law, an
obedience which is not only compatible with revolt against other
people's notions of what the intellectual man ought to think and do, but
which often directly leads to such revolt as its own inevitable result.

In the attempt to subject ourselves to the inward law, we may encounter
a class of mental refusals which indicate no congenital incapacity, but
prove that the mind has been incapacitated by its acquired habits and
its ordinary occupations. I think that it is particularly important to
pay attention to this class of mental refusals, and to give them the
fullest consideration. Suppose the case of a man who has a fine natural
capacity for painting, but whose time has been taken up by some
profession which has formed in him mental habits entirely different from
the mental habits of an artist. The inborn capacity for art might
whisper to this man, "What if you were to abandon your profession and
turn painter?" But to this suggestion of the inborn capacity the
acquired unfitness would, in a man of sense, most probably reply, "No;
painting is an art bristling all over with the most alarming technical
difficulties, which I am too lazy to overcome; let younger men attack
them if they like." Here is a mental refusal of a kind which the
severest self-disciplinarian ought to listen to. This is Nature's way
of keeping us to our specialities; she protects us by means of what
superficial moralists condemn as one of the minor vices--the
disinclination to trouble ourselves without necessity, when the work
involves the acquisition of new habits.

The moral basis of the intellectual life appears to be the idea of
discipline; but the discipline is of a very peculiar kind, and varies
with every individual. People of original power have to discover the
original discipline that they need. They pass their lives in
thoughtfully altering this private rule of conduct as their needs alter,
as the legislature of a progressive State makes unceasing alterations in
its laws. When we look back upon the years that are gone, this is our
bitterest regret, that whilst the precious time, the irrecoverable, was
passing by so rapidly, we were intellectually too undisciplined to make
the best personal use of all the opportunities that it brought. Those
men may be truly esteemed happy and fortunate who can say to themselves
in the evening of their days--"I had so prepared myself for every
successive enterprise, that when the time came for it to b