Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding, its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.
Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths.
Proportioned to the importance of the organ to be formed, is the extreme care with which its tuition is provided, a care pretermitted in no single case. The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems of debt and credit. Whilst now it is the gymnastics of the understanding, it is hiving in the foresight of the spirit, experience in profounder laws. Therefore is Space, and therefore Time, that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and individual. A bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can do the office of the other.