Intellectual pursuit

“ The intellectual pursuits which have occupied your time during these past years being entirely foreign to them, they cannot share with you that supreme satisfaction which the victories of the intellect bestow, nor can they help you to bear the trials and disappointments that attend the steps of the seeker after knowledge. ”

“ There are lessons which impart information or train our minds for intellectual pursuits. These are simple and can be acquired and used with advantage. But there are others which affect our deeper nature and change our direction of [Pg 108] life. ”

“ The encouraging inference which you may 203 draw from this in reference to your own case is that, since all intellectual men have had more than one pursuit, you may set off your business against the most absorbing of their pursuits, and for the rest be still almost as rich in time as they have been. You may study literature as some painters have studied it, or science as some literary men have studied it. ”

“ And as he aspires to exhibit models of education, possessing higher excellencies than mechanical dexterity or mere intellectual acuteness; his anxious aim will be to make instruction in art and science, the culture of the understanding, and of the physical powers, subservient to the nobler intention of fostering and maturing the virtues of the heart. ”

“ On the other hand mental life diminishes with the loss of interest, and even in fields of knowledge in which a man has displayed unusual mastery, a loss of interest is followed by a loss of energy. Excluding interest is like cutting off the circulation from a limb. Perfect vigor of thought which we aim at in education, is marked by strength along three lines, the vigor of the individual ideas, the extent and variety of ideas under control, and the connection and harmony of ideas. It is the highest general aim of intellectual education to strengthen mental vigor in these three directions. ”

“ The daily history of the Intellect is this alternating of expansions and concentrations. The expansions are the invitations from heaven to try a larger sweep, a higher pitch than we have yet climbed, and to leave all our past for this enlarged scope. Present power, on the other hand, requires concentration on the moment and the thing to be done.
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The condition of sanity is to respect the order of the intellectual world; to keep down talent in its place, to enthrone the instinct. There must be perpetual rallying and self-recovery. Each talent is ambitious and self-asserting ”

“ But, while it seems to me that nothing can be more conducive to vigorous mental habits and intellectual self-reliance than the study which trains us to apply the analysis of thought to the every-day affairs of life, and to see in constantly changing phenomena the evidence of unchanging law; which leads us to distinguish the real from the apparent, and to mark, beneath the seething eddies of interest, passion, and prejudice, the great currents of our times—it is not on such incentives that I wish to dwell. ”

“ These myriads of things mature, ripen, bear their fruit, fall back dead upon the soil of the mind itself. That mind may be the mind of an individual; it may be the mind of a century, a race, a civilization. To the individual, then, to a race, a civilization, a century, arrives the hour when it must either consume its own dead or surrender its own life. These hours are the moral, the intellectual revolutions of history.
The new science must not only clear the stagnant ground for the growth of new ideas, it must go deeper. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The love of novelty, the vanity of learning, the fascination of ceremony, the contagion of example, veneration for what appears above his immediate comprehension, and the innate activity of man's intellectual faculties, which, spurred by curiosity, prompts him to the acquisition of knowledge, whether true or false--all conspire to make him embrace a system of belief and scheme of instruction in which there is nothing that militates against prejudices already imbibed. ”

“ But the formation of new intellectual habits in men liberally educated, appeared to promise, ultimately, those larger fruits in the advancement and culture of learning which, in 'the hour-glass' of that first movement, could be, as yet, only prophecy and anticipation. ”

“ For, if he have the opportunity to learn all those things, and have his mind disciplined in the various directions the teaching of those topics would have necessitated, then, assuredly, he will be able to pick up, on his road through life, all the rest of the intellectual baggage he wants. ”

“ How could aught but failure in solving the problems of mental philosophy be expected from a system, even though that system were sustained by surpassing intellectual force, that ignored the instrument, brain, by which the result, mind, is evolved? ”

“ Against false premises and unsound reasoning, a good mental discipline may effectually secure us; but against the danger of overlooking something, neither strength of understanding nor intellectual cultivation can be more than a very imperfect protection. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There must be, to begin with, a developing sense and feeling for truth and for duty as something distinct and occasionally conflicting with immediate impulse and desire, and there must be certain clear intellectual elements established already almost impregnably in the mind, certain primary distinctions and classifications. ”

“ Amid scenes unpropitious, repulsive, wretched, have men labored, studied, and trained themselves, until they have at last emanated from the gloom of that obscurity the shining lights of their times; have become the companions of kings, the guides and teachers of their kind, and exercised an influence upon the thought of the world amounting to a species of intellectual legislation. ”

“ Let the world see that with informed heads you have reformed hearts, and that your intellectual training has been no one-sided system which has done all that is possible to be done for the mind, while it has left untended and untrained the heart, whence are the very issues of moral life. Good example is a language all can understand. ”

“ To whatever part of the vision of modern times you cast your eyes you will find marks of superiority and improvement, and I wish to impress upon you the conviction that the results of intellectual labour or of scientific genius are permanent and incapable of being lost. ”

