man, by whom she
allows herself to be guided and ruled. It is because she needs a lord
and master. If she is young, it will be a lover; if she is old, a
priest.

ON NOISE.

Kant wrote a treatise on _The Vital Powers_. I should prefer to write
a dirge for them. The superabundant display of vitality, which takes
the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved
a daily torment to me all my life long. There are people, it is
true--nay, a great many people--who smile at such things, because they
are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are
also not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a
word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that
the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality. On
the other hand, noise is a torture to intellectual people. In the
biographies of almost all great writers, or wherever else their
personal utterances are recorded, I find complaints about it; in the
case of Kant, for instance, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul; and if it
should happen that any writer has omitted to express himself on the
matter, it is only for want of an opportunity.

This aversion to noise I should explain as follows: If you cut up a
large diamond into little bits, it will entirely lose the value it
had as a whole; and an army divided up into small bodies of soldiers,
loses all its strength. So a great intellect sinks to the level of
an ordinary one, as soon as it is interrupted and disturbed, its
attention distracted and drawn off from the matter in hand; for its
superiority depends upon its power of concentration--of bringing all
its strength to bear upon one theme, in the same way as a concave
mirror collects into one point all the rays of light that strike upon
it. Noisy interruption is a hindrance to this concentration. That is
why distinguished minds have always shown such an extreme dislike
to disturbance in any form, as something that breaks in upon and
distracts their thoughts. Above all have they been averse to that
violent interruption that comes from noise. Ordinary people are
not much put out by anything of the sort. The most sensible and
intelligent of all nations in Europe lays down the rule, _Never
Interrupt_! as the eleventh commandment. Noise is the most impertinent
of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but
also a disruption of thought. Of course, where there is nothing t