REASONING. 371 



ativeness in the actual emergency is, somehow or other, 

 allied with his general superiority to ourselves. It is not 

 only that the gentleman ignores considerations relative to 

 conduct, sordid suspicious, fears, calculations, etc., which 

 the vulgarian is fated to entertain ; it is that he is silent 

 where the vulgarian talks ; that he gives nothing but results 

 where the vulgarian is profuse of reasons ; that he does not 

 explain or apologize ; that he uses one sentence instead of 

 twenty ; and that, in a word, there is an amount of intersti- 

 tial thinking, so to call it, which it is quite impossible to 

 get him to perform, but which is nearly all that the vul- 

 garian mind performs at all. All this suppression of the 

 secondary leaves the field clear, — for higher flights, should 

 they choose to come. But even if they never came, what 

 thoughts there were would still manifest the aristocratic 

 type and wear the well-bred form. So great is our sense 

 of harmony and ease in passing from the company of a phi- 

 listine to that of an aristocratic temperament, that we are 

 almost tempted to deem the falsest views and tastes as held 

 by a man of the world, truer than the truest as held by a 

 common person. In the latter the best ideas are choked, 

 obstructed, and contaminated by the redundancy of their 

 paltry associates. The negative conditions, at least, of an 

 atmosphere and a free outlook are present in the former. 

 I may appear to have strayed from jDsychological an- 

 alysis into aesthetic criticism. But the principle of selec- 

 tion is so important that no illustrations seem redundant 

 which may help to show how great is its scope. The 

 upshot of what I say simply is that selection implies rejec- 

 tion as well as choice ; and that the function of ignoring, of 

 mattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the 

 function of attention itself. 



