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Page 20
Now this weakness is a mental and moral sickness, pointing the way to
mental and moral death. It has its source in a violation of that law
which makes the health of the mind depend on its activity being directed
to an object. When directed on itself, it becomes fitful and moody;
and moodiness generates morbidness, and morbidness misanthropy, and
misanthropy self-contempt, and self-contempt begins the work of
self-dissolution. Why, every sensible man will despise himself, if he
concentrates his attention on that important personage! The joy and
confidence of activity come from its being fixed and fastened on things
external to itself. "The human heart," says Luther,--and we can apply
the remark as well, to the human mind,--"is like a millstone in a mill;
when you put wheat under it, it turns, and grinds, and bruises the wheat
into flour; if you put no wheat in, it still grinds on, but then it is
itself it grinds, and slowly wears away." Now activity for an object,
which is an activity that constantly increases the power of acting,
and keeps the mind glad, fresh, vigorous, and young, has three deadly
enemies,--intellectual indolence, intellectual conceit, and intellectual
fear. We will say a few words on the operation of this triad of
malignants.
Montaigne relates, that, while once walking in the fields, he was
accosted by a beggar of Herculean frame, who solicited alms. "Are you
not ashamed to beg?" said the philosopher, with a frown,--"you who are
so palpably able to work?" "Oh, Sir," was the sturdy knave's drawling
rejoinder, "if you only knew how lazy I am!" Herein is the whole
philosophy of idleness; and we are afraid that many a student of good
natural capacity slips and slides from thought into reverie, and from
reverie into apathy, and from apathy into incurable indisposition to
think, with as much sweet unconsciousness of degradation as Montaigne's
mendicant evinced; and at last hides from himself the fact of his
imbecility of action, somewhat as Sir James Herring accounted for the
fact that he could not rise early in the morning: he could, he said,
make up his mind to it, but could not make up his body.
"He who eats with the Devil," says the proverb, "has need of a long
spoon"; and he who domesticates this pleasant vice of indolence, and
allows it to nestle near his will, has need of a long head. Ordinary
minds may well be watchful of its insidious approaches when great ones
have mourned over its enfeebling effects; and the subtle indolence
that stole over the powers of Mackintosh, and gradually impaired the
productiveness even of Goethe, may well scare intellects of less natural
grasp and imaginations of less instinctive creativeness. Every step,
indeed, of the student's progress calls for energy and effort, and every
step is beset by some soft temptation to abandon the task of developing
power for the delight of following impulse. The appetites, for example,
instead of being bitted, and bridled, and trained into passions, and
sent through the intellect to quicken, sharpen, and intensify its
activity, are allowed to take their way unmolested to their own objects
of sense, and drag the mind down to their own sensual level. Sentiment
decays, the vision fades, faith in principles departs, the moment that
appetite rules. On the closing doors of that "sensual stye," as over the
gate of Dante's hell, be it written: "Let those who enter here leave
hope behind."
But a more refined operation of this pestilent indolence is its way
of infusing into the mind the delusive belief that it can attain the
objects of activity without its exercise. Under this illusion, men
expect to grow wise, as men who gamble in stocks expect to grow rich, by
chance, and not by work. They invest in mediocrity in the confident hope
that it will go many hundred per cent. above par; and so shocking has
been the inflation of the intellectual currency of late years, that this
speculation of indolence sometimes partially succeeds. But a revulsion
comes,--and then brass has to make a break-neck descent to reach its
proper level below gold. There are others whom indolence deludes by some
trash about "fits" of inspiration, for whose Heaven-sent spasms they are
humbly to wait. There is, it seems, a lucky thought somewhere in the
abyss of possibility, which is somehow, at some time, to step out
of essence into substance, and take up its abode in their capacious
minds,--dutifully kept unoccupied in order that the expected celestial
visitor may not be crowded for room. Chance is to make them king, and
chance to crown them, without their stir! There are others still, who,
while sloth is sapping the primitive energy of their natures, expect to
scale the fortresses of knowledge by leaps and not by ladders, and who
count on success in such perilous gymnastics, not by the discipline of
the athlete, but by the dissipation of the idler. Indolence, indeed,
is never at a loss for a smooth lie or delicious sophism to justify
inaction, and, in our day, has rationalized it into a philosophy of the
mind, and idealized it into a school of poetry, and organized it into a
"hospital of incapables." It promises you the still ecstasy of a divine
repose, while it lures you surely down into the vacant dulness of
inglorious sloth. It provides a primrose path to stagnant pools, to an
Arcadia of thistles, and a Paradise of mud.
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