But we must not speak too absolutely. Here, as elsewhere in moral and social questions, the problem is largely one of degree. Though it can never be right to treat life as if it were something meant to be taken in sips, and to regard life-tasting as an end, it would be absurd to rule out of life the gaining of innocent experiences. Within proper limits, a man has a right to expand his mind by gaining experience. As long as those experiences are not obtained by giving an indirect or an implicit sanction to what is wrong, as long as a man does not make his main aim the tasting of life, he has of course a perfect right to accumulate knowledge of all kinds. The gaining of innocent experiences may indeed be made a most useful discipline.

Goethe was right to force upon himself the experiences to be gained by climbing the spire of Strassburg Cathedral. He disliked going on to the spire. It was a useful victory for his will to oblige himself to become accustomed to standing on the edge of a sheer precipice of masonry. By all means let men learn all they can learn innocently, and let them use experience as a mental discipline; but do not let them imagine that the attitude of the mere life-taster is a fitting one from which to contemplate life. It is one that the good citizen can never occupy.

25

THE DREAD OF THOUGHT

AND, friend, when dost thee think?' was the reply made by the Quaker lady to whom Southey had explained, with no little satisfaction, how he spent his day. He told her how he studied Portuguese grammar while he was shaving, how he read Spanish for an hour before breakfast, how, after breakfast, he wrote or studied till dinner, and so on, and so on-how, in a word, every corner of the twenty-four hours was exactly filled by writing, reading, eating, talking, taking exercise, and sleeping; and she replied with the very pertinent question we have just given. That there are very few men, and not many women—women are, on the whole, more given to meditation than men-who could give a satisfactory answer to the question will, we believe, be admitted at once.

The idea of thinking for thinking's sake is, to most men, positively repellent. They have an intense objection-an objection which, too, they believe to be, on the whole, a laudable one-to time passed not in eating, sleeping, working, talking, reading, writing, or taking exercise or playing at games. Time not occupied by any of these occupations is held to be lost time, and loss of time, like every other loss, is something to be avoided.

The departure of the summer calls forth complaints in a hundred suburban trains. As long as there is light,' says the City man who lives an hour out of London, 'I find the journey quite a pleasant rest-a quiet time, in which to enjoy one's evening paper, or any novel one may be reading. Now, however, that the days are getting too dark to read comfortably after five I hardly know how to bear the journey back. Unless one happens to meet a friend, that hour of enforced idleness is positive torture. There is nothing to do, and sometimes the temptation to destroy one's eyesight by reading by the carriage-lamp becomes irresistible. Living out of town may be paradise in summer, but in winter it is purgatory.'

The feeling is a very common one, no doubt, and, most people would add, a very natural one; but to this we should emphatically demur. Why is it natural for a man to dread being thrown back upon his own thoughts? Why should he find meditation so unnatural, and reading so natural? After all, we were not born with copies of the evening papers in our hands, and the process of thinking is not one which has to be acquired. We believe that the dread of thought in a great measure comes from lack of habit. All children pass a good deal of time in thinking; but men, in the press of business and of pleasure, forget how to think, and grow to regard reading as the only possible way of passing the time quietly.

There is a story of a man who gave up hunting because he found the waiting about at the covert-side, with nothing to do, quite unbearable. If he could have had a book to read till the hounds got away he would

have been happy, and would, he said, have enjoyed the As it was, the pleasure of hunting was outweighed by the pain of doing nothing. We venture to think, however, that a very little patience and a very little practice would soon make most men give up their dread of thinking, and would make an hour spent without books or talk a pleasure instead of a pain. No doubt this is not true of all men. There are certain persons cursed with a constitutional melancholy so deep that it is impossible for them to think cheerfully. Thinking with them means a black procession of waking nightmares, which take possession of the mind the moment it ceases to be distracted by something external. They cannot force themselves to think of what they will, but seem compelled to let their thoughts wander through the waste places and deserts of despair.

Special circumstances, again, may give a man a right to dread his thoughts. Those under a cloud of sorrow or disappointment, those worried by some adverse turn in their affairs-a family quarrel or a bad speculationor those engaged in some scheme trembling in the balance of failure or success do wisely in avoiding their own thoughts. They cannot, unless they are cast in a specially heroic mould, avoid thinking of their 'grand concern,' as Governor Pitt styled the great diamond which dominated his existence, and therefore they had better not think at all, but should divert their minds in every way they can. These, however, are the abnormal

cases.

The ordinary man at ordinary times has no real reason for dreading his thoughts. It is merely want of habit that makes him dislike thinking. Let him make the plunge, and select something definite to think about,

and ten to one he will find following a train of thought a very agreeable exercise.

Letting the mind veer backwards and forwards like a weathercock, at the suggestion of this or that external circumstance, is, of course, dull and worrying; but the man who knows how to think does not do that. He thinks, as he reads, with a definite purpose. One cannot, of course, propose lines of thought in the abstract for unknown persons, but one may indicate one or two of the ways in which a man may learn to get pleasure from thinking. To begin with, he may follow the example of the wise man who said: When I have nothing else to do, I sort my thoughts and label them.' That was an excellent plan. There are few men whose thoughts would not be improved by being put through the process to which we subject a drawer full of papers -which have lacked for some time that rare combination of leisure and inclination which is necessary for tidying. Most of us, again, have confused thoughts and intuitions, that this or that thing connected with ourselves or our families might be better done than it is done.

Let the man, then, who complains of his intolerable hour on the South-Western, or the London and Brighton, or the Great Eastern, absorb himself in a definite scheme of meditation upon something which has already clamoured to be thought out, and he will find the time passes quickly enough. He must not wait till the thought comes to him. He must, by a conscious and deliberate exercise of will, set his mind to his subject. In plain words, he must say to himself: Now, I will regularly think out whether it is a good plan' to do this that, or the other. For those who have artistic,