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234 Refraining from further detail on this head, I close the illustration by a brief reference to one other aspect of mental expenditure, namely, the department of intellectual production, execution, or creativeness, to which in the end our acquired powers are ministerial. Of course, the greater the mere continuance or amount of intellectual labor in business, speculation, fine art, or any thing else, the greater the demand on the physique. But amount is not all. There are notorious differences of severity or laboriousness, which, when closely examined, are summed up in one comprehensive statement—namely, the number, the variety, and the conflicting nature of the conditions that have to be fulfilled. By this we explain the difficulty of work, the toil of invention, the harassment of adaptation, the worry of leadership, the responsibility of high office, the severity of a lofty ideal, the distraction of numerous sympathies, the meritoriousness of sound judgment, the arduousness of any great virtue. The physical facts underlying the mental fact are a wide-spread agitation of the cerebral currents, a tumultuous conflict, a consumption of energy.

It is this compliance with numerous and opposing conditions that obtains the most scanty justice in our appreciation of character. The unknown amount of painful suppression that a cautious thinker, a careful writer, or an artist of fine taste, has gone through, represents a great physico-mental expenditure. The