“ Now, it is by no distant analogy that we trace the likeness between these in their successful contests with the material conditions of life and those who are to succeed in the intellectual strife with the difficulties of science and of art. There must be minds which in variety may match with all the varieties of the subject-matters and minds which, at once or in swift succession, can be adjusted to all the increasing and changing modes of thought and work. ”

“ We have an illustration of this progress in the fact of continual occurrence, that conceptions which prove inadmissible to the minds of one generation in consequence either of their want of intellectual power to apprehend them or of their preoccupation by other habits of thought, subsequently find a universal acceptance, and even come to be approved as "self-evident." ”

“ His ingenious and elaborate works, especially his Inquiry into the Human Mind, and his Essays on the Intellectual and the Active Powers of Man, are noble and lasting monuments of his eminent abilities, his deep penetration, and his extensive learning. By unravelling sceptical perplexities, overturning ill-founded hypotheses, and resting every conclusion on evident principles, he has brought about a memorable revolution in the Philosophy of Human Nature. ”

“ The law that human intellects will seek their own intellectual level, providing the person is sound in principle, had worked out in her case, and, once she had made her decision, she clung to it with all the steadfastness of a strong and passionate nature. ”

“ The higher intellectual powers of man, such as those of ratiocination, abstraction, self-consciousness, etc., probably follow from the continued improvement and exercise of the other mental faculties. ”

“ But, in the name of my countrymen, I do repeat these accusations, and tax them with an utter want of intellectual courage—of that higher quality, which is never found without one or other of the three accompaniments, talents, genius, or principle;—talents matured by experience, without which it cannot exist at all; or the rapid insight of peculiar genius, by which the fitness of an act may be instantly determined, and which will supply higher motives than mere talents can furnish for encountering difficulty and danger, and will suggest better resources for diminishing or overcoming them. ”

“ I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. ”

“ Only by the aid of the most advanced intellectual culture, by accumulating a vast number of abstractions and analogies, and using them like the rounds of a ladder, do we climb to a height in which our intellectual and our emotional natures are able to realize the fact that the succeeding generations are merely a continuation and development of those that have gone before, and to find a consolation in the permanence and evolution of the human race as a whole, for the perishableness of the individual. ”

“ Imagine the success of the attempt to still the intellectual hunger of any of the men I have mentioned, by putting before him, as the object of existence, the successful mimicry of the measure of a Greek song, or the roll of Ciceronian prose! Imagine how much success would be likely to attend the attempt to persuade such men that the education which leads to perfection in such elegances is alone to be called culture ”

“ Only the sense and power of effort, which made Lessing prefer the search to the possession of truth, which trains the will in the intellectual field, which is becoming more and more the field of its activity, counts for character and makes instruction really educating. This makes mental work a series of acts, or living thoughts, and not merely words. ”

“ I am heart and soul with the Progressive as to the ultimate remedial powers of education. Moral advancement depends absolutely on the humanising influences of intellectual advancement. The foreseeing of consequences is a question of intelligence. ”

“ The devotion to the ideal in us presupposes therefore the most strenuous and persistent effort to learn these modes of control, to understand the deep and intricate ways of life, and to bend every power—of mind and body, of science and art—to bring life into harmony with their fundamental demands. ”

“ I mean that, as people grow more intelligent, or more people grow intelligent at all, we shall discover other opportunities for exercising intellectual energy and for obtaining the thrill and uplift of intellectual prowess. ”

“ But will any candid-minded person call it the highest form of intellectual development to have a clear conception of the precession of the equinoxes, or to manufacture metaphysical conundrums, whilst remaining utterly incapable of applying common sense to human affairs that demand at least an equal amount of attention? ”

“ For the intellectual power within a person, which operates with will, being one, will perform interchangeable actions. Through it, one acquires wisdom and skills, and with it, one tears, sews, conceals, builds, and many other such opposite or interchangeable actions. ”

“ Upon quickness of perception, power of analysis and combination, perseverance and endurance, depend our intellectual faculties, both in their degree and their kind; and are not they blunted or otherwise modified in a morbid state of the body? ”

“ We are attempting generalization about a class of remarkably peculiar and difficult persons. They are persons either of great intellectual power or simply of great imaginative power, whose bias and quality it is to apply these exceptional powers not directly and simply to their personal advancement and enrichment, but primarily through philosophical, scientific, or artistic channels, to the increase of knowledge or of wisdom or of both. ”

“ I conceived, that the pursuit of truth, and the advancement of reason, were the grand objects of universal attention, and I panted to do homage to those superior minds, who, teaching mankind to be wise, would at length lead them to happiness. Accustomed to think, to feel, to kindle into action, I am at a loss to understand the distinction between theory and practice, which every one seems eager to inculcate, as if the degrading and melancholy intelligence, which fills my soul with despondency, and pervades my understanding with gloom, was to them a subject of exultation. ”