The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 07, May, 1858. Various
reformer requires a courage that dares defy dictation from any quarter, and a mind which has come in direct contact with the great inspiring ideas of country and humanity. All the rest is spite, and spleen; and cant, and conceit, and words.
It is plain, of course, that every man of large and living thought will naturally sympathize with those great social movements, informing and reforming, which are the glory of the age; but it must always be remembered that the grand and generous sentiments that underlie those movements demand in their fervid disciple a corresponding grandeur and generosity of soul. There is no reason why his philanthropy should be malignant because other men's conservatism may be stupid; and the vulgar insensibility to the rights of the oppressed, and the vulgar scorn of the claims of the wretched, which men calling themselves respectable and educated may oppose to his own warmer feelings and nobler principles, should be met, not with that invective which may be as vulgar as the narrowness it denounces, nor always with that indignation which is righteous as well as wrathful, but with that awful contempt with which Magnanimity shames meanness, simply by the irony of her lofty example and the sarcasm of her terrible silence.
In these remarks, which we trust our readers have at least been kind enough to consider worthy of an effort of patience, we have attempted to connect all genuine intellectual success with manliness of character; have endeavored to show that force of individual being is its primary condition; that this force is augmented and enriched, or weakened and impoverished, according as it is or is not directed to appropriate objects; that indolence, conceit, and fear present continual checks to this going out of the mind into glad and invigorating communion with facts and laws; and that as a man is not a mere bundle of faculties, but a vital person, whose unity pervades, vivifies, and creates all the varieties of his manifestation, the same vices which enfeeble and deprave character tend to enfeeble and deprave intellect. But perhaps we have not sufficiently indicated a diseased state of consciousness, from which most intellectual men have suffered, many have died, and all should be warned,—the disease, namely, of mental disgust, the sign and the result of mental debility. Mental disgust "sicklies o'er" all the objects of thought, extinguishes faith in exertion, communicates a dull wretchedness to indolence in the very process by which it makes activity impossible, and drags into its own slough of despond, and discolors with its own morbid reveries, the objects which it should ardently seek and genially assimilate. It sees things neither as they are, nor as they are glorified and transfigured by hope and health and faith; but, in the apathy of that idling introspection which betrays a genius for misery, it pronounces effort to be vanity, and despairingly dismisses knowledge as delusion. "Despair," says Donne, "is the damp of hell; rejoicing is the serenity of heaven."
Now contrast this mental disgust, which proceeds from mental debility, with the sunny and soul-lifting exhilaration radiated from mental vigor,—a vigor which comes from the mind's secret consciousness that it is in contact with moral and spiritual verities, and is partaking of the rapture of their immortal life. A spirit earnest, hopeful, energetic, inquisitive, making its mistakes minister to wisdom, and converting the obstacles it vanquishes into power,—a spirit inspired by a love of the excellency and beauty of knowledge, which will not let it sleep,—such a spirit soon learns that the soul of joy is hid in the austere form of Duty, and that the intellect becomes brighter, keener, clearer, more buoyant, and more efficient, as it feels the freshening vigor infused by her monitions and menaces, and the celestial calm imparted by her soul-satisfying smile. In all the professions and occupations over which Intellect holds dominion, the student will find that there is no grace of character without its corresponding grace of mind. He will find that virtue is an aid to insight; that good and sweet affections will bear a harvest of pure and high thoughts; that patience will make the intellect persistent in plans which benevolence will make beneficent in results; that the austerities of conscience will dictate precision to statements and exactness to arguments; that the same moral sentiments and moral power which regulate the conduct of life will illumine the path and stimulate the purpose of those daring spirits eager to add to the discoveries of truth and the creations of art. And he will also find that this purifying interaction of spiritual and mental forces will give the mind an abiding foundation of joy for its starts of rapture and flights of ecstasy;—a joy, in whose light and warmth languor and discontent and depression and despair will be charmed away;—a joy, which will make the mind large, generous, hopeful, aspiring, in order to make life beautiful and sweet;—a joy, in the words of an old divine, "which will put on a more glorious garment above, and be joy superinvested in glory!"
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