been a far wiser race than we are if we
had been readier to sit quiet,--we should have known much better the way
in which it was best to act when we came to act. The rise of physical
science, the first great body of practical truth provable to all men,
exemplifies this in the plainest way: if it had not been for quiet
people who sat still and studied the sections of the cone, if other
quiet people had not sat still and studied the theory of infinitesimals,
or other quiet people had not sat still and worked out the doctrine of
chances (the most "dreamy moonshine," as the purely practical mind
would consider, of all human pursuits), if "idle star-gazers" had not
watched long and carefully the motions of the heavenly bodies,--our
modern astronomy would have been impossible, and without our astronomy
"our ships, our colonies, our seamen," all which makes modern life
modern life, could not have existed. Ages of sedentary, quiet, thinking
people were required before that noisy existence began, and without
those pale preliminary students it never could have been brought into
being. And nine-tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it
is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers, who
were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them, who as the
proverb went "walked into a well from looking at the stars," who were
believed to be useless if any one could be such. And the conclusion is
plain that if there had been more such people, if the world had not
laughed at those there were, if rather it had encouraged them, there
would have been a great accumulation of proved science ages before there
was. It was the irritable activity, the "wish to be doing something,"
that prevented it,--most men inherited a nature too eager and too
restless to be quiet and find out things: and even worse, with their
idle clamor they "disturbed the brooding hen"; they would not let those
be quiet who wished to be so, and out of whose calm thought much good
might have come forth.

If we consider how much science has done and how much it is doing for
mankind, and if the over-activity of men is proved to be the cause why
science came so late into the world and is so small and scanty still,
that will convince most people that our over-activity is a very great
evil; but this is only part and perhaps not the greatest part, of the
harm that over-activity does. As I have said, it is inherited from times
when life was simpl