The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 07, May, 1858. Various
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.
But curtly dismissing the fallacy, that the moral and spiritual faculties are likely to find a sound basis in a cowed and craven reason, we come to a form of fear that practically paralyzes independent thought more than any other, while it is incompatible with manliness and self-respect. This fear is compounded of self-distrust and that mode of vanity which cowers beneath the invective of men whose applause it neither courts nor values. If you examine critically the two raging parties of conservatism and radicalism, you will find that a goodly number of their partisans are men who have not chosen their position, but have been bullied into it,—men who see clearly enough that both parties are based on principles almost equally true in themselves, almost equally false by being detached from their mutual relations. But then each party keeps its professors of intimidation and stainers of character, whose business it is to deprive men of the luxury of large thinking, and to drive all neutrals into their respective ranks. The missiles hurled from one side are disorganizer, infidel, disunionist, despiser of law, and other trumpery of that sort; from the other side, the no less effective ones of murderer, dumb dog, traitor to humanity, and other trumpery of that sort; and the young and sensitive student finds it difficult to keep the poise of his nature amid the cross-fire of this logic of fury and rhetoric of execration, and too often ends in joining one party from fear, or the other from the fear of being thought afraid. The probability is, that the least danger to his mental independence will proceed from any apprehension he may entertain of what are irreverently styled the "old fogies"; for if Young America goes on at its present headlong rate, there is little doubt that the old fogy will have to descend from his eminence of place, become an object of pathos rather than terror, and be compelled to make the inquiring appeal to his brisk hunters, so often made to himself in vain, "Am I not a man and a brother?" But with whatever association, political or moral, the thinker may connect himself, let him go in,—and not be dragged in or scared in. He certainly can do no good to himself, his country, or his race, by being the slave and echo of the heads of a clique. Besides, as most organizations are constituted on the principles of a sort of literary socialism, and each member lives and trades on a common capital of phrases, there is danger that these phrases may decline from signs into substitutes of thought, and both intellect and character evaporate in words. Thus, a man may be a Union man and a National man, or an Anti-Slavery man and a Temperance man and a Woman's-Rights' man, and still be very little