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Page 19
Now in men of this stamp, who have so organized knowledge into faculty
that they have attained the power of giving Thought the character of
Fact, we notice no distinction between power of intellect and power of
will, but an indissoluble union and fusion of force and insight. Facts
and laws are so blended with their personal being, that we can hardly
decide whether it is thought that wills or will that thinks. Their
actions display the intensest intelligence; their thoughts come from
them clothed in the thews and sinews of energetic volition. Their force,
being proportioned to their intelligence, never issues in that wild and
anarchical impulse, or that tough, obstinate, narrow wilfulness, which
many take to be the characteristic of individualized power. They may, in
fact, exhibit no striking individual traits which stand impertinently
out, and yet from this very cause be all the more potent and influential
individualities. Indeed, in the highest efforts of ecstatic action,
when the person is mightiest, and amazes us by the giant leaps of his
intuition, the mere peculiarities of his personality are unseen and
unfelt. This is the case with Homer, Shakspeare, and Goethe, in
poetry,--with Plato and Bacon, in philosophy,--with Newton, in
science,--with Caesar, in war. Such men doubtless had peculiarities and
caprices, but they were "burnt and purged away" by the fire of their
genius, when its action was intensest. Then their whole natures were
melted down into pure force and insight, and the impression they leave
upon the mind is the impression of marvellous force and weight and reach
of thought.
If it be objected, that these high examples are fitted to provoke
despair rather than stimulate emulation, the answer is, that they
contain, exemplify, and emphasize the principles, and flash subtile
hints of the processes, of all mental growth and production. How comes
it that these men's thoughts radiate from them as acts, endowed not only
with an illuminating, but a penetrating and animating power? The answer
to this is a statement of the genesis, not merely of genius, but of
every form of intellectual manhood; for such thoughts do not leap, _�
la_ Minerva, full-grown from the head, but are struck off in those
moments when the whole nature of the thinker is alive and aglow with an
inspiration kindled long before in remote recesses of consciousness from
one spark of immortal fire, and unweariedly burning, burning, burning,
until it lit up the whole inert mass of surrounding mind in flame.
To show, indeed, how little there is of the _extempore_, the hap-hazard,
the hit-or-miss, in the character of creative thought, and how
completely the gladdest inspiration is earned, let us glance at the
psychological history of one of those imperial ideas which measure the
power, test the quality, and convey the life, of the minds that conceive
them. The progress of such an idea is from film to form. It has its
origin in an atmosphere of feeling; for the first vital movement of the
mind is emotional, and is expressed in a dim tendency, a feeble feeling
after the object, or the class of objects, related to the peculiar
constitution and latent affinities of its individual being. This
tendency gradually condenses and deepens into a sentiment, pervading the
man with a love of those objects,--by a sweet compulsion ordering his
energies in their direction,--and by slow degrees investing them,
through a process of imagination, with the attribute of beauty, and,
through a process of reason, investing the purpose with which he pursues
them with the attribute of intelligence. The object dilates as the mind
assimilates and the nature moves, so that every step in this advance
from mere emotion to vivid insight is a building up of the faculties
which each onward movement evokes and exercises,--sentiment,
imagination, reason increasing their power and enlarging their scope
with each impetus that speeds them on to their bright and beckoning
goal. Then, when the individual has reached his full mental stature, and
come in direct contact with the object, then, only then, does he "pluck
out the heart of its mystery" in one of those lightning-like _acts_ of
thought which we call combination, invention, discovery.
There is no luck, no accident, in all this. Nature does not capriciously
scatter her secrets as golden gifts to lazy pets and luxurious darlings,
but imposes tasks when she presents opportunities, and uplifts him whom
she would inform. The apple that she drops at the feet of Newton is but
a coy invitation to follow her to the stars.
Now this living process of developing manhood and building up mind,
while the person is on the trail of a definite object of intelligence,
is in continual danger of being devitalized into a formal process of
mere acquisition, which, though it may make great memories of students,
will be sure to leave them little men. Their thoughts will be the
_attach�s_, not the offspring, of their minds. They will have a bowing
acquaintance with many truths, without being admitted to the familiarity
of embracing or shaking hands with one. If they have native stamina of
animal constitution, they may become men of passions and opinions, but
they never will become men of sentiments and ideas; they may know the
truth as it is _about_ a thing, and support it with acrid and wrangling
dogmatism, but they never will know the truth as it is in the thing,
and support it with faith and insight. And the moment they come into
collision with a really live man, they will find their souls inwardly
wither, and their boasted acquisitions fall away, before one glance of
his irradiating intelligence and one stroke of his smiting will. If, on
the contrary, they are guided by good or great sentiments, which are the
souls of good or great ideas, these sentiments will be sure to organize
all the capacity there is in them into positive intellectual character;
but let them once divorce love from their occupations in life, and they
will find that labor will degenerate into drudgery, and drudgery will
weaken the power to labor, and weakness, as a last resort, will
intrench itself in pretence and deception. If they are in the learned
professions, they will become tricksters in law, quacks in medicine,
formalists in divinity, though _regular_ practitioners in all; and
clients will be cheated, and patients will be poisoned, and parishioners
will be--we dare not say what!--though all the colleges in the universe
had showered on them their diplomas. "To be weak is miserable": Milton
wrested that secret from the Devil himself!--but what shall we say of
those whose weakness has subsided from misery into complacency, and who
feel all the moral might of their being hourly rust and decay, with the
most amiable indifference and lazy content with dissolution?
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