The Project Gutenberg eBook of Miscellanies embracing Nature, addresses, and lectures
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Miscellanies embracing Nature, addresses, and lectures
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Release date: September 19, 2023 [eBook #71683]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1855
Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MISCELLANIES EMBRACING NATURE, ADDRESSES, AND LECTURES ***
NATURE,
ADDRESSES, AND LECTURES.
MISCELLANIES;
EMBRACING
NATURE, ADDRESSES, AND LECTURES.
BY
R. W. EMERSON.
BOSTON:
PHILLIPS, SAMPSON, AND COMPANY.
M.DCCC.LVI.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1855, by
PHILLIPS, SAMPSON, AND COMPANY, in the Clerk’s Office of the
District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:
STEREOTYPED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.
CONTENTS.
NATURE 5
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. AN ORATION BEFORE
THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY, AT CAMBRIDGE,
AUGUST 31, 1837 75
AN ADDRESS TO THE SENIOR CLASS IN DIVINITY
COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, JULY 15, 1838 113
LITERARY ETHICS. AN ADDRESS TO THE LITERARY
SOCIETIES IN DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, JULY 24, 1838 147
THE METHOD OF NATURE. AN ADDRESS TO THE
SOCIETY OF THE ADELPHI, IN WATERVILLE COLLEGE,
MAINE, AUGUST 11, 1841 181
MAN THE REFORMER. A LECTURE READ BEFORE
THE MECHANICS’ APPRENTICES’ LIBRARY ASSOCIATION,
BOSTON, JANUARY 25, 1841 217
INTRODUCTORY LECTURE ON THE TIMES. READ
IN THE MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, DEC. 2, 1841 249
THE CONSERVATIVE. A LECTURE READ IN THE
MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, DECEMBER 9, 1841 283
THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. A LECTURE READ IN
THE MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, JANUARY, 1842 317
THE YOUNG AMERICAN. A LECTURE READ TO
THE MERCANTILE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, IN BOSTON,
FEBRUARY 7, 1844 349
NATURE.
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
INTRODUCTION.
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It
writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations
beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should
not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not
we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a
religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed
for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through
us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to
nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the
living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun
shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are
new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws
and worship.
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must
trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever
curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of
things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic
to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he
apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms
and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great
apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what
end is nature?
All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have
theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach
to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that
religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are
esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most
abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it
will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all
phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable;
as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.
Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the
Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all
which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and
art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name,
NATURE. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I
shall use the word in both senses;--in its common and in its
philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the
inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur.
_Nature_, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man;
space, the air, the river, the leaf. _Art_ is applied to the mixture of
his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a
picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a
little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so
grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the
result.
NATURE.
CHAPTER I.
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as
from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody
is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The
rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and
what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent
with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual
presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they
are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would
men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance
of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these
envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present,
they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred
impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears
a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and
lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never
became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains,
reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the
simplicity of his childhood.
When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most
poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by
manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of
timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming
landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some
twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning
the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a
property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate
all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s
farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not
see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun
illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the
heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward
senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the
spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with
heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of
nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.
Nature says,--he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs,
he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every
hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change
corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from
breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits
equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a
cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles,
at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any
occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect
exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man
casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever
of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within
these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial
festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them
in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There
I feel that nothing can befall me in life,--no disgrace, no calamity,
(leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare
ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite
space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am
nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend
sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be
acquaintances,--master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I
am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I
find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the
tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon,
man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the
suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not
alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of
the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise,
and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a
better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or
doing right.
Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not
reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary
to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always
tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed
perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread
with melancholy to-day. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To
a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in
it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who
has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts
down over less worth in the population.
CHAPTER II.
COMMODITY.
Whoever considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude
of uses that enter as parts into that result. They all admit of being
thrown into one of the following classes: Commodity; Beauty; Language;
and Discipline.
Under the general name of commodity, I rank all those advantages which
our senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a benefit which is
temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul. Yet
although low, it is perfect in its kind, and is the only use of nature
which all men apprehend. The misery of man appears like childish
petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has
been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats
him through the heavens. What angels invented these splendid ornaments,
these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this ocean of water
beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac of lights, this
tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this fourfold
year? Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn serve him. The field is at
once his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, and his bed.
“More servants wait on man
Than he’ll take notice of.”----
Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also
the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each
other’s hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun
evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on
the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the
plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of
the divine charity nourish man.
The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man,
of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for favoring gales,
but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of Æolus’s bag, and carries
the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish
friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a
ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through
the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through the
air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world
changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon! The private poor man
hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the
post-office, and the human race run on his errands; to the book-shop,
and the human race read and write of all that happens, for him; to the
court-house, and nations repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the
road, and the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out the
snow, and cut a path for him.
But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class of uses.
The catalogue is endless, and the examples so obvious, that I shall
leave them to the reader’s reflection, with the general remark, that
this mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther good. A man
is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.
CHAPTER III.
BEAUTY.
A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty.
The ancient Greeks called the world κοσμος, beauty. Such is the
constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye,
that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal,
give us a delight _in and for themselves_; a pleasure arising from
outline, color, motion, and grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye
itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual action of its
structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which
integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, into a well
colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean
and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is round and
symmetrical. And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first
of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make
beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of
infinitude which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay. Even
the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this general grace diffused
over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye,
as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them, as the acorn,
the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of
most birds, the lion’s claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells,
flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm.
For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of Beauty in a
threefold manner.
1. First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight. The
influence of the forms and actions in nature, is so needful to man,
that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of
commodity and beauty. To the body and mind which have been cramped by
noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.
The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the
street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their
eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a
horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
But in other hours, Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and without any
mixture of corporeal benefit. I see the spectacle of morning from the
hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with
emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud
float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a
shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid
transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate
and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a few
and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp
of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and
moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall
be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my
Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.
Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon,
was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. The western clouds
divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints
of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much life and sweetness,
that it was a pain to come within doors. What was it that nature would
say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind the
mill, and which Homer or Shakspeare could not re-form for me in words?
The leafless trees become spires of flame in the sunset, with the blue
east for their back-ground, and the stars of the dead calices of
flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost,
contribute something to the mute music.
The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant
only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the winter
scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial
influences of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has
its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture
which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. The
heavens change every moment, and reflect their glory or gloom on the
plains beneath. The state of the crop in the surrounding farms alters
the expression of the earth from week to week. The succession of native
plants in the pastures and roadsides, which makes the silent clock by
which time tells the summer hours, will make even the divisions of the
day sensible to a keen observer. The tribes of birds and insects, like
the plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and the year has
room for all. By water-courses, the variety is greater. In July, the
blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow
parts of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in
continual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and gold. Indeed
the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.
But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least
part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains,
orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the
like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their
unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and ’tis mere tinsel; it
will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.
The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever
could clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone; ’tis only a mirage
as you look from the windows of diligence.
2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is
essential to its perfection. The high and divine beauty which can be
loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with the
human will. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural
action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the
place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions that
the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational
creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will.
