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.”