emies, is the nation
which succeeds. All the inducements of early society tend to foster
immediate action; all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the
traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that
'delays are dangerous,' and that the sluggish man--the man 'who
roasteth not that which he took in hunting'--will not prosper on the
earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it. And in consequence
an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one
of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.

Pascal said that most of the evils of life arose from 'man's being
unable to sit still in a room;' and though I do not go that length, it
is certain that we should have 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