Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 by Various
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Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858
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INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER.
The desire, the duty, the necessity of the age in which we live is
education, or that culture which developes, enlarges, and enriches each
individual intelligence, according to the measure of its capacity, by
familiarizing it with the facts and laws of nature and human life.
But, in this rage for information, we too often overlook the mental
constitution of the being we would inform,--detaching the apprehensive
from the active powers, weakening character by overloading memory, and
reaping a harvest of imbeciles after we may have flattered ourselves we
had sown a crop of geniuses. No person can be called educated, until he
has organized his knowledge into faculty, and wields it as a weapon.
We purpose, therefore, to invite the attention of our readers to some
remarks on Intellectual Character, the last and highest result of
intellectual education, and the indispensable condition of intellectual
success.
It is evident, that, when a young man leaves his school or college to
take his place in the world, it is indispensable that he be something
as well as know something; and it will require but little experience to
demonstrate to him that what he really knows is little more than what
he really is, and that his progress in intellectual manhood is not more
determined by the information he retains, than by that portion which, by
a benign provision of Providence, he is enabled to forget. Youth, to
be sure, is his,--youth, in virtue of which he is free of the
universe,--youth, with its elastic vigor, its far-darting hopes, its
generous impatience of prudent meanness, its grand denial of instituted
falsehood, its beautiful contempt of accredited baseness,--but youth
which must now concentrate its wayward energies, which must discourse
with facts and grapple with men, and through strife and struggle, and
the sad wisdom of experience, must pass from the vague delights of
generous impulses to the assured joy of manly principles. The moment he
comes in contact with the stern and stubborn realities which frown on
his entrance into practical life, he will find that power is the soul of
knowledge, and character the condition of intelligence. He will discover
that intellectual success depends primarily on qualities which are not
strictly intellectual, but personal and constitutional. The test
of success is influence,--that is, the power of shaping events by
informing, guiding, animating, controlling other minds. Whether this
influence be exerted directly in the world of practical affairs, or
indirectly in the world of ideas, its fundamental condition is still
force of individual being, and the amount of influence is the measure
of the degree of force, just as an effect measures a cause. The
characteristic of intellect is insight,--insight into things and their
relations; but then this insight is intense or languid, clear or
confused, comprehensive or narrow, exactly in proportion to the weight
and power of the individual who sees and combines. It is not so much the
intellect that makes the man, as the man the intellect; in every act of
earnest thinking, the reach of the thought depends on the pressure of
the will; and we would therefore emphasize and enforce, as the primitive
requirement of intellectual success, that discipline of the individual
which developes dim tendencies into positive sentiments, sentiments into
ideas, and ideas into abilities,--that discipline by which intellect
is penetrated through and through with the qualities of manhood, and
endowed with arms as well as eyes. This is Intellectual Character.
Now it should be thundered in the ears of every young man who has
passed through that course of instruction ironically styled education,
"What do you intend to be, and what do you intend to do? Do you purpose
to play at living, or do you purpose to live?--to be a memory, a
word-cistern, a feeble prater on illustrious themes, one of the world's
thousand chatterers, or a will, a power, a man?" No varnish and veneer
of scholarship, no command of the tricks of logic and rhetoric, can ever
make you a positive force in the world. Look around you in the community
of educated men, and see how many, who started on their career with
minds as bright and eager and hearts as hopeful as yours, have been
mysteriously arrested in their growth,--have lost all the kindling
sentiments which glorified their youthful studies, and dwindled into
complacent echoes of surrounding mediocrity,--have begun, indeed, to die
on the very threshold of manhood, and stand in society as tombs rather
than temples of immortal souls. See, too, the wide disconnection between
knowledge and life;--heaps of information piled upon little heads;
everybody speaking,--few who have earned the right to speak; maxims
enough to regenerate a universe,--a woful lack of great hearts, in
which reason, right, and truth, regal and militant, are fortified and
encamped! Now this disposition to skulk the austere requirements of
intellectual growth in an indolent surrender of the mind's power of
self-direction must be overcome at the outset, or, in spite of your
grand generalities, you will be at the mercy of every bullying lie,
and strike your colors to every mean truism, and shape your life
in accordance with every low motive, which the strength of genuine
wickedness or genuine stupidity can bring to bear upon you. There is no
escape from slavery, or the mere pretence of freedom, but in radical
individual power; and all solid intellectual culture is simply the right
development of individuality into its true intellectual form.
