There is, however, one reserve to be made about discipline, which is this: We ought not to disregard altogether the mind's preferences and refusals, because in most cases they are the indication of our natural powers. They are not so always; many have felt attracted to pursuits for which they had no capacity (this happens continually in literature and the fine arts), whilst others have greatly distinguished themselves in careers which were not of their own choosing, and for which they felt no vocation in their youth. Still there exists a certain relation between preference and capacity, which may often safely be relied upon when there are not extrinsic circumstances to attract men or repel them. Discipline becomes an evil, and a very serious evil, causing immense losses of special talents to the community, when it overrides the personal preferences entirely. We are less in danger of this evil, however, from the discipline which we impose upon ourselves than from that which is imposed upon us by the opinion of the society in which we live. The intellectual life has this remarkable peculiarity as to discipline, that whilst very severe discipline is indispensable to it, that which it really needs is the obedience to an inward law, an obedience which is not only compatible with revolt against other people's notions of what the intellectual man ought to think and do, but which often directly leads to such revolt as its own inevitable result. In the attempt to subject ourselves to the inward law, we may encounter a class of mental refusals which indicate no congenital incapacity, but prove that the mind has been incapacitated by its acquired habits and its ordinary occupations. I think that it is particularly important to pay attention to this class of mental refusals, and to give them the fullest consideration. Suppose the case of a man who has a fine natural capacity for painting, but whose time has been taken up by some profession which has formed in him mental habits entirely different from the mental habits of an artist. The inborn capacity for art might whisper to this man, "What if you were to abandon your profession and turn painter?" But to this suggestion of the inborn capacity the acquired unfitness would, in a man of sense, most probably reply, "No; painting is an art bristling all over with the most alarming technical difficulties, which I am too lazy to overcome; let younger men attack them if they like." Here is a mental refusal of a kind which the severest self-disciplinarian ought to listen to. This is Nature's way of keeping us to our specialities; she protects us by means of what superficial moralists condemn as one of the minor vices--the disinclination to trouble ourselves without necessity, when the work involves the acquisition of new habits.