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thought and activity, cannot but suffer; for it seems to me that a 

 variety of objects and employments is as essential to a healthy de- 

 velopment of man's intellectual powers, as a variety of food and 

 exercise to those of his body. You may in the latter nourish par- 

 ticular muscles to enormous strength, if you confine yourself to the 

 exclusive and unremitting practice of some one kind of exertion ; 

 but you do it at the expense of the rest; they waste away, and the 

 individual who is deformed by such disproportion can never be 

 considered a perfect specimen of the human figure. And so is it 

 also with the mind : it may indeed, by a concentration of its acti- 

 vity on one object, acquire in respect of that an intensity of power ; 

 but on the whole it loses : the balance of its powers is disturbed ; 

 the decay of those faculties which are left inert more than com- 

 pensates the partial vigour, and the result is far more than an ave- 

 rage depreciation. But this narrowing of the mind has a danger 

 much greater than mere loss of power, which Bacon saw clearly 

 when in those words of weighty meaning, with which many of us 

 are familiar, he warned us to beware of " the idols of the cave." The 

 mind that retires from the broad expanse of its intellectual domain 

 to some secluded nook, where it may devote itself undisturbed to 

 the admiration of some favourite object, makes there for itself a 

 den, where the little light that finds entrance is coloured and con- 

 fused. It may from habit be able to find an easy path among the 

 darkest windings of that abode, where one accustomed to the full 

 daylight must grope his way with difficulty ; but its vision is not 

 the less imperfect. In that doubtful twilight all is distorted from 

 its true form and magnitude ; the things which it follows assume 

 strange and fantastic shapes, become objects of visionary reverence, 

 and are at last enthroned by it as idols to which it gives the wor- 

 ship due to that which should be its sole divinity, the spirit of 

 truth. Well, too, if that wild dwelling become not also a lair of 

 wilder influences ! This oracle of the great hierophant needs no 

 interpreter but experience : in every department of knowledge you 

 find its fulfilment; errors glaring to all but their victim, while he 

 thinks them axioms ; blind and presumptuous exaggeration of the 

 extent and power of his own acquirements, absurd and contemp- 

 tuous disparagement of all with which he is unacquainted. Look 



