ery power to the level of
its own littleness, keeps vociferating, "What a great man am I!" It is
the essential vice of this glib imp of the mind, even when it infests
large intellects, that it puts Nature in the possessive case,--labels
all its inventions and discoveries "My truth,"--and moves about the
realms of art, science, and letters in a constant fear of having its
pockets picked. Think of a man's having vouchsafed to him one of those
awful glimpses into the mysteries of creation which should be received
with a shudder of prayerful joy, and taking the gracious boon with
a smirk of all-satisfied conceit! One page in what Shakspeare calls
"Nature's infinite book of secrecy" flies a moment open to his eager
gaze, and he hears the rustling of the myriad leaves as they close and
clasp, only to make his spirit more abject, his vanity more ravenous,
his hatred of rivals more rancorous and mean. That grand unselfish
love of truth, and joy in its discovery, by whomsoever made, which
characterize the true seeker and seer of science and creative art, alone
can keep the mind alive and alert, alone can make the possession of
truth a means of elevating and purifying the man.

But if this conceit, in powerful natures, tends to belittle character,
and eat into and consume the very faculties whose successful exercise
creates it, its slyly insinuated venom works swifter and deadlier on
youth and inexperience. The ordinary forms of conceit, it is true,
cannot well flourish in any assemblage of young men, whose plain
interest it is to undeceive all self-deception and quell every
insurrection of individual vanity, and who soon understand the art of
burning the nonsense out of an offending brother by caustic ridicule
and slow-roasting sarcasm. But there is danger of mutual deception,
springing from a common belief in a false, but attractive principle of
culture. The mischief of intellectual conceit in our day consists in its
arresting mental growth at the start by stuffing the mind with the husks
of pretentious generalities, which, while they impart no vital power and
convey no real information, give seeming enlargement to thought, and
represent a seeming opulence of knowledge. The deluded student, who
picks up these ideas in masquerade at the rag-fairs and old-clothes'
shops of philosophy, thinks he has the key to all secrets and the
solvent of all problems, when he really has no experimental knowledge of
anything, and dwindles all th