Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/104

 88 SOPHIE BRYANT: taste for sensuous detail, the quick eye for mathematical form, to say nothing of the minor special interests which make one musical person look first for fulness and variety of tone, while another searches and seizes on rhythmical movement these instincts of intellect are not detected subjectively by general skill of intellect but by skill intro- spectively ; and this is more rare. Objectively they are detected, where work of any importance is done, by the peculiar quality of the work. A great man who has ex- pressed himself much is above all things intelligible from this point of view. It does not take much skill, for in- stance, to characterise a Goethe intellectually by the extra- ordinary interest in the concrete which shows not more in the quality of his proper work than in his natural science tastes, his aversion to mathematics, and his ineffective attempts to acquire skill in painting. But Goethe in all probability never so characterised himself, and if he did we may be sure that his judgment of himself was no whit less objective than is ours. We cannot suppose that he ever saw into his own characteristic group of intellectual interest with anything like the psychologic insight with which he saw his moral self. In truth, nothing is more obscure to most of us than this intellectual self. We find it peculiarly difficult to feel what we are, because it is so peculiarly difficult to get any feeling of what it is to be what we are not in the sphere of intellect. The brave man can get a very good inkling of how the coward feels, and thus he gets to feel his own characteristic instinct more clearly. But how shall a mind deficient in pure literary interest get any touch of the scholar's passionate joy in words, and how shall one whose interest is absorbed in the presentation of sensuous detail have a feeling of the geometrician's delight in the discovery of curves, 1 not as beautiful, not even as explaining natural forms, but per se ? The explanation of this obscurity would seem to be that the intellectual self has a lower degree of consciousness (I do not here mean self-consciousness) than the moral self, because less feeling goes with its activity and self notes itself in feeling. Much intellectul life is hardly felt at all, and this tends to obscurity. The robust feelings that go with the moral life lend themselves readily to imaginative construction, by which we get notions of persons unlike ourselves, and notions of an ideal or standard person. But few persons could 1 A curve, mathematically, is not anything one chooses to draw, but is what it is because it follows some law known or unknown.