hen we
remember that people have recourse to sensual indulgences simply from a
desire for excitement, whilst intellectual pursuits supply excitement of
a more innocent kind and in the utmost variety and abundance. If,
instead of taking a few individual instances, you broadly observe whole
classes, you will recognize the moral utility of culture. The most
cultivated classes in our own country are also the most moral, and these
classes have advanced in morality at the same time that they have
advanced in culture. English gentlemen of the present day are superior
to their forefathers whom Fielding described; they are better educated,
and they read more; they are at the same time both more sober and more
chaste.

I may add that intellectual men have peculiar and most powerful reasons
for avoiding the excesses of immorality, reasons which to any one who
has a noble ambition are quite enough to encourage him in self-control.
Those excesses are the gradual self-destruction of the intellectual
forces, for they weaken the spring of the mind, not leaving it well
enough to face the drudgery that is inevitable in every career. Even in
cases where they do not immediately lead to visible imbecility, they
make the man less efficient and less capable than he might have been;
and all experienced wrestlers with fate and fortune know well that
success has often, at the critical time, depended upon some very
trifling advantage which the slightest diminution of power would have
lost to them. No one knows the full immensity of the difference between
having power enough to make a little headway against obstacles, and just
falling short of the power which is necessary at the time. In every
great intellectual career there are situations like that of a steamer
with a storm-wind directly against her and an iron-bound coast behind.
If the engines are strong enough to gain an inch an hour she is safe,
but if they lose there is no hope. Intellectual successes are so
rewarding that they are worth any sacrifice of pleasure; the sense of
defeat is so humiliating that fair Venus herself could not offer a
consolation for it. An ambitious man will govern himself for the sake of
his ambition, and withstand the seductions of the senses. Can he be ever
strong enough, can his brain ever be lucid enough for the immensity of
the task before him?

"Le jeune homme," says M. Taine, "ignore qu'il n'y a pas de pire
deperdition de forces, que de tels commerces abai