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Updated: May 15, 2025
Jones was the widow of the informer Richard O'Brien; that she feared over-subtlety on the part of the enemy might confuse her girl travelling companion with Esme O'Brien, hidden in a convent school near Monaco. "It's just credible that there may be other incentives," I said.
Over-subtlety in the leader of a party tends to perplex friends and give a handle to opponents. And with all his confidence in his cause, and also in his power and his call to use it, he had a curious shyness and self-distrust as to his own way of doing what he had to do; he was afraid of "wilfulness," of too great reliance on intellect.
The aversion to technicality and over-subtlety, to which I have so often referred, appears to have limited his powers. He did not enjoy for its own sake the process of finding a clue through a labyrinth of refined distinctions, and would have preferred a short cut to what seemed to him the substantial merits of the case.
His reiterated advice that we should lose no time in picking up our anchor and chain had ended by giving me the idea that he was anxious to get us away from Bensersiel and the mainland. Then it struck me that this might be over-subtlety on my part, and the idea recurred when the question of our future plans cropped up, and hampered me in deciding on a course.
Yet amid all these untoward conditions his mind kept up its interminable twisting and turning of the universe; that acute analysis for which centuries of over-subtlety had prepared the Polish Jew's brain, and which was now for the first time applied scientifically to the actual world instead of fantastically to the Bible.
Before we can make up our minds on Scott, we have to remember, or forget, the scornful patronage of one critic, the over-subtlety and exaggerations of another, the more than papal infallibility of a third. Perhaps the best critic would be an intelligent school-boy, with a generous heart and an unspoiled imagination.
But though certainty is denied us in regard to truth, it is not withheld in regard to duty. Submission to the divine ruler and benefactor is the first duty of the rational soul. From obedience proceeds every virtue, from over-subtlety and conceit, which is the product of fancied knowledge, comes every sin. Montaigne, like all who know men, has a sharp eye for human frailty.
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