his decline from the sphere of life to
which he had right and title. For life is a sphere, seeing that it extends
in all directions. Its limits are conterminous with the boundaries of time
and space. The feeble-minded person has life, but only in a very
restricted sphere. He eats; he drinks; he sleeps; he wanders in narrow
areas; and that is all. His thinking is weak, meager, and fitful. To him
darkness means a time for sleeping, and light a time for eating and
waiting. He produces nothing either of thought or substance, but is a
pensioner upon the thinking and substance of others. His eyesight is
strong and his hearing unimpaired; but he neither sees nor hears as normal
persons do, because his spirit is incapable of positive reactions, and his
mind too weak to give commands to his bodily organs at the behest of the
spirit. In the language of psychology, he lacks a sensory foundation by
which to react to external stimuli.

In striking contrast is the man whose sphere of life is large, whose
spirit is capable of reacting to the orient and the occident, to height
and depth, and whose mind flashes across the space from the dawn to the
sunset, and from nadir to zenith. Space is his playground, and his
companions are the stars. Such a man feels and knows more life in an hour
than his antithesis could feel and know in a century. To his spirit there
are no metes and bounds; it has freedom and strength to make excursions to
the far limits of space and time. Life comes to him from a thousand
sources and in a thousand ways because he is able to go out to meet it.
There has been developed in him a sensory foundation by which he can react
to every influence the universe affords, to light and shadow, to joy and
sorrow, to the near and the far, to the then and the now, to the lowly and
the sublime, and to the finite and the Infinite. He has a big spirit,
which is first in command; he has a strong, active mind, which is second
in command; and he has a loyal company of bodily organs that are able an

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

Anonymous may refer to: Anonymus, the Latin spelling, may refer to: