"It requires a first-class mind to carry a vast load of scientific facts. Hence the many eminent observers who have been the most illogical of reasoners. What a contrast between Hugh Miller and his friend Francia; the mind of the latter, as Miller describes it, 'a labyrinth without a clew, in whose recesses was a vast amount of book-knowledge that never could be used, and was of no use to himself or any one else;' the former wielding all his stores as he swung his sledge. What is wanted is the comprehensive hand, and not the prehensile tail.
"Involved in such an equipoise is the decisiveness, the willforce, that not only holds, but holds the balance. Common as it may be, it is none the less pitiable to be just acute enough constantly to question, but not to answer--forever to raise difficulties, and never to solve them. Wakeful, but the wakefulness of weakliness. Fine-strung minds are they often, acquisitive, subtle, and sensitive, able to look all around their labyrinth and see far into darkness, but not out to the light. It is by nature rather a German than an Anglo-Saxon habit. It is not always fatal even there. De Wette, 'the veteran doubter,' rallied at the last, and, like Bunyan's Feeble-mind, went over almost shouting. In this country, youth often have it somewhat later than the measles and the small-pox, and come through very well, without even a pock-mark. Sometimes it becomes epidemic, and assumes a languid or typhoidal cast,--not Positivism, but Agnosticism. It is rather fashionable to eulogize perplexity and doubt as a mark of strength and genius. But whatever may be the passing fashion, the collective judgment of the ages has settled it that the permanent state of mental hesitancy and indecision, in whatever sphere of thought and action, is and must be a false condition. It indicates the scrofulous diathesis, and calls for more iron in the blood. It is a lower type of manhood. It abdicates the province of a human intelligence, which is to seek and find truth. It abrogates the moral obligation to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good. It revolts from the great problem of life, which calls on us to know, and to know that we may do. Out upon this apotheosis of doubt. It is the sick man glorying in his infirmity, the beggar boasting of his intellectual rags.