Who can doubt that the habit of taking pains, the habit of minute attention, of patient thought and persevering study, is one of the leading characteristics of genius! To this rule there seems to be no exception.
We see it illustrated in the lives of our greatest thinkers. Did a genius like Lord Bacon compose his immortal works with ease, and, as it were, without effort? Far from it. On the contrary, he took great pains. They were written and re-written. They were the fruit of much patient thought, of repeated revision and persistent effort. Thus, we are told that he transcribed his “Novum Organum” twelve times with his own hand, each time revising it carefully. He was employed on this great work at intervals for a period of thirty years. When he transcribed it he did not merely recopy what he had written, with a few verbal alterations only, but changed it in substance, so as to bring it nearer the model in his own mind. This was his constant practice, as we know from his own words. Writing to a friend, he says—“My great work goeth forward, and, after my manner, I alter even when I add; so that nothing is finished till all be finished.”
Who is there among us who would have the patience to write any literary production in which he might be engaged twelve times over with his own hand! Think, too, of the patient thought that must have been bestowed on the work each time it was transcribed! If Bacon’s genius is immensely greater than what any of us can boast of, do not his patient thought, his persevering study, his habit of taking pains, exceed ours in the same proportion!
Bacon’s precept corresponded to his practice. How does the great author of the inductive method direct us to make discoveries? Not by volatile flights of fancy, but by patient labor. We are patiently to observe and make experiments. We are to collect all sorts of facts which have any bearing on the subject, not even neglecting what may appear trifles. We are to arrange them under proper heads. We are to examine them under every aspect, and reflect upon them with deepest thought. Thus only, he tells us, will discoveries be made worthy of the name.
Let us turn to another great philosopher of our own country. How did Newton succeed in making his name immortal? The poet says of him—
“Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night,
God said—Let Newton be, and there was light.”
Yet it was not without effort and painstaking care that he made his discoveries. The laws of light and gravitation did not reveal themselves to him at a glance. The process of discovery was much slower. Let us go to the man himself and learn the secret of his success. He tells us that he made his discoveries by always thinking about them. This patient thought, this persevering study, this painstaking care, enabled him at last to succeed where others failed. This it was, and not mere genius alone, that shed a luster on his name, which shall last so long as the sun and the moon endure.
To come nearer our own times and to men of less dazzling fame. George Stephenson, the inventor, we may say, of railways, will be allowed to have been a great mechanical genius. The lesson we learn from his life is to take pains and persevere. His inventions were, in no small degree, the result of careful study. We see the pains he took to acquaint himself with every detail as to the habits of “the engine” while still a brakesman. He thus laid the foundation of his future success in applying the steam-engine to the railway. We read, also, that when he retired for the night, it was not always to sink into slumber. He worked out many a difficult problem in bed, and for hours he would lie awake and turn over in his mind, with painstaking care and patient thought, how to overcome some mechanical obstacle that stood in his way.
In the later years of his life, when railways had spread over the kingdom, he was fond of pointing out to others the difficulties he had to surmount, and what pains and perseverance had brought him to. It was not talent, it was not genius, in the ordinary sense of the word, to which he attributed his success; it was to perseverance. In addressing young men his grand text was “persevere,” and on this theme the old man grew eloquent, glowing with the recollections of his own personal experience.