Even though, as I quoted the other day, Sertillanges encourages us to find our particular calling and seek to do it well, he by no means wants us to focus on that to the exclusion of everything else. He repeatedly tells us that we must have contact with many fields of interest both for the sake of our work, and so that we might be restored and refreshed when necessary:
We must always be more than we are; the philosopher must be something of a poet, the poet something of a philosopher; the craftsman must be poet and philosopher on occasion, and the people recognize this fact. The writer must be a practical man, and the practical man must know how to write. Every specialist is first of all a person, and the essential quality of the person is beyond anything that he thinks or does. (pg. 236-237)
[…]effortless intellectual life, leisure nobly employed, nature, art; all this does not overload the mind but, on the contrary, eases its strain. (pg. 237)
His advice in this section to alternate between different types of work reminded me of what Charlotte Mason instructed schools to do: arrange the schedule so that something taxing to one part of the brain is followed by something that uses a different part so that the children do not become fatigued. In fact, many things that Sertillanges said reminded me of Charlotte Mason’s principles: broad learning and the connections between areas of knowledge, the importance of habit, and even something that sounded very much like narration!
This final quote seems to me to be both a fitting end to this series and a succinct summary of The Intellectual Life:
The important thing is not what we shall get out of knowledge, but what we can give to it. The essential thing is not the reception accorded to our words, but the reception that we ourselves have given to truth, and that we are disposing others to give to it. (pg. 209)