He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate
his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his
constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and will, he
takes up the world into himself. “All those things for which men plough,
build, or sail, obey virtue;” said Sallust. “The winds and waves,” said
Gibbon, “are always on the side of the ablest navigators.” So are the
sun and moon and all the stars of heaven. When a noble act is
done,--perchance in a scene of great natural beauty; when Leonidas and
his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and moon
come each and look at them once in the steep defile of Thermopylæ; when
Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche,
gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his
comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene
to the beauty of the deed? When the bark of Columbus nears the shore of
America;--before it, the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of all
their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of the
Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the living
picture? Does not the New World clothe his form with her palm-groves and
savannahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal in like air,
and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry Vane was dragged up the
Tower-hill, sitting on a sled, to suffer death, as the champion of the
English laws, one of the multitude cried out to him, “You never sate on
so glorious a seat.” Charles II., to intimidate the citizens of London,
caused the patriot Lord Russel to be drawn in an open coach, through the
principal streets of the city, on his way to the scaffold. “But,” his
biographer says, “the multitude imagined they saw liberty and virtue
sitting by his side.” In private places, among sordid objects, an act of
truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple,
the sun as its cradle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man,
only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow
his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur
and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts
be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man
is in unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the visible
sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly in
our memory with the geography and climate of Greece. The visible
heavens and earth sympathize with Jesus. And in common life, whosoever
has seen a person of powerful character and happy genius, will have
remarked how easily he took all things along with him,--the persons, the
opinions, and the day, and nature became ancillary to a man.
3. There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world may
be viewed, namely, as it becomes an object of the intellect. Beside the
relation of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought. The
intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in the
mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and
the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity
of the one, generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is
something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the
alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and
will be followed by the other. Therefore does beauty, which, in relation
to actions, as we have seen, comes unsought, and comes because it is
unsought, remain for the apprehension and pursuit of the intellect; and
then again, in its turn, of the active power. Nothing divine dies. All
good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in
the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.
All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men
even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love
in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it
in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.
The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of
humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is
the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the
works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the
expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms
radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the
ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them
all,--that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is
the entire circuit of natural forms,--the totality of nature; which the
Italians expressed by defining beauty “il piu nell’ uno.” Nothing is
quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single
object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The
poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each
to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his
several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to
produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus
in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the
beauty of her first works.
The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This
element I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the
soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one
expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness,
and beauty, are but different faces of the same All. But beauty in
nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty,
and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand as a part,
and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final cause of
Nature.
CHAPTER IV.
LANGUAGE.
Language is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the
vehicle of thought, and in a simple, double, and threefold degree.
1. Words are signs of natural facts.
2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.
1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to
give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to
give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.
Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if
traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material
appearance. _Right_ means _straight_; _wrong_ means _twisted_. _Spirit_
primarily means _wind_; _transgression_, the crossing of a _line_;
_supercilious_, the _raising of the eyebrow_. We say the _heart_ to
express emotion, the _head_ to denote thought; and _thought_ and
_emotion_ are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated
to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is
made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but
the same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and
savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into
verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.
2. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import,--so
conspicuous a fact in the history of language,--is our least debt to
nature. It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are
emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every
appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that
state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural
appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a
fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is
innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the delicate
affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge
and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us,
is respectively our image of memory and hope.
Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the
flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that
propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is
conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life,
wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love,
Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is
not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men.
And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its
eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That
which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation
to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in
itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language,
as the FATHER.
It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these
analogies, but that they are constant, and pervade nature. These are not
the dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an analogist, and
studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings,
and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither
can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without
man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no
value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human
history, and it is full of life. Whole Floras, all Linnæus’ and Buffon’s
volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but the most trivial of these
facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect,
applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or, in
any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most lively and
agreeable manner. The seed of a plant,--to what affecting analogies in
the nature of man, is that little fruit made use of, in all discourse,
up to the voice of Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed,--“It is sown
a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” The motion of the earth
round its axis, and round the sun, makes the day, and the year. These
are certain amounts of brute light and heat. But is there no intent of
an analogy between man’s life and the seasons? And do the seasons gain
no grandeur or pathos from that analogy? The instincts of the ant are
very unimportant, considered as the ant’s; but the moment a ray of
relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen
to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits,
even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become
sublime.
Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human
thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures.
As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its
infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented
by natural symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original
elements of all languages. It has moreover been observed, that the
idioms of all languages approach each other in passages of the greatest
eloquence and power. And as this is the first language, so is it the
last. This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion
of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never
loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to
the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or back-woodsman, which all
men relish.
A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to
utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his
love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The
corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When
simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the
prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of
power, and of praise,--and duplicity and falsehood take place of
simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the
will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old
words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency
is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the
fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the
understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in
every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make
others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves
clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on
the language created by the primary writers of the country, those,
namely, who hold primarily on nature.
But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to
visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding
certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and
God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar
facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes
itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his
intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or less
luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which
furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and
brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is
spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of
the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working of the Original Cause
through the instruments he has already made.
These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses
for a powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of cities.
We know more from nature than we can at will communicate. Its light
flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its presence. The poet, the
orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their
fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without
heed,--shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or
the broil of politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitation and terror in
national councils,--in the hour of revolution,--these solemn images
shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the
thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble
sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and
shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them
in his infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the
keys of power are put into his hands.
3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of
particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn
informations! Did it need such noble races of creatures, this profusion
of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the
dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech? Whilst we use this grand
cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel that we
have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are like travellers
using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that
it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the
question, whether the characters are not significant of themselves. Have
mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously
give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? The world is
emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature
is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to
those of matter as face to face in a glass. “The visible world and the
relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible.” The axioms
of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, “the whole is greater
than its part;” “reaction is equal to action;” “the smallest weight may
be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated
by time;” and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well
as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and
universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to
technical use.
In like manner, the memorable words of history, and the proverbs of
nations, consist usually of a natural fact, selected as a picture or
parable of a moral truth. Thus; A rolling stone gathers no moss; A bird
in the hand is worth two in the bush; A cripple in the right way, will
beat a racer in the wrong; Make hay while the sun shines; ’Tis hard to
carry a full cup even; Vinegar is the son of wine; The last ounce broke
the camel’s back; Long-lived trees make roots first;--and the like. In
their primary sense these are trivial facts, but we repeat them for the
value of their analogical import. What is true of proverbs, is true of
all fables, parables, and allegories.
This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet,
but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. It
appears to men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate hours we ponder
this miracle, the wise man doubts, if, at all other times, he is not
blind and deaf;
----“Can these things be,
And overcome us like a summer’s cloud,
Without our special wonder?”
for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than
its own, shines through it. It is the standing problem which has
exercised the wonder and the study of every fine genius since the world
began; from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins, to that of
Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits
the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet comes
by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There seems to be a
necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and
night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preëxist in
necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of
preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last
issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the
circumference of the invisible world. “Material objects,” said a French
philosopher, “are necessarily kinds of _scoriæ_ of the substantial
thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation
to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a
spiritual and moral side.”
This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images of “garment,” “scoriæ,”
“mirror,” &c., may stimulate the fancy, we must summon the aid of
subtler and more vital expositors to make it plain. “Every scripture is
to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,”--is the
fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with nature, the love of
truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By
degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects
of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form
significant of its hidden life and final cause.
A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the view now suggested, we
contemplate the fearful extent and multitude of objects; since “every
object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul.” That which was
unconscious truth, becomes, when interpreted and defined in an object, a
part of the domain of knowledge,--a new weapon in the magazine of
power.
CHAPTER V.
DISCIPLINE.
In view of the significance of nature, we arrive at once at a new fact,
that nature is a discipline. This use of the world includes the
preceding uses, as parts of itself.
Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the
mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning
is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every
property of matter is a school for the understanding,--its solidity or
resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility.
The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment
and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason
transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving
the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.
1. Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths.
Our dealing with sensible objects is a constant exercise in the
necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of order, of being and
seeming, of progressive arrangement; of assent from particular to
general; of combination to one end of manifold forces. Proportioned to
the importance of the organ to be formed, is the extreme care with which
its tuition is provided,--a care pretermitted in no single case. What
tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form
the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances,
inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what
disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest,--and all to form the
Hand of the mind;--to instruct us that “good thoughts are no better than
good dreams, unless they be executed!”
