Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/190

 OPINIONS.

has been occasionally remarked by people who are not wholly in sympathy with the methods and devices of our time that this is an age of keen intellectual curiosity. We have scant leisure and scant liking for hard study, and we no longer recognize the admirable qualities of a wise and contented ignorance. Accordingly, there has been invented for us in late years, a via media, a something which is neither light nor darkness, a short cut to that goal which we used to be assured had no royal road for languid feet to follow. The apparent object of the new system is to enable us to live like gentlemen, or like gentlewomen, on other people's ideas; to spare us the labor and exhaustion incidental to forming opinions of our own by giving us the free use of other people's opinions. There is a charming simplicity in the scheme, involving as it does no effort of thought or mental adjustment, which cannot fail to heartily