By Ansarul Karim Jamee
Published: September 10, 2026
Ansarul Karim Jamee holds master’s degrees in Environmental Science and Management, History, and Business Administration. For nearly three decades, he has worked across diverse industries, advancing sustainability, well-being, and systems awareness.
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What the Article Is About
This article examines how vocation, character, desire, attention, intellect, the body, and truth work together in the formation of an intellectual life, drawing on Sertillanges’s The intellectual life: Its spirit, conditions, methods and related philosophical and scientific perspectives.
Vocation
In Bangladesh, there is an anonymous folk song:
ওরে কলে কেউ কারেও ফেলে না ধরে
দাদা গো, আপন ইচ্ছায় সব পড়ে
ইঁদুর মারা কল রয়েছে জগৎ মাঝারে।।
Ore kole keu kareo fele na dhore
Dada go, apon ichchhay sob pore
Indur mara kol royechhe jagat majhare.
No one casts another into the trap.
Brother, each falls there by his own will.
Rat traps lie throughout the world.
(English rendering by the author.)
The vocation of intellectual life is a self-accepted path. Some seem to hear the call early, almost as though they were born wearing the coat. Others discover or choose the path later. In the beginning, very few understand the burden; most learn its weight only after accepting the vocation.
Gradually, they see truth, learn to love it, and become loyal to it. Vocation gives them direction; fidelity keeps them on the path; effort carries them forward; and transmission allows what they discover to travel beyond themselves. Truth remains the measure of the journey.
So, knowledge seekers do not have a person in front of them to blame. Instead, they start digging inward.
Character gives preparedness
“When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.”
― Traditional proverb, often attributed to Billy Graham.
Some of us might disagree with this quote; however, in childhood, several times in different grades, I had to write an explanation of it, and serendipitously, it popped into my mind as I tried to write about how character builds preparedness.
As one cannot learn swimming on dry ground and then jump into a pond, one who chooses an intellectual life must also prepare the character that will carry it.
Most of us instinctively separate intelligence from character. A person may be selfish, vain, dishonest, undisciplined, jealous, or morally chaotic—and still possess a brilliant intellect.
Sertillanges does not exactly deny that brilliant people can have serious moral weaknesses. Obviously, they can. His argument is subtler. He says that intellectual ability is not the same thing as intellectual life.
A sharp mind is a tool. But the person holding that tool determines what happens with it. That is why character becomes part of the formation of an intellectual life.
He writes that intellectual qualities have only a secondary role compared with qualities of character. Intelligence without moral order can become isolated from the rest of the personality, and an isolated faculty, he says, may become dangerous.
Everything Enters the Library
Intelligence does not operate outside personality. The thinker brings himself into his thinking. His ambitions come. His resentments come. His desires come. His pride comes. His impatience comes. His honesty comes. His courage comes. Everything enters the library with him.
That is why Sertillanges’s intellectual life is never merely a life of the brain. It is the person’s life. Character, therefore, becomes part of the formation of an intellectual life. Character is a part of our thinking process. Our character quietly edits what we see—and sometimes what we are willing to admit we have seen.
Character can affect a person’s ability to see the truth clearly. Here, I can mention a conflict of interest. If certain interests bind me—personal, official, political, familial, or otherwise—I may observe a situation clearly; however, I may manipulate my interpretation. Another example: If I am already fascinated by an idea or person, I may naturally seek information that supports my preference and overlook what disturbs it.
So, while strong intellectual ability can make a person brilliant, remaining intellectually loyal to truth requires continual work on character. Yet another question remains: what if someone is loyal to truth, practices the qualities Sertillanges describes, discovers something genuine, and then uses that knowledge in a dangerous way? Strictly speaking, we may still call such a person an intellectual. Yet Sertillanges’s emphasis on character raises another possibility: if love of truth is joined with moral formation, perhaps the intellectual may also become less willing to use truth in ways that harm others.
Desire gives momentum
When I started writing about desire giving momentum, a sentence naturally rose from inside me. There is no reason this sentence arose from inside me other than that I just wanted to write about desire giving momentum. The sentence is, “The creation of the universe is the manifestation of a desire.” Please don’t ask whose desire it is. I don’t have the answer, at least not logically, scientifically, spiritually, or mystically. Fortunately, my subject begins with desire, not with whatever may have preceded it.
