CHAPTER XI.
The meditations of genius .-- A work on the art of meditation not yet produced .-- Predisposing the mind .-- Imagination awakens imagination.
-- Generating feelings by music .-- Slight habits .-- Darkness and silence, by suspending the exercise of our senses, increase the vivacity of our conceptions .-- The arts of memory .-- Memory the foundation of genius.
-- Inventions by several to preserve their own moral and literary character .-- And to assist their studies .-- The meditations of genius depend on habit .-- Of the night-time .-- A day of meditation should precede a day of composition .-- Works of magnitude from slight conceptions .-- Of thoughts never written .-- The art of meditation exercised at all hours and places.
-- Continuity of attention the source of philosophical discoveries.
-- Stillness of meditation the first state of existence in genius.
A continuity of attention, a patient quietness of mind, forms one of the characteristics of genius.

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius--the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

There is a thread in our thoughts, as there is a pulse in our hearts; he who can hold the one, knows how to think; and he who can move the other, knows how to feel.
A work on the art of meditation has not yet been produced; yet such a work might prove of immense advantage to him who never happened to have more than one solitary idea.

The pursuit of a single principle has produced a great system.

Thus probably we owe ADAM SMITH to the French economists.
And a loose hint has conducted to a new discovery.