Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/806

798 sidedness for many-sidedness, and forgetting that there is no insight without force to back it,—bedizened in conceit and magnificent in littleness,—he is thrown on society, walking in a vain show of knowledge, and doomed to be upset and trampled on by the first brawny concrete Fact he stumbles against. A true method of culture makes drudgery beautiful by presenting a vision of the object to which it leads;—beware of the conceit that dispenses with it! How much better it is to delve for a little solid knowledge, and be sure of that, than to be a proper target for such a sarcasm as a great statesman once shot at a glib advocate, who was saying nothing with great fluency and at great length! “ "Who,” he asked, “is this self-sufficient, all-sufficient, insufficient man?”

Idleness and Conceit, however, are not more opposed to that out-springing, reverential activity which makes the person forget himself in devotion to his objects, than Fear. A bold heart in a sound head,—that is the condition of energetic thinking, of the thought that thinks round things and into things and through things; but fear freezes activity at its inmost fountains. “There is nothing,” says Montaigne, “that I fear so much as fear.” Indeed, an educated man, who creeps along with an apologetic air, cringing to this name and ducking to that opinion, and hoping that it is not too presumptuous in him to beg the right to exist,—why, it is a spectacle piteous to gods and hateful to men! Yet think of the many knots of monitory truisms in which activity is likely to be caught and entangled at the outset,— knots which a brave purpose will not waste time to untie, but instantly cuts. First, there is the nonsense of students killing themselves by over-study,—some few instances of which, not traceable to over-eating, have shielded the shortcomings of a million idlers. Next, there is the fear that the intellect may be developed at the expense of the moral nature,—one of those truths in the abstract which are made to do the office of lies in the application, and which are calculated not so much to make good men as goodies,—persons rejoicing in an equal mediocrity of morals and mind, and pertinent examples of the necessity of personal force to convert moral maxims info moral might. The truth would seem to be, that half the crimes and sufferings which history records and observation furnishes are directly traceable to want of thought rather than to bad intention; and in regard to the other half, which may be referred to the remorseless selfishness of unsanctified intelligence, has that selfishness ever had more valuable allies and tools than the mental torpor that cannot think and the conscientious stupidity that will not? Moral laws, indeed, are intellectual facts, to be investigated as well as obeyed; and it is not a blind or blear-eyed conscience, but a conscience blended with intelligence and consolidated with character, that can both see and act.

But curtly dismissing the fallacy, that the moral and spiritual faculties are likely to find a sound basis in a cowed and craven reason, we come to a form of fear that practically paralyzes independent thought more than any other, while it is incompatible with manliness and self-respect. This fear is compounded of self-distrust and that mode of vanity which cowers beneath the invective of men whose applause it neither courts nor values. If you examine critically the two raging parties of conservatism and radicalism, you will find that a goodly number of their partisans are men who have not chosen their position, but have been bullied into it, —men who see clearly enough that both parties are based on principles almost equally true in themselves, almost equally false by being detached from their mutual relations. But then each party keeps its professors of intimidation and stainers of character, whose business it is to deprive men of the luxury of large flunking, and to drive all neutrals into their respective ranks. The missiles hurled from one side are dis-