t he wrote was unpleasantly difficult to read.
Even the thinking was no longer his own thinking. Having been in too
close communication with a writer who was not a literary artist, his own
art had deteriorated in consequence.

I could mention an English landscape painter who diminished the
pictorial excellence of his works by taking too much interest in
geology. His landscapes became geological illustrations, and no longer
held together pictorially. Another landscape painter, who began by
taking a healthy delight in the beauty of natural scenery, became
morbidly religious after an illness, and thenceforth passed by the
loveliest European scenery as comparatively unworthy of his attention,
to go and make ugly pictures of places that had sacred associations.

For people who produce nothing these risks appear to be less serious;
and yet there have been admirable characters, not productive, whose
admirableness might have been lessened by the addition of certain kinds
of learning. The last generation of the English country aristocracy was
particularly rich in characters whose unity and charm was dependent
upon the limitations of their culture, and which would have been
entirely altered, perhaps not for the better, by simply knowing a
science or a literature that was closed to them.

Abundant illustrations might be collected in evidence of the well-known
truth that the burden of knowledge may diminish the energy of action;
but this is rather outside of what we are considering, which is the
influence of knowledge upon the intellectual and not the active life.

I regret very much not to be able to suggest anything like a safe rule
for the selection of our knowledge. The most rational one which has been
hit upon as yet appears to be a simple confidence in the feeling that we
inwardly want to know. If I feel the inward want for a certain kind of
knowledge, it may perhaps be presumed that it would be good for me; but
even this feeling is not perfectly reliable, since people are often
curious about things that do not closely concern them, whilst they
neglect what it is most important for them to ascertain. All that I
venture to insist upon is, that we cannot learn any new thing without
changing our whole intellectual composition as a chemical compound is
changed by another ingredient; that the mere addition of knowledge may
be good for us or bad for us; and that whether it will be good or bad is
usually a more obscure problem th