This education, art claims as its direct function. To man alone, 

 of created beings, does art speak. 



" In industry thou'rt mastered by the bee ; 



The worm more skillfulness than thine hath shown ; 

 Thy knowledge, all high spirits share with thee, 



But Art, Oh! man, ha$t thou alone." 



Man has the mind possessed by the animals, and he has more. 

 He has powers far removed from theirs and different in kind. He 

 has an understanding trammeled and limited by the senses,. as 

 they have ; and he has a judgment which uses the senses for its 

 expression, which is not limited by them, but which makes its 

 affirmations positively, independently, and often in opposition to 

 their dictation. 



Sharing the judgment in common with the lower animals, where 

 shall we find the distinction between us and them? Shall we not 

 find it in this, that we possess a moral sense, or the power of con- 

 ceiving right and wrong abstractly as principles ; that we possess 

 imagination, that high imagination which '• bodies forth the forms 

 of things unknown," as essential to the man of science as to the 

 poet, to a Lord Bacon, as to John Milton ; and above all, that 

 power of affirming principles or laws, so surely that we never 

 question them ; principles which are the grounds of all mathe- 

 matical, metaphysical and ethical science ; that power whose as- 

 sertions are as postive and undeniable as that " Grod liveth." 



These faculties we know we possess, and we have as yet no 

 reasons for supposing they pertain to inferior creatures. 



Plato taught that in the mind of the Creator, there existed ideas 

 which were the types or patterns of all his creations. Also that 

 human souls are so formed in the Divine image, and so partake of 

 his nature, that they also perceive and delight in these divine 

 forms. Here we have the source of all transcendental philosophy. 

 It accords also with scriptural teaching, for we are told that man 

 was made in the image of Grod, and this image must have been of 

 the Divine mind. The adoption of this conception underlies the 

 philosophy of a majority of the greatest minds which have been 

 vouchsafed to us. That this faculty of intuition, or direct behold- 



