370 PSYCHOLOGY. 



reception. Tliey grope for the links, but the links do not 

 come. Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's 

 Mecanique Celeste, said that whenever his author prefaced 

 a proposition by the words ' it is evident,' he knew that 

 many hours of hard study lay before him. 



When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred 

 subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly re- 

 markable for the summariness of its allusions and the 

 rapidity of its transitions. Before one of them is half 

 through a sentence the other knows his meaning and 

 replies. Such genial play with such massive materials, 

 such an easy flashing of light over far perspectives, such 

 careless indifference to the dust and apparatus that ordi- 

 narily surround the subject and seem to pertain to its 

 essence, make these conversations seem true feasts for 

 gods to a listener who is educated enough to follow them 

 at all. His mental lungs breathe more deeply, in an atmos- 

 phere more broad and vast than is their wont. On the 

 other hand, the excessive explicitness and short-windedness 

 of an ordinary man are as wonderful as they are tedious to 

 the man of genius. But we need not go as far as the ways 

 of genius. Ordinary social intercourse will do. There the 

 charm of conversation is in direct proportion to the possi- 

 bility of abridgment and elision, and in inverse ratio to the 

 need of explicit statement. "With old friends a word stands 

 for a whole story or set of opinions. With new-comers 

 everything must be gone over in detail. Some jjersons 

 have a real mania for completeness, they must express 

 every step. They are the most intolerable of companions, 

 and although their mental energy may in its way be great, 

 they always strike us as weak and second-rate. In short, 

 the essence of plebeianism, that which separates vulgarity 

 from aristocracy, is perhaps less a defect than an excess, 

 the constant need to animadvert upon matters which for 

 the aristocratic temperament do not exist. To ignore, to 

 disdain to consider, to overlook, are the essence of the 

 * gentleman.' Often most provokingly so ; for the things 

 ignored may be of the deepest moral consequence. But in 

 the very midst of our indignation with the gentleman, we 

 have a consciousness that his preposterous inertia and neg* 