However, as I’m writing an intellectual article, and I have already said a couple of times that a love of truth, character, and loyalty to truth are crucial for an intellectual, a question naturally arose: has someone already said this sentence? And am I simply repeating it without giving credit to the source? So I tried to check the fact and didn’t find any quote similar to it; however, serendipitously, I found a beautiful sentence from a very motivational person, Paulo Coelho. He said:
“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
— The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
There is an English proverb:
“To him that will, ways are not wanting.” The expression evolved into the modern phrasing “where there’s a will, there’s a way”
— The saying appears in George Herbert’s proverb tradition. An earlier collection, Outlandish Proverbs, appeared in 1640 and was later expanded as Jacula Prudentum in 1651.
In our previous sections, we saw that no one is forcing us to choose an intellectual life. And if we borrow Coelho’s optimism and the spirit of the old English proverb, choosing this path becomes part of the formation of an intellectual life, making us more attentive to the people, paths, and opportunities that help us pursue it.
From Desire to Studiousness
Let’s see what Sertillanges has said on desire. According to him, intelligence does not operate outside personality. The thinker brings himself into his thinking. His desires come. We think with the whole person. Knowledge involves our bodily condition, emotions, desires, habits, memory, imagination, moral character, attention, and judgment. His highest intellectual virtue is not cleverness alone; he values a disciplined desire for knowledge.
One interesting thing is that Sertillanges uses desire to distinguish negligence, studiousness, and disordered curiosity. In this sense, curiosity is not always studiousness. Too little desire for knowledge becomes negligence; ordered desire becomes studiousness; and disordered desire becomes curiosity.
For Sertillanges, desire does not work alone. Character, emotion, bodily condition, memory, imagination, attention, and judgment all participate in thought. Desire provides movement; vocation provides direction; studiousness disciplines the movement. Ordered desire becomes studiousness; disordered desire may scatter attention.
The quality of desire shapes the quality of attention—and gives momentum to the formation of an intellectual life.
So, until now in our journey, we have seen,
Vocation says where.
Desire says how strongly.
Studiousness governs how that force is used.
Attention gives focus
Can you notice how many times in a day you are consciously, fully present where you are physically attending? When I was writing the first sentence of this section, I was sitting at my table in Dhaka. Still, I had already visited my elder sister’s home in Connecticut, USA, and spent time with her in her beautiful garden, with no time, no space. This is a magnificent human quality, though it can also become disruptive when we lose the ability to return our attention where it is needed.
Many organizations now teach attention, focus, and distraction management through their own methods and philosophies. I have seen their ads on the web and in magazines. So, attention has clearly become something people are willing to pay to cultivate.
While studying Sertillanges almost as if I were conducting research, I began connecting some dots. I should add that I am not offering any treatment or method for attentiveness here; this is purely an intellectual exploration. The formation of an intellectual life begins with a self-accepted vocation. No one casts another into the trap. Gradually, intellectual seekers see truth, learn to love it, and become loyal to it. From there, character and desire begin to reinforce one another.
Character disciplines desire, and desire gives energy to attention. This momentum can draw the person toward deeper focus, while sustained attention may strengthen devotion to the work and reduce some forms of distraction or distortion.
If we return to the opening question—“Can you notice how many times in a day you are consciously, fully present where you are physically attending?”—the distinction becomes clearer. In life, it matters whether the body and mind arrive together. If the body is present but the mind is elsewhere, we might call that fragmented attendance.
Intellect gives judgment
I don’t know what happened to me. While writing this article, peculiar stories keep arriving, and I am beginning to wonder whether they belong here at all. Fortunately, this section is called “Intellect gives judgment,” so perhaps the first object of judgment should be the author himself. Hah hah hah hah hah.
Oh, good that I am writing; intellect gives judgment, and I am judging myself. Whether I deserve the label intellectual is another question; at least doubt has not abandoned me.
I can at least console myself that, even if I am not an intellectual, I may not be entirely stupid. And that certification was given by Bertrand Russell: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
After reading such incoherent dialogues, some readers may leave at once; however, this is the Symposium without Plato, so you are free to throw a few philosophical stones into the comment box below. Judgment, after all, is one of the disciplines involved in the formation of an intellectual life.
Who Judges Whom?
And then comes the harder question: who judges whom? Even Socrates, standing at the edge of death, leaves the final judgment beyond himself. “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.”
Sertillanges’s argument can be summarized this way: Intellect gives judgment, but judgment is never entirely alone. Character, desire, memory, emotion, bodily condition, and attention all accompany it. The task, then, is not to pretend that judgment is pure, but to notice what may be bending it.
Sertillanges is not preaching intellectual perfection. He recognizes weakness. His demand is not: Become morally flawless before opening a book. That would end scholarship immediately.
Rather:
Notice what within you interferes with seeing clearly.
