it, and because it is a main point upon which the drama turns.
It is the contrast between his vivid intellectual ac
tivity, and the inertness of his conduct. To say that this depends upon a want of the power of will to transmute thought into action, is to do no more than to change one formula of words into another. There must be some better explanation for the unquestionable fact that one man of great intellectual vigour becomes a thinker only, and another a man of vehement action; one man a mute inglorious Milton, another a village Hampden, or even a Caesar or Napoleon. That activity of intellect is in itself adverse to decisiveness of conduct, is abun
dantly contradicted by biography. That activity of intellect may exist with the utmost powerlessness, or even perversity of conduct, is equally proved by the well-known biographies of many men, “who never said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one.”
The essential difference of men who are content
to rest in thought, and those who transmute it into action, appears not to consist in the presence or absence of that in comprehensible function, that unknown quantity of the mind, the will; but in the presence or absence of clearly defined and strongly-felt desire, and in that power of movement which can only be derived from the exercise of power, that is, from the habit of action. It is conceivable, as Sir James Mackintosh has well pointed out, that an intellectual being might exist examining all things, comparing all things, knowing all things, but desiring and doing nothing. It is equally conceivable that a being might exist with two strong desires, so equally poised that the result should be complete neutralization of each other, and a state of inaction as if no emotional spring to conduct whatever existed. Hence, inaction may arise, from want of desire, or from equipoise of desire. It is, moreover, conceivable that an intellectual being might exist in whom desires were neither absent nor equipoised, but in whom the habit of putting desires into action had never
