ween a physicist, a
historian, and a philosopher; and again, slowness, want of skill, and
even helplessness are something totally different from the peculiar kind
of irresolution that Hamlet shows. The notion that speculative thinking
specially tends to produce _this_ is really a mere illusion.

In the second place, even if this notion were true, it has appeared that
Hamlet did _not_ live the life of a mere student, much less of a mere
dreamer, and that his nature was by no means simply or even one-sidedly
intellectual, but was healthily active. Hence, granted the ordinary
chances of life, there would seem to be no great danger in his
intellectual tendency and his habit of speculation; and I would go
further and say that there was nothing in them, taken alone, to unfit
him even for the extraordinary call that was made upon him. In fact, if
the message of the Ghost had come to him within a week of his father's
death, I see no reason to doubt that he would have acted on it as
decisively as Othello himself, though probably after a longer and more
anxious deliberation. And therefore the Schlegel-Coleridge view (apart
from its descriptive value) seems to me fatally untrue, for it implies
that Hamlet's procrastination was the normal response of an
over-speculative nature confronted with a difficult practical problem.

On the other hand, under conditions of a peculiar kind, Hamlet's
reflectiveness certainly might prove dangerous to him, and his genius
might even (to exaggerate a little) become his doom. Suppose that
violent shock to his moral being of which I spoke; and suppose that
under this shock, any possible action being denied to him, he began to
sink into melancholy; then, no doubt, his imaginative and generalising
habit of mind might extend the effects of this shock through his whole
being and mental world. And if, the state of melancholy being thus
deepened and fixed, a sudden demand for difficult and decisive action in
a matter connected with the melancholy arose, this state might well have
for one of its symptoms an endless and futile mental dissection of the
required deed. And, finally, the futility of this process, and the shame
of his delay, would further weaken him and enslave him to his melancholy
still more. Thus the speculative habit would be _one_ indirect cause of
the morbid state which hindered action; and it would also reappear in a
degenerate form as one of the _symptoms_ of this morbid state.