The average Western American of Lincoln’s generation was fundamentally a man who subordinated his intelligence to certain dominant practical interests and purposes.  He was far from being a stupid or slow-witted man.  On the contrary, his wits had been sharpened by the traffic of American politics and business, and his mind was shrewd, flexible, and alert.  But he was wholly incapable either of disinterested or of concentrated intellectual exertion.  His energies were bent in the conquest of certain stubborn external forces, and he used his intelligence almost exclusively to this end.  The struggles, the hardships, and the necessary self-denial of pioneer life constituted an admirable training of the will.  It developed a body of men with great resolution of purpose and with great ingenuity and fertility in adapting their insufficient means to the realization of their important business affairs.  But their almost exclusive preoccupation with practical tasks and their failure to grant their intelligence any room for independent exercise bent them into exceedingly warped and one-sided human beings.

Lincoln, on the contrary, much as he was a man of his own time and people, was precisely an example of high and disinterested intellectual culture.  During all the formative years in which his life did not superficially differ from that of his associates, he was in point of fact using every chance which the material of Western life afforded to discipline and inform his mind.  These materials were not very abundant; and in the use which he proceeded to make of them Lincoln had no assistance, either from a sound tradition or from a better educated master.  On the contrary, as the history of the times shows, there was every temptation for a man with a strong intellectual bent to be betrayed into mere extravagance and aberration.  But with the sound instinct of a well-balanced intelligence Lincoln seized upon the three available books, the earnest study of which might best help to develop harmoniously a strong and many-sided intelligence.  He seized, that is, upon the Bible, Shakespeare, and Euclid.  To his contemporaries the Bible was for the most part a fountain of fanatic revivalism, and Shakespeare, if anything, a mine of quotations.  But in the case of Lincoln, Shakespeare and the Bible served, not merely to awaken his taste and fashion his style, but also to liberate his literary and moral imagination.  At the same time he was training his powers of thought by an assiduous study of algebra and geometry.  The absorbing hours he spent over his Euclid were apparently of no use to him in his profession; but Lincoln was in his way an intellectual gymnast and enjoyed the exertion for its own sake.  Such a use of his leisure must have seemed a sheer waste of time to his more practical friends, and they might well have accounted for his comparative lack of success by his indulgence in such secret and useless pastimes.  Neither would this criticism have been beside the mark, for if Lincoln’s great energy and powers of work had been devoted exclusively to practical ends, he might well have become in the early days a more prominent lawyer and politician than he actually was.  But he preferred the satisfaction of his own intellectual and social instincts, and so qualified himself for achievements beyond the power of a Douglas.