The greatest results in life are usually attained by simple means, and the
exercise of ordinary qualities. 1. The common life of every day, with
its cares, necessities, and duties, affords ample opportunity for acquiring
experience of the best kind; and its most beaten paths provide the true worker
with abundant scope for effort and room for self-improvement. The road of human
welfare lies along the old highway of steadfast well-doing; and they who are the
most persistent, and Work in the truest spirit, will usually be the most
successful. Fortune has often been blamed for her blindness;
but fortune is not so blind as men are. Those who look into practical life will
find that fortune is usually on the side of the industrious, as the winds and
waves are on the side of the best navigators. In the pursuit of even the
highest branches of human inquiry, the commoner qualities are found the most
useful—such as common sense, attention, application, and perseverance.
2. Genius may not be necessary, though even genius of the highest sort
does not disdain the use of these ordinary qualities. The very greatest men have
been among the least believers in the power of genius, and as worldly wise and
persevering as successful men of the commoner sort. Some have even defined
genius to be only common sense intensified. A distinguished teacher and
president of a college spoke of it as the power of making efforts. John Foster
held it to be the power of lighting one’s own fire. Buffon said of genius "it is
patience". Newton’s was unquestionably a mind of the very
highest order, and yet, when asked by what means he had worked out his
extraordinary discoveries, he modestly answered, "By always thinking unto them."
At another time he thus expressed his method of study: "I keep the subject
continually before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly by little
and little into a full and clear light." 3. It was in Newton’s case, as in
every other, only by diligent application and perseverance that his great
reputation was achieved. Even his recreation consisted in change of study,
laying down one subject to take up another. To Dr. Bentley he said, "If I
have done the public any service, it is due to nothing but industry and patient
thought." 4. The extraordinary results effected by dint of
sheer industry and perseverance, have led many distinguished men to doubt
whether the gift of genius be so exceptional an endowment as it is usually
supposed to be. Thus Voltaire held that it is only a very slight line of
separation that divides the man of genius from the man of ordinary mould.
Beccaria was even of opinion that all men might be poets and orators, and
Reynolds that they might be painters and sculptors. If this were really so, that
stolid Englishman might not have been so very far wrong after all, who, on
Canova’s death, inquired of his brother whether it was "his intention to carry
on the business". Locke, Helvetius, and Diderot believed that
all men have an equal aptitude for genius, and that what some are able to
effect, under the laws which regulate the operations of the intellect, must also
be within the reach of others who, under like circumstances, apply themselves to
like pursuits. 5. But while admitting to the fullest extent the wonderful
achievements of labor, and recognizing the fact that men of the most
distinguished genius have invariably been found the most indefatigable workers,
it must nevertheless be sufficiently obvious that, without the original
endowment of heart and brain, no amount of labor, however well applied, could
have produced a Shakespeare, a Newton, a Beethoven, or a
Michelangelo. Dalton, the chemist, repudiated the notion of
his being "a genius", attributing everything which he had accomplished to simple
industry and accumulation. John Hunter said of himself, "My mind is like a
beehive; but full as it is of buzz and apparent confusion, it is yet full of
order and regularity, and food collected with incessant industry from the
choicest stores of nature." We have, indeed, but to glance at the biographies of
great men to find that the most distinguished inventors, artists, thinkers, and
workers of all kinds, owe their success, in a great measure, to their
indefatigable industry and application. They were men who turned all things to
Gold-even time itself.