a tolerably objectionable person.  A single-minded and disinterested attempt to obtain mastery of any particular occupation may in specific instances force a man to neglect certain admirable and in other relations essential qualities.  He may be a faithless husband, a treacherous friend, a sturdy liar, or a professional bankrupt, without necessarily interfering with the excellent performance of his special job.  A man who breaks a road to individual distinction by such questionable means may always be tainted; but he is a better public servant than would be some comparatively impeccable nonentity.  It all depends on the nature and the requirements of the particular task, and the extent to which a man has really made sacrifices in order to accomplish it.  There are many special jobs which absolutely demand scrupulous veracity, loyalty in a man’s personal relations, or financial integrity.  The politician who ruins his career in climbing down a waterspout, or the engineer who prevents his employers from trusting his judgment and conscience in money matters, cannot plead in extenuation any other sort of instrumental excellence.  They have deserved to fail, because they have trifled with their job; and it may be added that serious moral delinquencies are usually grave hindrances to a man’s individual efficiency.

From the intellectual point of view also technical competence means something more than manual proficiency.  Just as the master must possess those moral qualities essential to the integrity of his work, so he must possess the corresponding intellectual qualities.  All the liberal arts require, as a condition of mastery, a certain specific and considerable power of intelligence; and this power of intelligence is to be sharply distinguished from all-round intellectual ability.  From our present point of view its only necessary application concerns the problems of a man’s special occupation.  Every special performer needs the power of criticising the quality and the subject-matter of his own work.  Unless he has great gifts or happens to be brought up and trained under peculiarly propitious conditions, his first attempts to practice his art will necessarily be experimental.  He will be sure to commit many mistakes, not merely in the choice of alternative methods and the selection of his subject-matter, but in the extent to which he personally can approve or disapprove of his own achievements.  The thoroughly competent performer must at least possess the intellectual power of profiting from this experience.  A candid consideration of his own experiments must guide him in the selection of the better methods, in the discrimination of the more appropriate subject-matter, in the avoidance of his own peculiar failings, and in the cultivation of his own peculiar strength.  The technical career of the master is up to a certain point always a matter of growth.  The technical career of the second-rate man is always a matter of degeneration or at best of repetition.  The former brings with it its own salient and special form of enlightenment based upon the intellectual power to criticise his own experience and the moral power to act on his own acquired insight.  To this extent he becomes more of a man by the very process of becoming more of a master.