The men who must depend upon others to do their thinking for them deserve pity and commiseration. The bureaus which thrive by furnishing essays and orations for commencements, sermons for special occasions, and even for the regularly recurring Sunday services, show how often our schools make their pupils dependent instead of self-reliant. On being cast upon the sea of life, their minds resemble a craft which has lost its rudder; they drift with wind and tide, uncertain where they shall land. Their thinking is not grounded on first principles; hence their minds reflect transient views on every question. The strong personality in the sunlight of whose influence they happened last to bask moulds their opinions and directs their intellectual life until they move into the sphere of new influences, constantly resembling those whom Randolph of Roanoke stigmatized as dough-faces because their votes were under the control of party leaders and were cast regardless of their convictions of right.
The men whom the world reveres as great thinkers have been distinguished by their ability to give continuous thought to whatever engaged their serious attention. Newton claimed that he made his discoveries by always thinking about them. His biographers relate how he would for hours remain seated upon his bed, half dressed, absorbed in thought, forgetful of his surroundings. Stories of the absent-mindedness of Socrates, Sydney Smith, Neander, Edison, and many others who attained eminence as philosophers, authors, or inventors, are interesting indeed, but they throw no light upon the way in which these men acquired their marvellous powers; they merely show a capacity for focussing all the energies of the soul upon one point to the exclusion of sense impressions from without. It is very certain that men who excel in any line of work acquire habits of concentrated and continuous thought in one direction. Very different from these are the mental habits of the boy and the average man. A writer in _Cornhill Magazine_ describes their intellectual activity as follows:
“The normal mental locomotion of even well-educated men and women (save under the spur of exceptional stimulus) is neither the flight of an eagle in the sky, nor the trot of a horse upon the road, but may better be compared to the lounge of a truant school-boy in a shady lane, now dawdling passively, now taking a hop-skip-jump, now stopping to pick blackberries, and now turning to right or left to catch a butterfly, climb a tree, or make dick-duck-drake on a pond; going nowhere in particular, and only once in a mile or so proceeding six steps in an orderly and philosophical manner.”