The Intellectual Life

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Excerpt: ...a moral snare or pitfall, from which the best and noblest would be least likely to escape. It is hard to believe that the strong passions which so often accompany high intellectual gifts were intended either to drive their possessors into immorality or else to the misery of ill-assorted unions. No, there is such a thing as the intellectual marriage, in which the intellect itself is married. If such marriages are not frequent, it is that they are not often made the deliberate purpose of a wise alliance. Men choose their wives because they are pretty, or because they are rich, or because they are well-connected, but rarely for the permanent interest of their society. Yet who that had ever been condemned to the dreadful embarrassments of a tête-à-tête with an uncompanionable person, could reflect without apprehension on a lifetime of such tête-à-têtes? When intellectual men suffer from this misery they have themselves to blame. What is the use of having any mental superiority, 293 if, in a matter so enormously important as the choice of a companion for life, it fails to give us a warning when the choice is absurdly unsuitable? When men complain, as they do not unfrequently, that their wives have no ideas, the question inevitably suggests itself, why the superiority of the masculine intellect did not, in these cases, permit it to discover the defect in time? If we are so clever as to be bored by ordinary women, why cannot our cleverness find out the feminine cleverness which would respond to it? What I am going to say now is in its very nature incapable of proof, and yet the longer I live the more the truth of it is "borne in upon me." I feel convinced that for every grade of the masculine intellect there exists a corresponding grade of the feminine intellect, so that a precisely suitable intellectual marriage is always possible for every one. But since the higher intellects are rare, and rare in proportion to their elevation, it...