Where, then, shall we place those members of the community who make the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake their chief occupation? It may help us towards the solution of this weighty problem if we make a distinction between brains and intellect, and call such people as professors, philosophers, and poets the "intellect" of the community. We shall then have to define clearly what we mean by "brains," and what we mean by "intellect."
"Brains" are what a man uses when he has some practical end in view, such as more money in his pocket, better food to eat, better clothes to wear; "intellect" deals with problems (usually classed as "academic") which have no immediate commercial value—such as whether the sun goes round the earth or the earth round the sun, or why an apple falls to the ground. "Brains" are generally admired, because everybody can see the results which they achieve; "intellect" is usually treated with neglect or indifference because it works in a sphere which is far out of range of the common vision.
What, then, is the justification for the maintenance in a community of a purely intellectual class of people, occupied with problems which have nothing to do with actual life, and which apparently contribute nothing to the common stock of "useful" knowledge, the kind of knowledge that can be turned into money. Why, for example, do we maintain at great expense in our universities professors of literature, philosophy, and pure science to devote their time to the study of merely academic problems, and to teach our sons and daughters such a smattering of these things as is of no practical use to them whatever, and which causes most of them a good deal of trouble and annoyance?
It is easy to understand why we should maintain professors of such subjects as engineering, dentistry, and agriculture, for engines and teeth are both things that will not allow themselves to be neglected, and it is undoubtedly a good thing to make two blades of grass grow where only one grew before. But why should a man be afraid to devote his time to making an appreciation of Greek tragedy grow where none grew before, or to try to arouse an interest in such a problem as the psychology of metre.
It may be argued, of course, that University professors provide a good deal of amusement for their students, that their personal peculiarities, carefully observed through four years of class-room work, often furnish rich entertainment at convivial gatherings. Or, again, it may be urged that the study of professors (in so far as professors can be regarded as human) is the study of human nature, and that students who observe their professors carefully are gaining an acquaintance with a practical branch of the science of anthropology. But neither of these answers to our question can be regarded as wholly satisfactory.
Let us consider briefly the function of intellect in the individual, and see if it will throw any light on the function of the intellectual class in the community. When intellect is developed at all in the average citizen, its sole function seems to be to make him either uncomfortable or objectionable. For suppose a small puny growth of intellect does appear in a man, it generally has one of two effects; either it makes him dissatisfied with himself, troubled with vague yearnings after a higher life, worried with misgivings on religious questions, annoyed by the feeling that he ought to be able to enjoy books and pictures and music which afford him no real enjoyment; or, he becomes abnormally satisfied with himself, propounds half-baked theories of the universe, teems with criticisms of books which he has not read or does not understand, or bubbles over with solutions of problems upon which he has never seriously pondered.
The one thing that such men can seldom be got to do is to set to work to develop that little growth of intellect, to feed and nourish it by the study of literature and philosophy, so that they may at last be enabled to think out problems for themselves, or at least to appreciate intelligently the solutions of them which great thinkers have placed on record. When, oh when, will men understand that intellectual things are not an amusement nor a hobby, to be taken up as a side-line in one's spare time, but that the appreciation of the things of the intellect is the reward of the most difficult and baffling of all kinds of labour; that one will appreciate Plato or Sophocles, Shakespeare or Milton, Descartes or Newton, precisely in proportion to the distance which one has climbed along the rugged path which leads to the intellectual peaks upon which those giants of thought sit eternally throned, that the cultivation of the intellect is not the work of four years or forty years, but of a lifetime, nay, of many lifetimes?
To spend uncounted years of pain,
Again, again, and yet again,
In working out in heart and brain,
The problem of our being here,
To gather facts from far and near,
Upon the mind to hold them clear
And knowing more may yet appear,
Unto one's latest breath to fear,
The premature result to draw—
Is the object, end and law,
And purpose of our being here?
asks Clough, and to this question all our greatest thinkers have answered—Yes.
It is the few who are convinced of the value and seriousness of intellectual things, and who do not flinch from the self-sacrifice and apparently fruitless labour which the pursuit of such things involves, that humanity as a whole owes its progress. If it were not for these men, whom Bunyan would call the intellectual Greathearts of the community, we should still, as a race, be sunk in barbarism. Intellect in the average man is allowed to atrophy; in the small percentage who strive after culture it accomplishes nothing of value, but it is the latter people who form the rank and file of the intellectual army. Gradually, little by little, that army is advancing;. every now and then some great general appears—a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Newton, a Kant, a Darwin—and under his leadership a victory is won; now this outpost of the hosts of darkness is captured, now that, and the flag of the human intellect is raised upon its ramparts. Meanwhile, the mass of mankind trudges on heavily, often two or three centuries behind. Next arrive the inventors, the reformers, the men of constructive intellect, who take the results of the great thinkers and plan their application to life; and lastly come the men of "brains" in their fur coats and fair round bellies, promote their companies, organize their industries, make their political speeches, and finally gather in the shekels, and also most of the honour and glory. By this time the intellectual army is again far ahead, attacking the next outpost of the kingdom of chaos and Old Night. And so humanity moves onward and upward.