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 ease,—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 allsatisfied 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 dignities with the appellation of repose; and, on the strength of comprehensiveness and repose, is of course qualified to take his scat beside Shakspeare, and chat cosily with Bacon, and wink knowingly at Goethe, and startle Leibnitz with a slap on the shoulder,—the true RedRepublican 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-
