y be expressed in a few sentences, the rest
being little more than evidence or illustration. First, it appears that
all who are born with considerable intellectual faculties are urged
towards the intellectual life by irresistible instincts, as water-fowl
are urged to an aquatic life; but the lower animals have this advantage
over man, that as their purposes are simpler, so they attain them more
completely than he does. The life of a wild duck is in perfect
accordance with its instincts, but the life of an intellectual man is
never on all points perfectly in accordance with _his_ instincts. Many
of the best intellectual lives known to us have been hampered by
vexatious impediments of the most various and complicated kinds; and
when we come to have accurate and intimate knowledge of the lives led by
our intellectual contemporaries, we are always quite sure to find that
each of them has some great thwarting difficulty to contend against. Nor
is it too much to say that if a man were so placed and endowed in every
way that all his work should be made as easy as the ignorant imagine it
to be, that man would find in that very facility itself a condition most
unfavorable to his intellectual growth. So that, however circumstances
may help us or hinder us, the intellectual life is always a contest or a
discipline, and the art or skill of living intellectually does not so
much consist in surrounding ourselves with what is reputed to be
advantageous as in compelling every circumstance and condition of our
lives to yield us some tribute of intellectual benefit and force. The
needs of the intellect are as various as intellects themselves are
various: and if a man has got high mental culture during his passage
through life it is of little consequence where he acquired it, or how.
The school of the intellectual man is the place where he happens to be,
and his teachers are the people, books, animals, plants, stones, and
earth round about him. The feeling almost always predominant in the
minds of intellectual men as they grow older, is not so much one of
regret that their opportunities were not more abundant, as of regret
that they so often missed opportunities which they might have turned to
better account.

I have written for all classes, in the conviction that the intellectual
life is really within the reach of every one who earnestly desires it.
The highest culture can never be within the reach of those who cannot
give the years of l