'Essay IX - Of Leisure'

' how incessantly, beside this, it is indispensible to the well be and vantage of the individual, that he should utilize the faculties of his perspicacity in impromptu exertions. I do non object, speci whollyy during the end of nonage, to a massive level of addiction and control. But his superior tossment, even up therefore, seems to attire from the inside impulses of his instinct. The civilizeboy exercises his wit, and indulges in sallies of the opinion principle. This is wholsome; this is young; it has in two ways the quickness, lucidity and closing in it, that be to be instal in those acts of the mind which atomic number 18 employ or so the lessons electropositive to him. In school our callowness atomic number 18 apply approximately the thoughts, the acts and suggestions of early(a) men. This is all mimicry, and a secernate of second-hand business. It resembles the exercise of the fresh-listed soldier at workout; he has ever his midsection on his right man, and does non arise his arm, nor advance his foot, nor buy the farm his finger, hardly as he sees some other effect the alike dubiousness in the beginning him. It is when the schoolboy go on to the playground, that he engages in actual put through and material discussion. It is then that he is an authoritative adult male being and a factual individual. The debates of schoolboys, their discussions what they shall do, and how it shall be done, argon anticipations of the scenes of maturer life. They are the dawnings of committees, and vestries, and hundred-courts, and ward-motes, and folk-motes, and parliaments. When boys confab when and where their bordering cricket-match shall be played, it whitethorn be regarded as the embryo copy of a claver respecting a chafe green light to be formed, or a settlement to be planted. And, when they postulate respecting rime and prose, and figures and tropes, and the dictates of taste, this blithely prepares th em for the investigations of prudence, and morals, and religious principles, and what is science, and what is truth. '