Love must be wise, and wisdom must be affectionate, or
life will fail of its end. External morality has no reliable foundation
unless it be built on morality of thought and affection. Apart from
these, it is either the result of a happy organization that demands no
disorderly indulgence, or it is the figleaf garment of deceit, put on by
those who strive to seem rather than to be.
In the just training of Character, if we first learn to understand the
capacities and relations of Affection, Thought, and Life, and look
within our own natures until we learn to comprehend how everything
pertaining to our being belongs to one of these departments, we shall
better appreciate the difficulties to be overcome before we shall be
willing to make everything that we do the honest outbirth of everything
that we are. Pretence and hypocrisy, subterfuge and falsehood, will then
disappear, and life will become the adequate expression of symmetrical
Character.
The intellectual part of our being may be better understood if divided
into two departments, viz., Thought and Imagination,--the subjective and
the objective. Thought can be lifted up into the Affections, and made
manifest in Life only through the medium of the Imagination. Thought is
at first a pure abstraction, a subjective idea,--something entirely
within the mind, and having no relation to conduct,--a seed sown, but
not germinated; and while it remains thus it has no influence upon the
Affections.
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