Now from these instances, to which many more might be added, it is
plain, first, that the communication of knowledge certainly is either a
condition or the means of that sense of enlargement or enlightenment, of
which at this day we hear so much in certain quarters: this cannot be
denied; but next, it is equally plain, that such communication is not
the whole of the process. The enlargement consists, not merely in the
passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto unknown to
it, but in the mind's energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards
and among those new ideas, which are rushing in upon it. It is the
action of a formative power, reducing to order and meaning the matter of
our acquirements; it is a making the objects of our knowledge
subjectively our own, or, to use a familiar word, it is a digestion of
what we receive, into the substance of our previous state of thought;
and without this no enlargement is said to follow. There is no
enlargement, unless there be a comparison of ideas one with another, as
they come before the mind, and a systematising of them.
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