so intense
an apprehension of their own interest, that they would grasp at the
slightest possibility of gain as a certainty, and were led into as many
mistakes by an overgriping, usurious disposition as they could have been
by the most thoughtless extravagance.--We hear a great outcry about the
want of judgment in men of genius. It is not a want of judgment, but an
excess of other things. They err knowingly, and are wilfully blind.
The understanding is out of the question. The profound judgment which
soberer people pique themselves upon is in truth a want of passion and
imagination. Give them an interest in anything, a sudden fancy, a bait
for their favourite foible, and who so besotted as they? Stir their
feelings, and farewell to their prudence! The understanding operates
as a motive to action only in the silence of the passions. I have heard
people of a sanguine temperament reproached with betting according to
their wishes, instead of their opinion who should win; and I have seen
those who reproached them do the very same thing the instant their own
vanity or prejudices are concerned. The most mechanical people, once
thrown off their balance, are the most extravagant and fantastical.
What passion is there so unmeaning and irrational as avarice itself? The
Dutch went mad for tulips, and ---- ---- for love! To return to what was
said a little way back, a question might be started, whether as thought
relates to the whole circumference of things and interests, and business
is confined to a very small part of them, viz. to a knowledge of a man's
own affairs and the making of his own fortune, whether a talent for
the latter will not generally exist in proportion to the narrowness and
grossness of his ideas, nothing drawing his attention out of his own
sphere, or giving him an interest except in those things which he can
realise and bring home to himself in the most undoubted shape? To the
man of business all the world is a fable but the Stock Exchange: to the
money-getter nothing has a real existence that he cannot convert into a
tangible feeling, that he does not recognise as property, that he cannot
'measure with a two-foot rule or count upon ten fingers.' The want
of thought, of imagination, drives the practical man upon immediate
realities: to the poet or philosopher all is real and interesting that
is true or possible, that can reach in its consequences to others, or be
made a subject of curious speculation to himself!