c. Those
are wisdom embalmed; these wisdom vitalized. The former are literary
fodder; the latter are literary pemmican.

The commonest application of proverbs is as mental economics,
_substitutes for thought_. They are constantly employed by the
ordinary sort of persons as provisions to avoid spiritual exertion,
artifices to dispose of a matter with the smallest amount of
intellectual trouble, as when one ends a controversy with the adage,
"Least said, soonest mended." The majority of people desire to get
along with the least possible expenditure of thinking. To many a
hard-headed laborer, five minutes of girded and continuous thinking
are more exhaustive than a whole day of muscular toil. No fact is more
familiar than that illiterate minds are furnished with an abundance of
trite sayings which they readily cite on all occasions. They thus
hit, or at least fancy they hit, the principle which applies to the
exigency, without the trouble of extemporaneously thinking it out
for themselves on the spot. Such saws as, "The pot must not call the
kettle black," "One swallow does not make a Spring," "Nought is never
in danger," "Out of sight, out of mind," often give employment to an
otherwise freightless tongue, and serve as excusing makeshifts for a
mind incompetent, from ignorance, indolence, or fatigue, to discharge
the duty of furnishing its own thought and expression for the
occasion.

Proverbs are more frequently used as _explanations_ than as _guides_
of conduct, as the reason why we _have_ acted in a certain manner than
as a reason why we _should_ act so. "Look before you leap," is usually
said _after_ we have leaped. When a miserly man refuses to give
anything in behalf of some distant object, his refusal is not prompted
by the remembrance of the proverb, "Charity begins at home"; but the
stingy propensity first stirs in the man and actuates him, and then he
expresses his motive, or evades the true issue, by quoting the selfish
old saw ever ready at his hand. In such cases the axiom is not the
forerunning cause of the action, but its justifying explanation.
Sometimes, undeniably, an applicable proverb coming to mind does
influence a man and decide his conduct. Coming at the right moment, in
the wavering of his will, it suggests the principle which determines
him, lends the needful balance of impulse for which he waited. An old
proverb, indorsed by the usage of generations, strikes on the ear like
a voice falling fro