I liked the linking of intelligence with large-heartedness, since heart and mind are often viewed as being in opposition, though I’ve always seen them as being a marriage of two kinds. When I was a student, a Mongolian teacher asked me, one mizzling Monday morning, ‘What is more important to you, heart or mind?’
‘Heart’, I said, though I wasn’t sure why one needed to choose, since I see no reason they can’t be in equilibrium.
‘Then you will never be a great academic,’ he stated, closing the discussion.
I was (and remain) baffled, and continue to strive for large-hearted intelligence, which I’ve also found in some of the finest scholars I have known.
‘… but it was not from her that Adam got his well-filled brow and his expression of large-hearted intelligence.’
Source: George Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 (1859)), p. 83
