individual entireness.

Man has been called a microcosm, or little world. And such, however
mean and contemptible to others, is man to himself; nay, such he must
ever be, whether he wills it or not. He may hate, he may despise, yet
he cannot but cling to that without which he is not; he is the centre
and the circle, be it of pleasure or of pain; nor can he be other.
Touch him with misery, and he becomes paramount to the whole
world,--to a thousand worlds; for the beauty and the glory of the
universe are as nothing to him who is all darkness. Then it is that he
will _feel_, should he have before doubted, that he is not a mere
part, a fraction, of his kind, but indeed a world; and though little
in one sense, yet a world of awful magnitude in its capacity of
suffering. In one word, Man is a whole, _an Individual_.

If the preceding argument be admitted, it will be found to have
relieved the student of two delusive dogmas,--and the more delusive,
as carrying with them a plausible show of science.

As to the flowery declamations about Beauty, they would not here be
noticed, were they not occasionally met with in works of high merit,
and not unfrequently mixed up with philosophic truth. If they have
any definite meaning, it amounts to this,--that the Beautiful is the
summit of every possible excellence! The extravagance, not to say
absurdity, of such a proposition, confounding, as it does, all
received distinctions, both in the moral and the natural world, needs
no comment. It is hardly to be believed, however, that the writers in
question could have deliberately intended this. It is more probable,
that, in so expressing themselves, they were only giving vent to an
enthusiastic feeling, which we all know is generally most vague when