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The intellect is the great faculty of spiritual beings such as the human soul, and it is the principal domain of human activity. Its powers are wondrously great, and it exercises itself in an endless variety of ways. Even within the limited sphere of this world, and with all the hindrances arising from our personal weakness and external impediments, human intelligence can find scope for a series of most wonderful achievements which will not be exhausted in thousands of generations. Nay more, as time goes on the field of investigation increases instead of diminishing. Granted a wider universe for research, and a hundred-fold multiplication of human powers, what imagination can picture the stores of knowledge that would be opened, or the heights to which the intelligence might rise? No interest is so absorbing, no pleasure so intense and so elevating as a rule, as those which spring from the exercise of the intellectual powers. The human mind is also a source of immense energy; it controls and turns to its purposes most of the great forces of nature; it has produced sublime works in the material sphere as well as in those of art, invention, investigation; further it is the image of that internal action of God by which the Son proceeds from the Father. The satisfaction of this high faculty is one of the great cravings of human nature; and its complete satisfaction by an infinite object must be the first element of supreme beatitude. What wonderful possibilities of delight are suggested by the mere thought of the multiplication of our present powers; infinitely greater must be the delight when God is the object of our enlarged intelligence!