That is much more humane. You do not have to destroy every human weakness. But you should know when ego enters the argument and envy enters judgment.
At most, I would say that intellect may give judgment, but in the formation of an intellectual life, character quietly influences what judgment is willing to see, admit, and correct.
The body gives endurance
If we summarize Sertillanges’s thought about the body, it looks like this: human beings do not think as disembodied minds.
Thought depends upon bodily processes.
He explicitly notes the roles of sensation, imagination, memory, the nervous system, and physical condition in intellectual activity. Therefore, caring for the body becomes an intellectual duty.
What an idea.
Not bodybuilding.
Not appearance.
Not vanity.
Stewardship of the instrument of thought.
Sertillanges offers practical advice on bodily discipline. Some of his recommendations belong to his period, so we should not treat every medical detail as modern scientific prescription. Yet the governing principles remain striking.
He recommends fresh air and proper ventilation, along with breathing, movement, posture, manual activity, moderate food, and sufficient sleep. Sertillanges also recognizes individual variation: there is no identical formula for everyone.
And notice the philosophy behind all this.
He does not worship the body.
He does not despise it either.
The body is a collaborator
Sertillanges begins with the moral person and ends with the physical person because he wants to abolish the fantasy of the floating brain. Bodily disorder can diminish intellectual work, while bodily discipline can support attention, memory, endurance, and judgment.
So, if I drew his intellectual on the board, I would not draw a giant head.
I would draw a complete human being:
eyes, lungs, heart, stomach, legs, memory, imagination, conscience, desire, and mind—
all sitting together at the same desk.
That is Sertillanges.
The body therefore has its own place in the formation of an intellectual life.
And this is why the body gives endurance. Vocation may give direction, desire may give momentum, attention may give focus, and intellect may give judgment—but the body must carry all of them through time.
Truth gives the measure
To understand Sertillanges’s idea of truth, we have to step back for a moment.
He connects truth with love. Knowledge does not begin only with technique. Somewhere beneath genuine inquiry lies attachment—a love of truth, reality, creation, humanity, God, or whatever one sincerely seeks to understand.
Sertillanges develops an almost Platonic idea:
Truth reveals herself to those who love her.
Not because love magically supplies facts. Rather, because love changes the quality of attention.
If I hate a person, I notice certain things about him. If I envy him, I notice different things. If I admire him unquestioningly, I may overlook others. But if I genuinely wish to understand him, my perception changes again.
So perception is not entirely innocent.
Our character quietly edits what we see.
To seek truth well, then, we must learn to love reality more than our preferred version of reality.
This also helps us distinguish between loving knowledge and loving truth.
A person may accumulate knowledge for prestige, reputation, superiority, argument, exhibition, or domination. Knowledge can become a trophy cabinet. So knowledge itself cannot be the final measure of intellectual life.
We have already seen how direction, preparedness, momentum, focus, judgment, and endurance contribute to the formation of an intellectual life.
But none of these is enough by itself.
Truth Tests the Journey
Direction is not enough.
Vocation may point us somewhere, but truth asks: Is the direction right?
Preparedness is not enough.
Character may prepare us for the journey, but truth asks: Prepared for what?
Momentum is not enough.
Desire may propel us forward, but truth asks: What are you rushing toward?
Focus is not enough.
Attention may concentrate the mind, but truth asks: Are you seeing faithfully?
Judgment is not enough.
Intellect may reach a conclusion, but truth asks: Is it correct—or merely clever?
Endurance is not enough.
The body may carry us for years, but truth asks: What are you enduring for?
That is why truth gives the measure.
It becomes the standard by which the whole intellectual life is tested.
A disciplined person can be disciplined in error.
A focused person can focus on falsehood.
A brilliant person can defend nonsense brilliantly.
A strong body can carry someone very far in the wrong direction.
Truth therefore tests whether every other part of intellectual life remains faithful to reality rather than to ego, preference, ambition, or convenience.
Truth Reveals Relations
And perhaps this is where Sertillanges’s wider view becomes clearest. No truth stands completely alone. A fact points outward. A tree points toward soil, rainfall, sunlight, evolution, atmosphere, and organisms. A human decision points toward psychology, history, culture, and morality. A molecule points toward physics. A poem points toward language, memory, and civilization.
A particular truth is almost like a doorway.
Study it deeply enough, and connections begin to appear.
Think of mercury. Mercury is an element. But follow it far enough and chemistry opens into ecology, health, industry, law, policy, and ethics.
One element opens onto a civilization.
The intellectually awakened person therefore sees not isolated facts, but relations.
