REASONING. 369 



and dislikes are formed ; lier opinions, to a great extent, the 

 same that they will be through life. Her character is, in 

 fact, finished in its essentials. How inferior to her is a boy 

 of twenty in all these respects ! His character is still gelat- 

 inous, uncertain what shape to assume, * trying it on ' in 

 every direction. Feeling his power, yet ignorant of the 

 manner in which he shall express it, he is, when comj)ared 

 with his sister, a being of no definite contour. But this 

 absence of prompt tendency in his brain to set into particu- 

 lar modes is the very condition which insures that it shall 

 ultimately become so much more efficient than the woman's. 

 The very lack of preappointed trains of thought is the 

 ground on which general principles and heads of classifi- 

 cation grow up ; and the masculine brain deals with new 

 and complex matter indirectly by means of these, in a 

 manner which the feminine method of direct intuition, ad- 

 mirably and rapidly as it performs within its limits, can 

 vainly hope to cope with. 



In looking back over the subject of reasoning, one feels 

 how intimately connected it is with conception ; and one 

 realizes more than ever the deejD reach of that principle of 

 selection on which so much stress was laid towards the close 

 of Chapter IX. As the art of reading (after a certain stage 

 in one's education) is the art of skipping, so the art ol being 

 wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The first efi'ect 

 on the mind of growing cultivated is that processes once 

 multiple get to be performed b}' a single act. Lazarus has 

 called this the progressive ' condensation ' of thought. 

 But in the psychological sense it is less a condensation than 

 a loss, a genuine dropping out and throwing overboard of 

 conscious content. Steps really sink from sight. An ad- 

 vanced thinker sees the relations of his topics in such 

 masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to 

 explain to younger minds it is often hard to say which 

 grows the more perplexed, he or the pupil. In every uni- 

 versity there are admirable investigators who are notori- 

 oiisly bad lecturers. The reason is that they never spon- 

 taneously see the subject in the minute articulate way in 

 which the student needs to have it ofi'ered to his slow 



