Complete. From “Caitoniana.”

READING without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for definite end in knowledge than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye. A cottage flower gives honey to the bee, a king’s garden none to the butterfly.

  Youths who are destined for active careers, or ambitious of distinction in such forms of literature as require freshness of invention or originality of thought, should avoid the habit of intense study for many hours at a stretch. There is a point in all tension of the intellect beyond which effort is only waste of strength. Fresh ideas do not readily spring up within a weary brain; and whatever exhausts the mind not only enfeebles its power, but narrows its scope. We often see men who have overread at college entering upon life as languidly as if they were about to leave it. They have not the vigor to cope with their own generation; for their own generation is young, and they have wasted the nervous energy which supplies the sinews of war to youth in its contests for fame or fortune.

  Study with regularity, at settled hours. Those in the forenoon are the best, if they can be secured. The man who has acquired the habit of study, though for only one hour every day in the year, and keeps to the one thing studied till it is mastered, will be startled to see the way he has made at the end of a twelvemonth.

  He is seldom overworked who can contrive to be in advance of his work. If you have three weeks before you to learn something which a man of average quickness could learn in a week, learn it the first week, and not in the third. Business dispatched is business well done, but business hurried is business ill done.

  In learning what others have thought, it is well to keep in practice the power to think for oneself; when an author has added to your knowledge, pause and consider if you can add nothing to his.

  Be not contented to have learned a problem by heart; try and deduce from it a corollary not in the book.

  Spare no pains in collecting details before you generalize; but it is only when details are generalized that a truth is grasped. The tendency to generalize is universal with all men who achieve great success, whether in art, literature, or action. The habit of generalizing, though at first gained with care and caution, secures, by practice, a comprehensiveness of judgment and a promptitude of decision which seem to the crowd like the intuitions of genius. And, indeed, nothing more distinguishes the man of genius from the mere man of talent than the facility of generalizing the various details, each of which demands the aptitude of a special talent, but all of which can be only gathered into a single whole by the grasp of a mind which may have no special aptitude for any.

  Invention implies the power of generalization, for an invention is but the combining of many details known before into a new whole, and for new results.

  Upon any given point, contradictory evidence seldom puzzles the man who has mastered the laws of evidence, but he knows little of the laws of evidence who has not studied the unwritten law of the human heart; and without this last knowledge a man of action will not attain to the practical, nor will a poet achieve the ideal.

  He who has no sympathy never knows the human heart; but the obtrusive parade of sympathy is incompatible with dignity of character in a man, or with dignity of style in a writer. Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.

  In science, address the few; in literature, the many. In science, the few must dictate opinion to the many; in literature, the many, sooner or later, force their judgment on the few. But the few and the many are not necessarily the few and the many of the passing time; for discoverers in science have not unoften, in their own day, had the few against them, and writers the most permanently popular not unfrequently found, in their own day, a frigid reception from the many. By the few, I mean those who must ever remain the few, from whose dicta, we, the multitude, take fame upon trust; by the many, I mean those who constitute the multitude in the long run. We take the fame of a Harvey or a Newton upon trust, from the verdict of the few in successive generations; but the few could never persuade us to take poets and novelists on trust. We, the many, judge for ourselves of Shakespeare and Cervantes.

  He who addresses the abstract reason addresses an audience that must forever be limited to the few; he who addresses the passions, the feelings, the humors, which we all have in common, addresses an audience that must forever compose the many. But either writer, in proportion to his ultimate renown, embodies some new truth, and new truths require new generations for cordial welcome. This much I would say meanwhile: Doubt the permanent fame of any work of science which makes immediate reputation with the ignorant multitude; doubt the permanent fame of any work of imagination which is at once applauded by a conventional clique that styles itself “the critical few.”