The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems of
debt and credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the
orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate;--debt, which consumes so
much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares
that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be forgone, and
is needed most by those who suffer from it most. Moreover, property,
which has been well compared to snow,--“if it fall level to-day, it will
be blown into drifts to-morrow,”--is the surface action of internal
machinery, like the index on the face of a clock. Whilst now it is the
gymnastics of the understanding, it is having in the foresight of the
spirit, experience in profounder laws.
The whole character and fortune of the individual are affected by the
least inequalities in the culture of the understanding; for example, in
the perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and therefore Time,
that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered
and individual. A bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can
do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool
to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten. The
wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of
creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range
in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. What is not
good they call the worst, and what is not hateful, they call the best.
In like manner, what good heed nature forms in us! She pardons no
mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.
The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoölogy, (those first steps
which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature’s
dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure
and useful results.
How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the laws
of physics! What noble emotions dilate the mortal as he enters into the
counsels of the creation, and feels by knowledge the privilege to BE!
His insight refines him. The beauty of nature shines in his own breast.
Man is greater than he can see this, and the universe less, because Time
and Space relations vanish as laws are known.
Here again we are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to
be explored. “What we know, is a point to what we do not know.” Open any
recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning
Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge
whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted.
Passing by many particulars of the discipline of nature, we must not
omit to specify two.
The exercise of the Will or the lesson of power is taught in every
event. From the child’s successive possession of his several senses up
to the hour when he saith, “Thy will be done!” he is learning the
secret, that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events,
but great classes, nay the whole series of events, and so conform all
facts to his character. Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to
serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which
the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material
which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it
up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious
words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command. One
after another, his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all
things, until the world becomes, at last, only a realized will,--the
double of the man.
2. Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect
the conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes
have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature
glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest
heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of
life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in
the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine;
every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or
thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten
Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all
her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest,
David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This ethical
character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the
end for which it was made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any
member or part, this is its public and universal function, and is never
omitted. Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing
has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior
service. In God, every end is converted into a new means. Thus the use
of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the
mind an education in the doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good
only so far as it serves; that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the
production of an end, is essential to any being. The first and gross
manifestation of this truth, is our inevitable and hated training in
values and wants, in corn and meat.
It has already been illustrated, that every natural process is a version
of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and
radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every
substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we
deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the
wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,--it is a sacred
emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow
of winter overtakes in the fields. But the sailor, the shepherd, the
miner, the merchant, in their several resorts, have each an experience
precisely parallel, and leading to the same conclusion: because all
organizations are radically alike. Nor can it be doubted that this moral
sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and impregnates
the waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The
moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth
which it illustrates to him. Who can estimate this? Who can guess how
much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? how much
tranquillity has been reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose
unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and
leave no wrinkle or stain? how much industry and providence and
affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes? What a searching
preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of Health!
Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature,--the unity in
variety,--which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things
make an identical impression. Xenophanes complained in his old age,
that, look where he would, all things hastened back to Unity. He was
weary of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety of forms. The
fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a
moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection
of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the
likeness of the world.
Not only resemblances exist in things whose analogy is obvious, as when
we detect the type of the human hand in the flipper of the fossil
saurus, but also in objects wherein there is great superficial
unlikeness. Thus architecture is called “frozen music,” by De Stael and
Goethe. Vitruvius thought an architect should be a musician. “A Gothic
church,” said Coleridge, “is a petrified religion.” Michael Angelo
maintained, that, to an architect, a knowledge of anatomy is essential.
In Hayden’s oratories, the notes present to the imagination not only
motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also;
as the green grass. The law of harmonic sounds reappears in the harmonic
colors. The granite is differenced in its laws only by the more or less
of heat, from the river that wears it away. The river, as it flows,
resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light which
traverses it with more subtile currents; the light resembles the heat
which rides with it through Space. Each creature is only a modification
of the other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and
their radical law is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of
one organization, holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this
Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of
nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For, it pervades
Thought also. Every universal truth which we express in words, implies
or supposes every other truth. _Omne verum vero consonat._ It is like a
great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; which,
however, may be drawn, and comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth
is the absolute Ens seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.
The central Unity is still more conspicuous in actions. Words are finite
organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is
in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it. An action is the
perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the
eye, and to be related to all nature. “The wise man, in doing one thing,
does all; or, in the one thing he does rightly, he sees the likeness of
all which is done rightly.”
Words and actions are not the attributes of brute nature. They
introduce us to the human form, of which all other organizations appear
to be degradations. When this appears among so many that surround it,
the spirit prefers it to all others. It says, ‘From such as this, have I
drawn joy and knowledge; in such as this, have I found and beheld
myself; I will speak to it; it can speak again; it can yield me thought
already formed and alive.’ In fact, the eye,--the mind,--is always
accompanied by these forms, male and female; and these are incomparably
the richest informations of the power and order that lie at the heart of
things. Unfortunately, every one of them bears the marks as of some
injury; is marred and superficially defective. Nevertheless, far
different from the deaf and dumb nature around them, these all rest like
fountain-pipes on the unfathomed sea of thought and virtue whereto they
alone, of all organizations, are the entrances.
It were a pleasant inquiry to follow into detail their ministry to our
education, but where would it stop? We are associated in adolescent and
adult life with some friends, who, like skies and waters, are
coextensive with our idea; who, answering each to a certain affection of
the soul, satisfy our desire on that side; whom we lack power to put at
such focal distance from us, that we can mend or even analyze them. We
cannot choose but love them. When much intercourse with a friend has
supplied us with a standard of excellence, and has increased our respect
for the resources of God who thus sends a real person to outgo our
ideal; when he has, moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst
his character retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in the
mind into solid and sweet wisdom,--it is a sign to us that his office is
closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.
CHAPTER VI.
IDEALISM.
Thus is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable meaning of the
world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil, in every object of sense. To
this one end of Discipline, all parts of nature conspire.
A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, whether this end be not the
Final Cause of the Universe; and whether nature outwardly exists. It is
a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World, that God will
teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of
congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house
and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report
of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond
with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up
there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the
soul? The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the
same, what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds
revolve and intermingle without number or end,--deep yawning under deep,
and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space,--or, whether,
without relations of time and space, the same appearances are inscribed
in the constant faith of man? Whether nature enjoy a substantial
existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike
useful and alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me,
so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses.
The frivolous make themselves merry with the Ideal theory, as if its
consequences were burlesque; as if it affected the stability of nature.
It surely does not. God never jests with us, and will not compromise the
end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession. Any
distrust of the permanence of laws, would paralyze the faculties of man.
Their permanence is sacredly respected, and his faith therein is
perfect. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of
the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but
like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of this structure,
that, so long as the active powers predominate over the reflective, we
resist with indignation any hint that nature is more short-lived or
mutable than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the carpenter, the
tollman, are much displeased at the intimation.
But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws, the
question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It is
the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith
in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote; but
to lead us to regard nature as phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute
necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an
effect.
To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of
instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view,
man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they
never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars this faith.
The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses,
which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature
aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher agency intervened, the
animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored
surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at
once added, grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and
affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If
the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces
become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen
through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of
the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its
God.
Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 1. Our first
institution in the Ideal philosophy is a hint from nature herself.
Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain
mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position apprizes us
of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a
moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The
last change in our point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial air.
A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach and traverse his
own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the
women,--talking, running, bartering, fighting,--the earnest mechanic,
the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized at once, or,
at least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and seen as
apparent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are suggested by
seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the
railroad car! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make a very slight change
in the point of vision,) please us most. In a camera obscura, the
butcher’s cart, and the figure of one of our own family amuse us. So a
portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the eyes upside down,
by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the
picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!
