us, it is right for the
learned to earn money by turning themselves into the ministers and
accomplices of superstition. If he is clever enough to see through the
vulgar and their beliefs, he is tolerably sure to be clever enough from
time to time and in his better moments to see through himself. He begins
to suspect himself of being an impostor. That suspicion gradually unmans
him when he comes to use his mind in the sphere of his own
enlightenment. One of really superior power cannot escape these better
moments and the remorse that they bring. As he advances in life, as his
powers ought to be coming to fuller maturity and his intellectual
productiveness to its prime, just in the same degree the increasing
seriousness of life multiplies such moments and deepens their remorse,
and so the light of intellectual promise slowly goes out in impotent
endeavour, or else in taking comfort that much goods are laid up, or,
what is deadliest of all, in a soulless cynicism.

We do not find out until it is too late that the intellect too, at least
where it is capable of being exercised on the higher objects, has its
sensitiveness. It loses its colour and potency and finer fragrance in an
atmosphere of mean purpose and low conception of the sacredness of fact
and reality. Who has not observed inferior original power achieving
greater results even in the intellectual field itself, where the
superior understanding happens to have been unequally yoked with a
self-seeking character, over scenting the expedient? If Hume had been in
the early productive part of his life the hypocrite which he wished it
were in his power to show himself in its latter part, we may be
tolerably sure that European philosophy would have missed one of its
foremost figures. It has been often said that he who begins life by
stifling his convictions is in a fair way for ending it without any
convictions to stifle. We may, perhaps, add that he who sets out with
the notion that the difference between truth and falsehood is a thing of
no concern to the vulgar, is very likely sooner or later to come to the
kindred notion that it is not a thing of any supreme concern to himself.

Let thus much have been said as to those who deliberately and knowingly
sell their intellectual birthright for a mess of pottage, making a
brazen compromise with what they hold despicable, lest they should have
to win their bread honourably. Men need to expend no declamatory
indignation upon th