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Page 21
But in a mind of any primitive power, intellectual indolence is sure to
generate intellectual conceit,--a little Jack Horner, that ensconces
itself in lazy heads, and, while it dwarfs every power to the level of
its own littleness, keeps vociferating, "What a great man am I!" It is
the essential vice of this glib imp of the mind, even when it infests
large intellects, that it puts Nature in the possessive case,--labels
all its inventions and discoveries "My truth,"--and moves about the
realms of art, science, and letters in a constant fear of having its
pockets picked. Think of a man's having vouchsafed to him one of those
awful glimpses into the mysteries of creation which should be received
with a shudder of prayerful joy, and taking the gracious boon with
a smirk of all-satisfied conceit! One page in what Shakspeare calls
"Nature's infinite book of secrecy" flies a moment open to his eager
gaze, and he hears the rustling of the myriad leaves as they close and
clasp, only to make his spirit more abject, his vanity more ravenous,
his hatred of rivals more rancorous and mean. That grand unselfish
love of truth, and joy in its discovery, by whomsoever made, which
characterize the true seeker and seer of science and creative art, alone
can keep the mind alive and alert, alone can make the possession of
truth a means of elevating and purifying the man.
But if this conceit, in powerful natures, tends to belittle character,
and eat into and consume the very faculties whose successful exercise
creates it, its slyly insinuated venom works swifter and deadlier on
youth and inexperience. The ordinary forms of conceit, it is true,
cannot well flourish in any assemblage of young men, whose plain
interest it is to undeceive all self-deception and quell every
insurrection of individual vanity, and who soon understand the art of
burning the nonsense out of an offending brother by caustic ridicule
and slow-roasting sarcasm. But there is danger of mutual deception,
springing from a common belief in a false, but attractive principle of
culture. The mischief of intellectual conceit in our day consists in its
arresting mental growth at the start by stuffing the mind with the husks
of pretentious generalities, which, while they impart no vital power and
convey no real information, give seeming enlargement to thought, and
represent a seeming opulence of knowledge. The deluded student, who
picks up these ideas in masquerade at the rag-fairs and old-clothes'
shops of philosophy, thinks he has the key to all secrets and the
solvent of all problems, when he really has no experimental knowledge of
anything, and dwindles all the more for every juiceless, unnutritious
abstraction he devours. Though famished for the lack of a morsel of the
true mental food of facts and ideas, he still swaggeringly despises all
relative information in his ambition to clutch at absolute truth, and
accordingly goes directly to ultimates by the short cuts of cheap
generalities. Why, to be sure, should he, who can, Napoleon-like, march
straight on to the interior capital, submit, Marlborough-like, to the
drudgery of besieging the frontier fortresses? Why should he, who can
throw a girdle of generalization round the universe in less than forty
minutes, stoop to master details? And this easy and sprightly amplitude
of understanding, which consists not in including, but in excluding all
relative facts and principles, he calls comprehensiveness; the mental
decrepitude it occasions he dignifies with the appellation of repose;
and, on the strength of comprehensiveness and repose, is of course
qualified to take his seat beside Shakspeare, and chat cosily with
Bacon, and wink knowingly at Goethe, and startle Leibnitz with a slap
on the shoulder,--the true Red-Republican sign of liberty in manners,
equality in power, and fraternity in ideas! These men, to be sure, have
a way of saying things which he has not yet caught; but then their
wide-reaching thoughts are his as well as theirs. Imitating the
condescension of some contemporary philosophers of the Infinite, he
graciously accepts Christianity and patronizes the idea of Deity, though
he gives you to understand that he could easily pitch a generalization
outside of both. And thus, mistaking his slab-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
short-comings 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 into 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.
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