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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 7, May, 1858 by Various
page 61 of 278 (21%)
and eat into and consume the very faculties whose successful exercise
creates it, its slyly insinuated venom works swifter and deadlier on
youth and inexperience. The ordinary forms of conceit, it is true,
cannot well flourish in any assemblage of young men, whose plain
interest it is to undeceive all self-deception and quell every
insurrection of individual vanity, and who soon understand the art of
burning the nonsense out of an offending brother by caustic ridicule
and slow-roasting sarcasm. But there is danger of mutual deception,
springing from a common belief in a false, but attractive principle of
culture. The mischief of intellectual conceit in our day consists in its
arresting mental growth at the start by stuffing the mind with the husks
of pretentious generalities, which, while they impart no vital power and
convey no real information, give seeming enlargement to thought, and
represent a seeming opulence of knowledge. The deluded student, who
picks up these ideas in masquerade at the rag-fairs and old-clothes'
shops of philosophy, thinks he has the key to all secrets and the
solvent of all problems, when he really has no experimental knowledge of
anything, and dwindles all the more for every juiceless, unnutritious
abstraction he devours. Though famished for the lack of a morsel of the
true mental food of facts and ideas, he still swaggeringly despises all
relative information in his ambition to clutch at absolute truth, and
accordingly goes directly to ultimates by the short cuts of cheap
generalities. Why, to be sure, should he, who can, Napoleon-like, march
straight on to the interior capital, submit, Marlborough-like, to the
drudgery of besieging the frontier fortresses? Why should he, who can
throw a girdle of generalization round the universe in less than forty
minutes, stoop to master details? And this easy and sprightly amplitude
of understanding, which consists not in including, but in excluding all
relative facts and principles, he calls comprehensiveness; the mental
decrepitude it occasions he dignifies with the appellation of repose;
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