The
application of my intellect might have been a different one, but the
principle would have remained the same. The true sign of a vocation
is the impossibility of getting away from it: that is to say, of
succeeding in anything except that for which one was created. The man
who has a vocation mechanically sacrifices everything to his dominant
task. External circumstances might, as so often happens, have checked
the cause of my life and prevented me from following my natural bent,
but my utter incapability of succeeding in anything else would have
been the protest of baffled duty, and Predestination would in one way
have been triumphant by proving the subject of the experiment to be
powerless outside the kind of labour for which she had selected him.
I should have succeeded in any variety of intellectual application; I
should have failed miserably in any calling which involved the pursuit
of material interests.
The characteristic feature of all degrees of the Breton race is its
idealism--the endeavour to attain a moral and intellectual aim, which
is often erroneous but always disinterested. There never was a race of
men less suited for industry and trade. They can be got to do anything
by putting them upon their honour; but material gain is deemed
unworthy of a man of spirit, the noblest occupations being those which
bring no profit, as of the soldier, the sailor, the priest, the true
gentleman who derives from his land no more than the amount sanctioned
by long tradition, the magistrate and the thinker.
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