A sensible person will soon see the folly and wickedness of thinking to
please. Sensible men are very rare. A sensible man does not brag, avoids
introducing the names of his creditable companions, omits himself as
habitually as another man obtrudes himself in the discourse, and is
content with putting his fact or theme simply on its ground. You shall
not tell me that your commercial house, your partners, or yourself are
of importance; you shall not tell me that you have learned to know men;
you shall make me feel that; your saying so unsays it. You shall not
enumerate your brilliant acquaintances, nor tell me by their titles what
books you have read. I am to infer that you keep good company by your
better information and manners, and to infer your reading from the
wealth and accuracy of your conversation.
Young men think that the manly character requires that they should go to
California, or to India, or into the army. When they have learned that
the parlor and the college and the counting-room demand as much courage
as the sea or the camp, they will be willing to consult their own
strength and education in their choice of place.
There are to each function and department of nature supplementary men:
to geology, sinewy, out-of-doors men, with a taste for mountains and
rocks, a quick eye for differences and for chemical changes. Give such,
first, a course in chemistry, and then a geological survey. Others find
a charm and a profession in the natural history of man and the mammalia,
or related animals; others in ornithology, or fishes, or insects; others
in plants; others in the elements of which the whole world is made.
These lately have stimulus to their study through the extraordinary
revelations of the spectroscope that the sun and the planets are made in
part or in whole of the same elements as the earth is. Then there is the
boy who is born with a taste for the sea, and must go thither if he has
to run away from his father's house to the forecastle; another longs for
travel in foreign lands; another will be a lawyer; another, an
astronomer; another, a painter, sculptor, architect, or engineer. Thus
there is not a piece of nature in any kind, but a man is born, who, as
his genius opens, aims slower or faster to dedicate himself to that.
Then there is the poet, the philosopher, the politician, the orator, the
clergyman, the physician. 'Tis gratifying to see this adaptation of man
to the world, and to every part and particle of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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