And that is why truth is not merely the destination of intellectual life.
It is also the measure by which the journey is judged.
Author’s Reflection
I began this journey by asking what forms an intellectual life. Sertillanges led me through character, desire, attention, judgment, the body, and truth. But somewhere along the way, the questions stopped belonging only to him.
They turned toward me.
What do I seek when I study? What enters my judgment unnoticed? What do I do when reality disagrees with what I prefer? How long can I remain faithful to a vocation when enthusiasm fades and only effort remains?
Perhaps an intellectual life is not built by intelligence alone. It is built slowly, through direction, fidelity, effort, and transmission.
I may never know whether I deserve the word intellectual. That question now seems less important to me.
What matters more is whether I can remain loyal to truth, keep correcting myself, and pass forward whatever little I manage to understand.
That is enough work for one lifetime.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sertillanges presents intellectual life as the formation of the whole person. Intelligence matters, but character, desire, attention, judgment, bodily condition, spiritual orientation, and fidelity to truth all influence how intellectual ability is used.
Curiosity can become scattered or disordered when it moves from one subject to another without direction. Studiousness is an ordered desire for knowledge: curiosity disciplined by purpose, proportion, and sustained attention.
Because thinking does not occur through a detached mind. Sleep, movement, breathing, posture, food, fatigue, and physical condition can affect attention, memory, endurance, and judgment. Caring for the body therefore becomes part of caring for intellectual work.
Direction, focus, intelligence, discipline, and endurance can all be used well or badly. Truth becomes the measure because it tests whether intellectual life remains faithful to reality rather than to ego, preference, ambition, or convenience.
Articles You May Like
If this journey through vocation, character, desire, attention, judgment, the body, and truth has stayed with you, the following articles may open a few neighboring doors.
- Intellectual Growth and Vocation: Before the Mind Can Grow, It Must Answer a Call
A companion article exploring the first chapter of Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life—why intellectual growth needs vocation, purpose, and a reason to serve beyond the self. - Mindset Willpower and Brain Growth: Learning Shapes Thinking
An exploration of how effort, persistence, learning, and the brain’s capacity for change shape intellectual development—and why discipline matters after the initial spark of curiosity. - Humanity and Morality: Is There a Borderline Between Them?
A broader reflection on character, conscience, moral judgment, and the difficult question of what makes a person not only capable, but worthy of trust. - In Praise of Night: The Call of Lullabies and Fairy Tales
A slower journey through darkness, memory, imagination, stories, and the quiet spaces where the mind sometimes sees what daylight and noise conceal.
Intellectual life is not only about what we know. It is also about what we love, what we attend to, how we judge, how we care for the person doing the thinking, and what remains when knowledge finally asks us what we intend to do with it.
Principal Sources
The following works helped shape the perspective behind this story.
- Sertillanges, A. G. (1992). The intellectual life: Its spirit, conditions, methods (M. Ryan, Trans.; J. V. Schall, Foreword). The Catholic University of America Press. (Original work published 1920).
https://www.cuapress.org/search-results/?contributor=a-g-sertillanges - Plato. (n.d.). Apology (B. Jowett, Trans.). The Internet Classics Archive.
https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html - Russell, B. (2009). The triumph of stupidity. In Mortals and others. Taylor & Francis. (Essay originally published in 1933 as “Stupidity Rules” in the San Francisco Examiner.)
https://www.routledge.com/Mortals-and-Others/Russell/p/book/9780415473514 - Coelho, P. (n.d.). The alchemist. HarperCollins.
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-alchemist-paulo-coelho?variant=32122391101474 - Herbert, G. (1651). Jacula prudentum. The saying appears in George Herbert’s proverb tradition: an earlier collection, Outlandish Proverbs, appeared in 1640 and was later expanded as Jacula Prudentum in 1651.
https://curiosmith.com/products/jacula-prudentum-by-george-herbert?_pos=1&_sid=77130d67d&_ss=r - Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.108.3.480 - Porter, T., Elnakouri, A., Meyers, E. A., Shibayama, T., Jayawickreme, E., & Grossmann, I. (2022). Predictors and consequences of intellectual humility. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1, 524–536.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-022-00081-9 - Diekelmann, S., & Born, J. (2010). The memory function of sleep. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11, 114–126.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2762 - Krause, A. J., Ben Simon, E., Mander, B. A., Greer, S. M., Saletin, J. M., Goldstein-Piekarski, A. N., & Walker, M. P. (2017). The sleep-deprived human brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 18, 404–418.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2017.55
Relevant sections were interpreted through narrative and systems lenses rather than being cited exhaustively.