"I believe I saw Mr. Cardew in the meadow: I have just called on
his wife."
"Is she ill?"
"Yes, not seriously, I hope. You know Mr. Cardew?"
"Yes, a little. I have heard him preach, and have been to his house
when I was living at Abchurch."
"A remarkable man in many ways, and yet not a man whom I much
admire. He thinks a good deal, and when I am in company with him I
am unaccountably stimulated, but his thinking is not directed upon
life. My notion is that our intellect is intended to solve real
difficulties which confront us, and that all intellectual exercise
upon what does not concern us is worse than foolish. My brain finds
quite enough to do in contriving how to remove actual hard obstacles
which lie in the way of other people's happiness and my own."
"His difficulties may be different from yours."
"Certainly, but they are to a great extent artificial, and all the
time spent upon them is so much withdrawn from the others which are
real. He goes out into the fields reading endless books, containing
records of persons in various situations. He is not like any one of
those persons, and he never will be in any one of those situations.
The situation in which he found himself that morning at home, or
that in which a poor neighbour found himself, is that which to him
is important. It is a pernicious consequence of the sole study of
extraordinary people that the customary standards of human action
are deposed, and other standards peculiar to peculiar creatures
under peculiar circumstances are set up.
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