sting it with its opposite:

Sweet it is when on the great seas the winds are buffeting, to gaze
from the land on another's great struggles; not because it is pleasure
or joy that any one should be distressed, but because it is sweet to
perceive from what misfortunes you yourself are free. Sweet is it, too,
to behold great contests of war in full array over the plains, when you
have no part in the danger. But nothing is more gladdening than
to dwell in the calm high places, firmly embattled on the heights by
the teaching of the wise, whence you can look down on others, and
see them wandering hither and thither and going astray, as they seek
the way of life, in strife matching their wits or rival claims of birth,
struggling night and day by surpassing effort to rise up to the height
of power and gain possession of the world.[1]

[Footnote 1: Lucretius: _De Rerum Natura_ (Bailey translation),
book II, lines 1-12.]

But in the two types it is not the fruit of action or contemplation,
but action and contemplation themselves that the
two types find respectively interesting. The man of action
finds an immediate satisfaction in movement, change, the
clamor of affairs, the contacts with other people, the making
of changes in the practical world. The man of thought finds
as immediate enjoyment in noting the ways of men, and reflecting
upon them.

That contemplation, disinterested thinking, also has its use
goes without saying. The thinker and the dreamer may be
something at least of what the Irish poet boasts:

"... the movers and shakers
Of the world, forever, it seems."

The scholar, the thinker, the man who stands aside from
immediate action, may, often does, help the world of action
in a far-reaching way. The researches of a Newton make
possible eventually the feats of modern engineering and
telegraphy; the abstruse study of the calculus helps to build
bridges and skyscrapers.

Both types, in their extremes, have their weaknesses. The
extremely practical man "may cut off the limb upon which
he is sitting," or "see no further than the end of his nose." A
really great administrator is not penny-wise; he thinks far
ahead, around and into a problem. He is concerned for
tomorrow as well as to-day. The contemplative man may
come to be "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
There is the hero of one Russian novel who reflects through
three hundred pages on his wasted life, all at the ripe age of
twenty-thre