Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/53

Rh hand, their action is thwarted and delayed by their ideological prejudices and by that element of the paradoxical which is to be found in every thinker who is not content merely to repeat the ideas of his predecessors.

Thus they waver between the search for general concepts and the management of particular undertakings, between the tower of the philosopher and the pulpit of the preacher. They are too theoretical to start a true religious or social revolution, too oratorical to be taken seriously by professional scientists and metaphysicians. The learned look down on them a little, and the people pity them. They love many things, they often change occupation, they sometimes change opinion. Not that they are dilettantes—far from it! They are very much in earnest about their own activities, but they are men of such multiform vivacity that they cannot stay for forty or fifty years in a single rut. Among them you will find the discoverers of the intuitions which are ultimately developed by those mastodontic pedants who cannot assimilate ideas less than fifty years old. Among them you will find the agitators, the revolutionists, the aristocratic propagandists who form an intermediate class between the disdainful metaphysicians—outspoken enemies of clearness and of utility—and the great simple apostles of the people, men of intuition who stir