In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between
the observer and the spectacle,--between man and nature. Hence arises a
pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt
from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprized, that, whilst the
world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable.
2. In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same pleasure. By a few
strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the
city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we know them, but
only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the
land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary
thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion,
he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual man conforms thoughts to
things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature
as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being
thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexible; he
invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the
Reason. The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason
makes of the material world. Shakspeare possesses the power of
subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets.
His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand,
and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his
mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest
sundered things are brought together, by a subtile spiritual connection.
We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all
objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his
sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to
be the _shadow_ of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his
_chest_; the suspicion she has awakened, is her _ornament_;
The ornament of beauty is Suspect,
A crow which flies in heaven’s sweetest air.
His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, as he speaks, to a
city, or a state.
No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the brow of thralling discontent;
It fears not policy, that heretic,
That works on leases of short numbered hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic.
In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem to him recent and
transitory. The freshness of youth and love dazzles him with its
resemblance to morning.
Take those lips away
Which so sweetly were forsworn:
And those eyes,--the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.
The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say, in passing, it would not
be easy to match in literature.
This transfiguration which all material objects undergo through the
passion of the poet,--this power which he exerts to dwarf the great, to
magnify the small,--might be illustrated by a thousand examples from his
Plays. I have before me the Tempest, and will cite only these few lines.
ARIEL. The strong based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar.
Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, and his
companions;
A solemn air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains
Now useless, boiled within thy skull.
Again;
The charm dissolves apace,
And, as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.
Their understanding
Begins to swell: and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shores
That now lie foul and muddy.
The perception of real affinities between events, (that is to say, of
_ideal_ affinities, for those only are real,) enables the poet thus to
make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and
to assert the predominance of the soul.
3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he
differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty
as his main end; the other Truth. But the philosopher, not less than the
poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of things to the empire
of thought. “The problem of philosophy,” according to Plato, “is, for
all that exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and
absolute.” It proceeds on the faith that a law determines all phenomena,
which being known, the phenomena can be predicted. That law, when in the
mind, is an idea. Its beauty is infinite. The true philosopher and the
true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is
beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato’s or
Aristotle’s definitions, strictly like that of the Antigone of
Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted
to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and
dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the
vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in
their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is
attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of
particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.
Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual. The
astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and
disdain the results of observation. The sublime remark of Euler on his
law of arches, “This will be found contrary to all experience, yet is
true;” had already transferred nature into the mind, and left matter
like an outcast corpse.
4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of
the existence of matter. Turgot said, “He that has never doubted the
existence of matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical
inquiries.” It fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated
natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their presence, we feel that the
outward circumstance is a dream and a shade. Whilst we wait in this
Olympus of gods, we think of nature as an appendix to the soul. We
ascend into their region, and know that these are the thoughts of the
Supreme Being. “These are they who were set up from everlasting, from
the beginning, or ever the earth was. When he prepared the heavens, they
were there; when he established the clouds above, when he strengthened
the fountains of the deep. Then they were by him, as one brought up with
him. Of them took he counsel.”
Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science, they are
accessible to few men. Yet all men are capable of being raised by piety
or by passion, into their region. And no man touches these divine
natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine. Like a new
soul, they renew the body. We become physically nimble and lightsome; we
tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will never be
so. No man fears age or misfortune or death, in their serene company,
for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we behold
unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference
between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the
absolute. As it were, for the first time, _we exist_. We become
immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter;
that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have no
affinity.
5. Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called,--the
practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life,--have an
analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading nature and
suggesting its dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein;
that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the
other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does
not. They are one to our present design. They both put nature under
foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, “The things that are
seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal.” It puts an
affront upon nature. It does that for the unschooled, which philosophy
does for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform language that may be heard in
the churches of the most ignorant sects, is,--“Contemn the unsubstantial
shows of the world; they are vanities, dreams, shadows, unrealities;
seek the realities of religion.” The devotee flouts nature. Some
theosophists have arrived at a certain hostility and indignation towards
matter, as the Manichean and Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any
looking back to these flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed of his
body. In short, they might all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said
of external beauty, “it is the frail and weary weed, in which God
dresses the soul, which he has called into time.”
It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and
religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the
external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in expanding too
curiously the particulars of the general proposition, that all culture
tends to imbue us with idealism. I have no hostility to nature, but a
child’s love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and
melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my
beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to indicate the
true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man, all
right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of
human life, that is, of man’s connection with nature. Culture inverts
the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent,
which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call
visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the external world. The
belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture, this
faith will as surely arise on the mind as did the first.
The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that
it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to
the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative and
practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For, seen in the light
of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it
to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle
of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion,
not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged
creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant
eternity, for the contemplation of the soul. Therefore the soul holds
itself off from a too trivial and microscopic study of the universal
tablet. It respects the end too much, to immerse itself in the means. It
sees something more important in Christianity, than the scandals of
ecclesiastical history, or the niceties of criticism; and, very
incurious concerning persons or miracles, and not at all disturbed by
chasms of historical evidence, it accepts from God the phenomenon, as it
finds it, as the pure and awful form of religion in the world. It is not
hot and passionate at the appearance of what it calls its own good or
bad fortune, at the union or opposition of other persons. No man is its
enemy. It accepts whatsoever befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a
watcher more than a doer, and it is a doer, only that it may the better
watch.
CHAPTER VII.
SPIRIT.
It is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should
contain somewhat progressive. Uses that are exhausted or that may be,
and facts that end in the statement, cannot be all that is true of this
brave lodging wherein man is harbored, and wherein all his faculties
find appropriate and endless exercise. And all the uses of nature admit
of being summed in one, which yields the activity of man an infinite
scope. Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things,
it is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin. It always speaks
of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a
great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us.
The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands
with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is
he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.
Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most,
will say least. We can foresee God in the coarse, and, as it were,
distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe
himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as
fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in propositions,
but when man has worshipped him intellectually, the noblest ministry of
nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through
which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead
back the individual to it.
When we consider Spirit, we see that the views already presented do not
include the whole circumference of man. We must add some related
thoughts.
Three problems are put by nature to the mind; What is matter? Whence is
it? and Whereto? The first of these questions only, the ideal theory
answers. Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a substance.
Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of
our own being, and the evidence of the world’s being. The one is
perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is a part of
the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from which we may
presently awake to the glories and certainties of day. Idealism is a
hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of
carpentry and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the existence of matter,
it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. It leaves God out of me.
It leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander
without end. Then the heart resists it, because it balks the affections
in denying substantive being to men and women. Nature is so pervaded
with human life, that there is something of humanity in all, and in
every particular. But this theory makes nature foreign to me, and does
not account for that consanguinity which we acknowledge to it.
Let it stand, then, in the present state of our knowledge, merely as a
useful introductory hypothesis, serving to apprize us of the eternal
distinction between the soul and the world.
But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to inquire,
Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the
recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the
soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or
love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that
for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit
creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one
and not compound, it does not act upon us from without, that is, in
space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that
spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us,
but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new
branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the
earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by
unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power. Who
can set bounds to the possibilities of man? Once inhale the upper air,
being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and
we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is
himself the creator in the finite. This view, which admonishes me where
the sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to virtue as to
“The golden key
Which opes the palace of eternity,”
carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it
animates me to create my own world through the purification of my soul.
The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a
remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the
unconscious. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It
is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its serene order is
inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the
divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure.
As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident.
We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not
understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us;
the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few
plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the
landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him? Yet
this may show us what discord is between man and nature, for you cannot
freely admire a noble landscape, if laborers are digging in the field
hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight, until he is
out of the sight of men.
CHAPTER VIII.
PROSPECTS.
