progress
deceptive.

Of these characteristics, the first is what the word directly
expresses--zealous exertion on the part of the student's own
intellectual powers, a zeal literally pre-venting all other incentives,
or, at the least, subordinating them, through pure love of finding out
that which is new and curious, or true. In two words, this first
essential of study, and fraught with all the desirable results of study,
is genuine INTELLECTUAL WORK. It is the _nisus_ of the intelligent
principle to bring itself into ascertained and well-ordered relations
with the facts, agencies, and uses of nature, alike in her physical and
spiritual domains. The bright-minded boy or girl who may not comprehend
the feeling or thought when so uttered, nevertheless _knows_ it, and,
for his or her range of effort, as keenly as does the adult explorer.

But, when a mind thus _works_, the truth that it can never advance
beyond missing or unfound links in the chain of thought does not need to
be taught to it. The impossibility of so doing has become a matter of
experience and of certain conviction. The mathematician knows, that,
beyond that form of his equation containing an actual mis-step, or a
positively irresoluble expression, all subsequent forms or values
involving that step or expression are vitiated, and the results they
seem to show substantially worthless. Now, every actually working mind,
and at every stage, from schoolboy perplexities over algebraic signs, up
to philosophic ventures in quest of one remove further of solid ground,
in respect to the interrelations of physical forces, or the law of
development of organized forms, finds itself in precisely the
predicament of the mathematician: it feels no footing and accomplishes
no advance beyond that link in the chain of fact and thought, which, to
its comprehension, stands as uncertain, erroneous, wanting, or
inexplicable. This is so from the very nature of our knowing faculties
and of knowledge. The true intellectual worker, encountering
interruption through any of these conditions, goes back to view his
difficulty from a better vantage ground, or attempts to approach it from
either side, or, failing these resources, bows to the necessity, and
suffers no harm, other than stoppage and loss of time. Thus, the second
characteristic of true study is in the rigidly natural and unfailing
CONSECUTION of the steps and processes by which the intellectual advance
is made. A mind so adva