And first, at the risk of being considered metaphysical,--though we fear
no metaphysician would indorse the charge,--let us define what we
mean by individuality; for the word is commonly made to signify some
peculiarity or eccentricity, some unreasonable twist, of mind or
disposition. An individual, then, in the sense in which we use the term,
is a causative spiritual force, whose root and being are in eternity,
but who lives, grows, and builds up his nature in time. All the objects
of sense and thought, all facts and ideas, all things, are external to
his essential personality. But he has bound up in his personal being
sympathies and capacities which ally him with external objects, and
enable him to transmute their inner spirit and substance into his own
personal life. The process of his growth, therefore, is a development
of power from within to assimilate objects from without, the power
increasing with every vital exercise of it. The result of this
assimilation is character. Character is the spiritual body of the
person, and represents the individualization of vital experience, the
conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men. Sir Thomas
Browne, in quaint reference to the building up of our physical frame
through the food we eat, declares that we have all been on our own
trenchers; and so, on the same principle, our spiritual faculties can be
analyzed into impersonal facts and ideas, whose life and substance we
have converted into personal reason, imagination, and passion. The
fundamental characteristic of man is spiritual hunger; the universe of
thought and matter is spiritual food. He feeds on Nature; he feeds on
ideas; he feeds, through art, science, literature, and history, on
the acts and thoughts of other minds; and could we take the mightiest
intellect that ever awed and controlled the world, and unravel his
powers, and return their constituent particles to the multitudinous
objects whence they were derived, the last probe of our analysis, after
we had stripped him of all his faculties, would touch that unquenchable
fiery atom of personality which had organized round itself such a
colossal body of mind, and which, in its simple naked energy, would
still be capable of rehabilitating itself in the powers and passions of
which it had been shorn.
It results from this doctrine of the mind's growth, that success in all
the departments of life over which intellect holds dominion depends, not
merely on an outside knowledge of the facts and laws connected with each
department, but on the assimilation of that knowledge into instinctive
intelligence and active power. Take the good farmer, and you will find
that ideas in him are endowed with will, and can work. Take the good
general, and you will find that the principles of his profession are
inwrought into the substance of his nature, and act with the velocity
of instincts. Take the good judge, and in him jurisprudence seems
impersonated, and his opinions are authorities. Take the good merchant,
and you will find that commerce, in its facts and laws, seems in him
embodied, and that his sagacity appears identical with the objects on
which it is exercised. Take the great statesman, take Webster, and note
how, by thoroughly individualizing his comprehensive experience, he
seems to carry a nation in his brain; how, in all that relates to the
matter in hand, he has in him as _faculty_ what is out of him in _fact_;
how between the man and the thing there occurs that subtile freemasonry
of recognition which we call the mind's intuitive glance; and how
conflicting principles and statements, mixed and mingling in fierce
confusion and with deafening war-cries, fall into order and relation,
and move in the direction of one inexorable controlling idea, the
moment they are grasped by an intellect which is in the secret of their
combination:--
"Confusion hears his voice, and the wild uproar
stills."
Mark, too, how, in the productions of his mind, the presence and
pressure of his whole nature, in each intellectual act, keeps his
opinions on the level of his character, and stamps every weighty
paragraph with "Daniel Webster, his mark." The characteristic, of all
his great speeches is, that the statements, arguments, and images have
what we should call a positive being of their own,--stand out as plainly
to the sight as a ledge of rocks or chain of hills,--and, like the works
of Nature herself, need no other justification of their right to exist
than the fact of their existence. We may detest their object, but we
cannot deny their solidity of organization. This power of giving a
substantial body, an undeniable external shape and form, to his thoughts
and perceptions, so that the toiling mind does not so much seem to pass
from one sentence to another, unfolding its leading idea, as to
make each sentence a solid work in a Torres-Vedras line of
fortifications,--this prodigious constructive faculty, wielded with the
strength of a huge Samson-like artificer in the material of mind, and
welding together the substances it might not be able to fuse, puzzled
all opponents who understood it not, and baffled the efforts of all who
understood it well. He rarely took a position on any political question,
which did not draw down upon him a whole battalion of adversaries, with
ingenious array of argument and infinite noise of declamation; but after
the smoke and dust and clamor of the combat were over, the speech loomed
up, perfect and whole, a permanent thing in history or literature,
while the loud thunders of opposition had too often died away into low
mutterings, audible only to the adventurous antiquary who gropes in the
"still air" of stale "Congressional Debates." The rhetoric of sentences
however melodious, of aphorisms however pointed, of abstractions however
true, cannot stand in the storm of affairs against this true rhetoric,
in which thought is consubstantiated with things.
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, _a
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
_attaches_, 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?
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.
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.
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