In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things,
the highest reason is always the truest. That which seems faintly
possible--it is so refined, is often faint and dim because it is deepest
seated in the mind among the eternal verities. Empirical science is apt
to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and
processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the
whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who
lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there
remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not
to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of
known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit,
by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive
that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than
preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than
an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into
the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.
For, the problems to be solved are precisely those which the
physiologist and the naturalist omit to state. It is not so pertinent to
man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to know
whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his constitution, which
evermore separates and classifies things, endeavoring to reduce the most
diverse to one form. When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my
purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata,
than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of
unity. I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details, so long as there is
no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon
the _metaphysics_ of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the
relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to the
mind, and build science upon ideas. In a cabinet of natural history, we
become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard
to the most unwieldly and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.
The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of
buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York
Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures
are imitations also,--faint copies of an invisible archetype. Nor has
science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks that
wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which
he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because
he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great
and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color,
fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or
analysis lay open. A perception of this mystery inspires the muse of
George Herbert, the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The
following lines are part of his little poem on Man.
“Man is all symmetry,
Full of proportions, one limb to another,
And to all the world besides.
Each part may call the farthest, brother;
For head with foot hath private amity,
And both with moons and tides.
“Nothing hath got so far
But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;
His eyes dismount the highest star;
He is in little all the sphere.
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
Find their acquaintance there.
“For us, the winds do blow,
The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;
Nothing we see, but means our good,
As our delight, or as our treasure;
The whole is either our cupboard of food,
Or cabinet of pleasure.
“The stars have us to bed:
Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws.
Music and light attend our head.
All things unto our flesh are kind,
In their descent and being; to our mind,
In their ascent and cause.
“More servants wait on man
Than he’ll take notice of. In every path,
He treads down that which doth befriend him
When sickness makes him pale and wan.
Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him.”
The perception of this class of truths makes the attraction which draws
men to science, but the end is lost sight of in attention to the means.
In view of this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence of Plato,
that “poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.” Every surmise
and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we
learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences, which contain
glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no one valuable
suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and
composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of
thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid
spirit.
I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and
nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have always
been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both
history and prophecy.
‘The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the
element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of
events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of
the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries
are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation.
‘We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own and
disown our relation to it, by turns. We are, like Nebuchadnezzar,
dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can
set limits to the remedial force of spirit?
‘A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer,
and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations
should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and
infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of
fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.
‘Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by
spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him
sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The
laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externalized themselves
into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for
himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the
veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees, that the structure
still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted
him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly
his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower
of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at
himself and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt
him and it. He perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he
have elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not
conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is
Instinct.’ Thus my Orphic poet sang.
At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the
world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a
penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and
whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted,
and he is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power over it,
is through the understanding; as by manure; the economic use of fire,
wind, water, and the mariner’s needle; steam, coal, chemical
agriculture; the repairs of the human body by the dentist and the
surgeon. This is such a resumption of power, as if a banished king
should buy his territories inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once
into his throne. Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are not wanting
gleams of a better light,--occasional examples of the action of man upon
nature with his entire force,--with reason as well as understanding.
Such examples are; the traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity
of all nations; the history of Jesus Christ; the achievements of a
principle, as in religious and political revolutions, and in the
abolition of the Slave-trade; the miracles of enthusiasm, as those
reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers; many obscure and yet
contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal Magnetism;
prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children. These are
examples of Reason’s momentary grasp of the sceptre; the exertions of a
power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous
in-streaming causing power. The difference between the actual and the
ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that
the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, _vespertina cognitio_, but
that of God is a morning knowledge, _matutina cognitio_.
The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is
solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see
when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not
coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent
but opake. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in
heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a
naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as
much its demand, as perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without
the other. In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and
devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep. But in actual life, the
marriage is not celebrated. There are innocent men who worship God after
the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet
extended to the use of all their faculties. And there are patient
naturalists, but they freeze their subject under the wintry light of the
understanding. Is not prayer also a study of truth,--a sally of the soul
into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily, without learning
something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object
from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at
the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections,
then will God go forth anew into the creation.
It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for
objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the
common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman?
What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem
unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform
it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the fact is seen
under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We
behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true
poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to
our own door. You also are a man. Man and woman, and their social life,
poverty, labor, sleep, fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none
of these things is superficial, but that each phenomenon has its roots
in the faculties and affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract
question occupies your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to be
solved by your hands. It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to compare,
point by point, especially at remarkable crises in life, our daily
history, with the rise and progress of ideas in the mind.
So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the
endless inquiry of the intellect,--What is truth? and of the
affections,--What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated
Will. Then shall come to pass what my poet said; ‘Nature is not fixed
but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness
of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid, it is
volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond
its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the
world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are,
that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Cæsar could, you have
and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Cæsar called his
house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler’s trade; a hundred acres
of ploughed land; or a scholar’s garret. Yet line for line and point for
point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names.
Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to
the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A
correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.
So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests,
madhouses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no
more seen. The sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up, and
the wind exhale. As when the summer comes from the south; the snow-banks
melt, and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so shall the
advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, and carry with it
the beauty it visits, and the song which enchants it; it shall draw
beautiful faces, warm hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts, around
its way, until evil is no more seen. The kingdom of man over nature,
which cometh not with observation,--a dominion such as now is beyond his
dream of God,--he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man
feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.’
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.
AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY, AT CAMBRIDGE,
AUGUST 31, 1837.
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,
I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary
is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for
games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies,
and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy,
like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our
contemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our
holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of
letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such,
it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the
time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be, something else;
when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its
iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with
something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of
dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands,
draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life,
cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events,
actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can
doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the
constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers
announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?
In this hope, I accept the topic which not only usage, but the nature of
our association, seem to prescribe to this day,--the AMERICAN SCHOLAR.
Year by year, we come up hither to read one more chapter of his
biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on
his character, and his hopes.
It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an
unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into
men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was
divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.
The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One
Man,--present to all particular men only partially, or through one
faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man.
Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man
is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the
_divided_ or social state, these functions are parcelled out to
individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst
each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to
possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all
the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this
fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so
minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and
cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members
have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking
monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter,
who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by
any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his
cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on
the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work,
but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to
dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the
mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of the ship.
In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated
intellect. In the right state, he is, _Man Thinking_. In the degenerate
state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker,
or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.
In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office is
contained. Him nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory
pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites. Is not,
indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the
student’s behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true
master? But the old oracle said, ‘All things have two handles: beware of
the wrong one.’ In life, too often, the scholar errs with mankind and
forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and consider him
in reference to the main influences he receives.
I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon
the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset,
night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every
day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is
he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value
in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is
never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but
always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his
own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find,--so
entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system
shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without
circumference,--in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to
render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the
young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it
finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three,
then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying
instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies,
discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote
things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently learns, that,
since the dawn of history, there has been a constant accumulation and
classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving
that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law
which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that
geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of
planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method
throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy,
identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before
each refractory fact; one after another, reduces all strange
constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on
for ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of
nature, by insight.
Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is
suggested, that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is
flower; relation, sympathy, stiring in every vein. And what is that
root? Is not that the soul of his soul?--A thought too bold,--a dream
too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of
more earthly natures,--when he has learned to worship the soul, and to
see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings
of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever expanding
knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see, that nature is the
opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and
one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the
laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his
attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own
mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, “Know
thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become at last one
maxim.
II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, the
mind of the Past,--in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of
institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the
influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth,--learn the
amount of this influence more conveniently,--by considering their value
alone.
The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into
him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of
his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out
from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from
him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him,
poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and
it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in
proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it
soar, so long does it sing.
Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of
transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the
distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be.
But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a
perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the
conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book
of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a
remote posterity, as to cotemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each
age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation
for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.
Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the
act of creation,--the act of thought,--is transferred to the record. The
poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is
divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is
settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship
of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a
tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open
to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received
this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged.
Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by
Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out
from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young
men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views,
which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that
Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they
wrote these books.
Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the
book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature
and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with
the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the
emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What
is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect?
They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than
to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a
satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is
the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains
within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn.
The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In
this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a
favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is
progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution
of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say
they,--let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not
forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his
forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever
talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is
not his;--cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are
creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words;
manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority,
but springing spontaneous from the mind’s own sense of good and fair.
On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from
another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without
periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice
is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by
over-influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The
English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.
Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly
subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books
are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the
hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their
readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they
must,--when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining,--we
repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps
to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The
Arabian proverb says, “A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh
fruitful.”
It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best
books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and
the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of
Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy,--with a
pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of
all _time_ from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of
our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three
hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which
I also had wellnigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence
afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we
should suppose some preëstablished harmony, some foresight of souls that
were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like
the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young
grub they shall never see.
I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of
instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that, as the human body
can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth
of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and
heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information than by the
printed page. I only would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that
diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He
that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the
wealth of the Indies.” There is then creative reading as well as
creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the
page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.
Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as
broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the
seer’s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so
is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning
will read, in his Plato or Shakspeare, only that least part,--only the
authentic utterances of the oracle;--all the rest he rejects, were it
never so many times Plato’s and Shakspeare’s.
Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise
man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading.
Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach
elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill,
but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to
their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts
of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which
apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary
foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least
sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will
recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.
III. There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should be a
recluse, a valetudinarian,--as unfit for any handiwork or public labor,
as a penknife for an axe. The so-called ‘practical men’ sneer at
speculative men, as if, because they speculate or _see_, they could do
nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy,--who are always, more
universally than any other class, the scholars of their day,--are
addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they
do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often
virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, there are advocates for their
celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just
and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential.
Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into
truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we
cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no
scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition
through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is
action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose
words are loaded with life, and whose not.
The world,--this shadow of the soul, or _other me_, lies wide around.
Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me
acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I
grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to
suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss
be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its fear; I
dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of
life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I
vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion.
I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his
nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and
rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are
instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every
opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power.
It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid
products. A strange process too, this, by which experience is converted
into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The
manufacture goes forward at all hours.
The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now matters of
calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so
with our recent actions,--with the business which we now have in hand.
On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet
circulate through it. We no more feel or know it, than we feel the feet,
or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of
life,--remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some
contemplative hour, it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit,
to become a thought of the mind. Instantly, it is raised, transfigured;
the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an object of
beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the
impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly,
it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation,
the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom.
So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not,
sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by
soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, school and
playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little
maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky,
are gone already; friend and relative, profession and party, town and
country, nation and world, must also soar and sing.
Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has
the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe
of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger and
pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust one vein
of thought, much like those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood by
carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe,
went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and discovered that they
had whittled up the last of their pine-trees. Authors we have, in
numbers, who have written out their vein, and who, moved by a
commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper
into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish their
merchantable stock.
If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of
action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors;
in town,--in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank
intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end
of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and
embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much
he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech.
Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and
copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar.
Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the
workyard made.
But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than
books, is, that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in
nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath;
in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night;
in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and
every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity,--these “fits of
easy transmission and reflection,” as Newton called them, are the law of
nature because they are the law of spirit.
The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other. When
the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints,
when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness,--he
has always the resource _to live_. Character is higher than intellect.
Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats
to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong
to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truth? He can still
fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act.
Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his
affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those ‘far
from fame,’ who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his
constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be
measured by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him, that
the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the
sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in
seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those, on whom systems of
education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to
destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage
nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and
Skakspeare.
I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the
dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in
the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And
labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this
limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity
sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.
* * * * *
I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books,
and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.
They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in
self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to
guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow,
unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in
their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of
all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But
he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars
of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such,--watching
days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old
records;--must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period
of his preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness
in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him
aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for
the dead. Worse yet, he must accept,--how often! poverty and solitude.
For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the
fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of
making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart,
the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and
tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the
state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and
especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what
offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of
human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations,
and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the
world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. He is to resist the vulgar
prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and
communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and
the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all
emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the
world of actions,--these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new
verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men
and events of to-day,--this he shall hear and promulgate.
These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in
himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows
the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great
decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or
man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if
all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole
question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in
listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun
is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to
be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction,
let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of
neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time,--happy enough, if
he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly.
Succcess treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that
prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in
going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the
secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his
private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he
speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The
poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and
recording them, is found to have recorded that, which men in crowded
cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the
fitness of his frank confessions,--his want of knowledge of the persons
he addresses,--until he finds that he is the compliment of his
hearers;--that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their
own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest
presentiment, to his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most
public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part
of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.
In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar
be,--free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, “without
any hindrance that does not arise out of his own constitution.” Brave;
for fear is a thing, which a scholar by his very function puts behind
him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his
tranquillity, amid, dangerous times, arise from the presumption, that,
like children and women, his is a protected class; or if he seek a
temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed
questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes,
peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep
his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse.
Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look into its eye and search
its nature, inspect its origin,--see the whelping of this lion,--which
lies no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect
comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet
on the other side, and can henceforth defy it, and pass on superior. The
world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what
stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by
sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have
already dealt it its mortal blow.
Yes, we are the cowed,--we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion
that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long
time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it
is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and
sin, it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in
proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows
before him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who can alter
matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the
world who give the color of their present thought to all nature and all
art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the
matter, that this thing which they do, is the apple which the ages have
desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest.
The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is
the head of the table. Linnæus makes botany the most alluring of
studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy,
chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his, who works in it
with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him
whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic
follow the moon.
For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed,--darker
than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my
audience in stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground
of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man
has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light,
that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no
account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day are bugs, are spawn,
and are called ‘the mass’ and ‘the herd.’ In a century, in a millennium,
one or two men; that is to say,--one or two approximations to the right
state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their
own green and crude being,--ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so
_that_ may attain to its full stature. What a testimony,--full of
grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by
the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his
chief. The poor and the low find some amends to their immense moral
capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social inferiority.
They are content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great
person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which
it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun
themselves in the great man’s light, and feel it to be their own
element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod selves upon
the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood to
make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and conquer. He
lives for us, and we live in him.
Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power
because it is as good as money,--the “spoils,” so called, “of office.”
And why not? for they aspire to the highest, and this, in their
sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them, and they shall quit
the false good, and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks
and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication
of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor,
for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strown
along the ground. The private life of one man shall be a more
illustrious monarchy,--more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and
serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For
a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men.
Each philosopher, each bard, each actor, has only done for me, as by a
delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The books which once we
valued more than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is
that but saying, that we have come up with the point of view which the
universal mind took through the eyes of one scribe; we have been that
man, and have passed on. First, one; then, another; we drain all
cisterns, and, waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better
and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever.
The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person, who shall set a barrier
on any one side to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one
central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the
capes of Sicily; and, now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the
towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a
thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.
* * * * *
But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the Scholar.
I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say, of nearer
reference to the time and to this country.
Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which
predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the
genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or
Philosophical age. With the views I have intimated of the oneness or the
identity of the mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell on
these differences. In fact, I believe each individual passes through all
three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective. I
deny not, however, that a revolution in the leading idea may be
distinctly enough traced.
Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil?
We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we
cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure
consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is
infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness,--
“Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
It is so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be
blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth
dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class, as a mere
announcement of the fact, that they find themselves not in the state of
mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy
dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there is any
period one would desire to be born in,--is it not the age of Revolution;
when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being
compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope;
when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich
possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good
one, if we but know what to do with it.
I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they
glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science,
through church and state.
One of these signs is the fact, that the same movement which effected
the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state, assumed
in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect. Instead of the
sublime and beautiful; the near, the low, the common, was explored and
poetized. That, which had been negligently trodden under foot by those
who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into
far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts.
The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of
the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time.
It is a great stride. It is a sign,--is it not? of new vigor, when the
extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the
hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic;
what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provençal
minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the
familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the
antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The
meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the
news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the
body;--show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the
sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it
does lurk, in these surburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every
trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an
eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the leger, referred to the
like cause by which light undulates and poets sing;--and the world lies
no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order;
there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and
animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.
This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, and, in a
newer time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This idea they have
differently followed and with various success. In contrast with their
writing, the style of Pope, of Johnson, of Gibbon, looks cold and
pedantic. This writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that
things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The
near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to
all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in
discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns,
has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
There is one man of genius, who has done much for this philosophy of
life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated;--I mean
Emanuel Swedenborg. The most imaginative of men, yet writing with the
precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely
philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such an
attempt, of course, must have difficulty, which no genius could
surmount. But he saw and showed the connection between nature and the
affections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual character
of the visible, audible, tangible world. Especially did his shade-loving
muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature; he showed the
mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul material forms, and
has given in epical parables a theory of insanity, of beasts, of unclean
and fearful things.
Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political
movement, is, the new importance given to the single person. Every thing
that tends to insulate the individual,--to surround him with barriers of
natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man
shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state;--tends
to true union as well as greatness. “I learned,” said the melancholy
Pestalozzi, “that no man in God’s wide earth is either willing or able
to help any other man.” Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar
is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time,
all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must
be an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than
another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the
man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet
how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason;
it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and
Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by
all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American
Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The
spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid,
imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe
thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already
the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low
objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and
the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon
our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars
of God, find the earth below not in unison with these,--but are
hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which
business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust,--some
of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and
thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the
career, do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself
indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come
round to him. Patience,--patience;--with the shades of all the good and
great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite
life; and for work, the study and the communication of principles, the
making those instincts prevalent, the conversation of the world. Is it
not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit;--not to be
reckoned one character;--not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man
was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or
the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our
opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so,
brothers and friends,--please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on
our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own
minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for
doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man
shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of
men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself
inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED BEFORE THE SENIOR CLASS IN DIVINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, SUNDAY
EVENING, JULY 15, 1838.
ADDRESS.
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of
life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire
and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet
with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night
brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the
transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man
under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night
bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the
crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily.
The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the
never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward, has not
yielded yet one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the
perfection of this world, in which our senses converse. How wide; how
rich; what invitation from every property it gives to every faculty of
man! In its fruitful soils; in its navigable sea; in its mountains of
metal and stone; in its forests of all woods; in its animals; in its
chemical ingredients; in the powers and path of light, heat, attraction,
and life, it is well worth the pith and heart of great men to subdue and
enjoy it. The planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the astronomers,
the builders of cities, and the captains, history delights to honor.
But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the
universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at
once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and
What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never
to be quenched. Behold these outrunning laws, which our imperfect
apprehension can see tend this way and that, but not come full circle.
Behold these infinite relations, so like, so unlike; many, yet one. I
would study, I would know, I would admire forever. These works of
thought have been the entertainments of the human spirit in all ages.
A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his
heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in
what is above him. He learns that his being is without bound; that, to
the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and
weakness. That which he venerates is still his own, though he has not
realized it yet. _He ought._ He knows the sense of that grand word,
though his analysis fails to render account of it. When in innocency, or
when by intellectual perception, he attains to say,--‘I love the Right;
Truth is beautiful within and without forevermore. Virtue, I am thine:
save me: use me: thee will I serve, day and night, in great, in small,
that I may be not virtuous, but virtue;’--then is the end of the
creation answered, and God is well pleased.
The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of
certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play,
covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish. The
child amidst his baubles, is learning the action of light, motion,
gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human life, love, fear,
justice, appetite, man, and God, interact. These laws refuse to be
adequately stated. They will not be written out on paper, or spoken by
the tongue. They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly
in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our own remorse. The
moral traits which are all globed into every virtuous act and
thought,--in speech, we must sever, and describe or suggest by painful
enumeration of many particulars. Yet, as this sentiment is the essence
of all religion, let me guide your eye to the precise objects of the
sentiment, by an enumeration of some of those classes of facts in which
this element is conspicuous.
The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of
the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of
time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus; in the soul
of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He
who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is
by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts
on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the
safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into
that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself,
and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. A man in the view of
absolute goodness, adores, with total humanity. Every step so downward,
is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.
See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs,
correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with
thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is, at last,
as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made the Providence to himself,
dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is
always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will
speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie,--for example,
the taint of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable
appearance,--will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and
all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak
the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very
roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear
you witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to
the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we
associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity,
the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into
hell.
These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed, that the
world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one
mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star,
in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that will, is
everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so, and not
otherwise. Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it
is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death
or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a
man hath, so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of this same
spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its
different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on
the several shores which it washes. All things proceed out of the same
spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends,
he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from
these ends, he bereaves himself of power, or auxiliaries; his being
shrinks out of all remote channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a
point, until absolute badness is absolute death.
The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which
we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness.
Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air.
It is the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine
and rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent
song of the stars is it. By it, is the universe made safe and habitable,
not by science or power. Thought may work cold and intransitive in
things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of
virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign
over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to
break out into joy.
This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It
makes him illimitable. Through it, the soul first knows itself. It
corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by
following the great, and hopes to derive advantages _from another_,--by
showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally
with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Reason. When he says, “I
ought;” when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the
good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from
Supreme Wisdom.--Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship;
for he can never go behind this sentiment. In the sublimest flights of
the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown.
This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, and successively
creates all forms of worship. The principle of veneration never dies
out. Man fallen into superstition, into sensuality, is never quite
without the visions of the moral sentiment. In like manner, all the
expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to
their purity. The expressions of this sentiment affect us more than all
other compositions. The sentences of the oldest time, which ejaculate
this piety, are still fresh and fragrant. This thought dwelled always
deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not
alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in
Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to oriental
genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men
found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon
mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history
of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion.
Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day,
before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is
guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It
cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not
instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What
he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as
his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing. On the contrary, the
absence of this primary faith is the presence of degradation. As is the
flood so is the ebb. Let this faith depart, and the very words it spake,
and the things it made, become false and hurtful. Then falls the church,
the state, art, letters, life. The doctrine of the divine nature being
forgotten, a sickness infects and dwarfs the constitution. Once man was
all; now he is an appendage, a nuisance. And because the indwelling
Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers
this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two
persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury. The doctrine
of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices,
usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul. Miracles, prophecy,
poetry; the ideal life, the holy life, exist as ancient history merely;
they are not in the belief, nor in the aspiration of society; but, when
suggested, seem ridiculous. Life is comic or pitiful, as soon as the
high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and
can only attend to what addresses the senses.
These general views, which, whilst they are general, none will contest,
find abundant illustration in the history of religion, and especially in
the history of the Christian church. In that, all of us have had our
birth and nurture. The truth contained in that, you, my young friends,
are now setting forth to teach. As the Cultus, or established worship of
the civilized world, it has great historical interest for us. Of its
blessed words, which have been the consolation of humanity, you need not
that I should speak. I shall endeavor to discharge my duty to you, on
this occasion, by pointing out two errors in its administration, which
daily appear more gross from the point of view we have just now taken.
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye
the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its
beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history,
he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you
and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes
forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of
sublime emotion, ‘I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me,
speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest
as I now think.’ But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory
suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no
doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the
Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s
lips, and said, in the next age, ‘This was Jehovah come down out of
heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.’ The idioms of his
language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his
truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes.
Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of
Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a
miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle
shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by
Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not
one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.
He felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit tenderness at
postponing their initial revelations, to the hour and the man that now
is; to the eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was he a true man.
Having seen that the law in us is commanding, he would not suffer it to
be commanded. Boldly, with hand, and heart, and life, he declared it was
God. Thus is he, as I think, the only soul in history who has
appreciated the worth of man.
1. In this point of view we become sensible of the first defect of
historical Christianity. Historical Christianity has fallen into the
error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears
to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the
soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It
has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the _person_ of
Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the
full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of
spontaneous love. But by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which
indolence and fear have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of
man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with expressions, which
were once sallies of admiration and love, but are now petrified into
official titles, kills all generous sympathy and liking. All who hear
me, feel, that the language that describes Christ to Europe and America,
is not the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good and noble
heart, but is appropriated and formal,--paints a demigod as the
Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. Accept the
injurious impositions of our early catechetical instruction, and even
honesty and self-denial were but splendid sins, if they did not wear the
Christian name. One would rather be
‘A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,’
than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into nature, and
finding not names and places, not land and professions, but even virtue
and truth foreclosed and monopolized. You shall not be a man even. You
shall not own the world; you shall not dare, and live after the infinite
Law that is in you, and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven
and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms; but you must subordinate
your nature to Christ’s nature; you must accept our interpretations; and
take his portrait as the vulgar draw it.
That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is excited in
me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. That which shows God in
me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a
wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the
long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decease
forever.
The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect, of my
strength. They admonish me, that the gleams which flash across my mind,
are not mine, but God’s; that they had the like, and were not
disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I love them. Noble provocations
go out from them, inviting me to resist evil; to subdue the world; and
to Be. And thus by his holy thoughts, Jesus serves us, and thus only. To
aim to convert a man by miracles, is a profanation of the soul. A true
conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made, by the
reception of beautiful sentiments. It is true that a great and rich
soul, like his, falling among the simple, does so preponderate, that, as
his did, it names the world. The world seems to them to exist for him,
and they have not yet drunk so deeply of his sense, as to see that only
by coming again to themselves, or to God in themselves, can they grow
forevermore. It is a low benefit to give me something; it is a high
benefit to enable me to do somewhat of myself. The time is coming when
all men will see, that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting,
overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a
goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be
and to grow.
The injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching is not less flagrant to
Jesus, than to the souls which it profanes. The preachers do not see
that they make his gospel not glad, and shear him of the locks of beauty
and the attributes of heaven. When I see a majestic Epaminondas, or
Washington; when I see among my contemporaries, a true orator, an
upright judge, a dear friend; when I vibrate to the melody and fancy of
a poem; I see beauty that is to be desired. And so lovely, and with yet
more entire consent of my human being, sounds in my ear the severe music
of the bards that have sung of the true God in all ages. Now do not
degrade the life and dialogues of Christ out of the circle of this
charm, by insulation and peculiarity. Let them lie as they befel, alive
and warm, part of human life, and of the landscape, and of the cheerful
day.
2. The second defect of the traditionary and limited way of using the
mind of Christ is a consequence of the first; this, namely; that the
Moral Nature, that Law of laws, whose revelations introduce
greatness,--yea, God himself, into the open soul, is not explored as the
fountain of the established teaching in society. Men have come to speak
of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were
dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher; and the goodliest of
institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.
It is very certain that it is the effect of conversation with the beauty
of the soul, to beget a desire and need to impart to others the same
knowledge and love. If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a
burden on the man. Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is
told: somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on
canvas; sometimes with chisel on stone; sometimes in towers and aisles
of granite, his soul’s worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of
indefinite music; but clearest and most permanent, in words.
The man enamored of this excellency, becomes its priest or poet. The
office is coeval with the world. But observe the condition, the
spiritual limitation of the office. The spirit only can teach. Not any
profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but
only he can give, who has; he only can create, who is. The man on whom
the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach.
Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his
door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues. But
the man who aims to speak as books enable, as synods use, as the fashion
guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him hush.
To this holy office, you propose to devote yourselves. I wish you may
feel your call in throbs of desire and hope. The office is the first in
the world. It is of that reality, that it cannot suffer the deduction of
any falsehood. And it is my duty to say to you, that the need was never
greater of new revelation than now. From the views I have already
expressed, you will infer the sad conviction, which I share, I believe,
with numbers, of the universal decay and now almost death of faith in
society. The soul is not preached. The Church seems to totter to its
fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion, any complaisance would
be criminal, which told you, whose hope and commission it is to preach
the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached.
It is time that this ill-suppressed murmur of all thoughtful men against
the famine of our churches; this moaning of the heart because it is
bereaved of the consolation, the hope, the grandeur, that come alone out
of the culture of the moral nature; should be heard through the sleep
of indolence, and over the din of routine. This great and perpetual
office of the preacher is not discharged. Preaching is the expression of
the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life. In how many
churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is
an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind;
that he is drinking forever the soul of God? Where now sounds the
persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises my heart, and so affirms
its own origin in heaven? Where shall I hear words such as in elder ages
drew men to leave all and follow,--father and mother, house and land,
wife and child? Where shall I hear these august laws of moral being so
pronounced, as to fill my ear, and I feel ennobled by the offer of my
uttermost action and passion? The test of the true faith, certainly,
should be its power to charm and command the soul, as the laws of nature
control the activity of the hands,--so commanding that we find pleasure
and honor in obeying. The faith should blend with the light of rising
and of setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird, and the
breath of flowers. But now the priest’s Sabbath has lost the splendor of
nature; it is unlovely; we are glad when it is done; we can make, we do
make, even sitting in our pews, a far better, holier, sweeter, for
ourselves.
Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper
defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin,
which do not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain to wrap our
cloaks about us, and secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not.
I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to
church no more. Men go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else had
no soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow-storm was falling
around us. The snow-storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and
the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the
window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived
in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was
married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he
had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital
secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not
learned. Not one fact in all his experience, had he yet imported into
his doctrine. This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and
bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head
aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a
surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all.
Not a line did he draw out of real history. The true preacher can be
known by this, that he deals out to the people his life,--life passed
through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be
told from his sermon, what age of the world he fell in; whether he had a
father or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he
was a citizen or a countryman; or any other fact of his biography. It
seemed strange that the people should come to church. It seemed as if
their houses were very unentertaining, that they should prefer this
thoughtless clamor. It shows that there is a commanding attraction in
the moral sentiment, that can lend a faint tint of light to dulness and
ignorance, coming in its name and place. The good hearer is sure he has
been touched sometimes; is sure there is somewhat to be reached, and
some word that can reach it. When he listens to these vain words, he
comforts himself by their relation to his remembrance of better hours,
and so they clatter and echo unchallenged.
I am not ignorant that when we preach unworthily, it is not always quite
in vain. There is a good ear, in some men, that draws supplies to
virtue out of very indifferent nutriment. There is poetic truth
concealed in all the common-places of prayer and of sermons, and though
foolishly spoken, they may be wisely heard; for, each is some select
expression that broke out in a moment of piety from some stricken or
jubilant soul, and its excellency made it remembered. The prayers and
even the dogmas of our church, are like the zodiac of Denderah, and the
astronomical monuments of the Hindoos, wholly insulated from anything
now extant in the life and business of the people. They mark the height
to which the waters once rose. But this docility is a check upon the
mischief from the good and devout. In a large portion of the community,
the religious service gives rise to quite other thoughts and emotions.
We need not chide the negligent servant. We are struck with pity,
rather, at the swift retribution of his sloth. Alas for the unhappy man
that is called to stand in the pulpit, and _not_ give bread of life.
Everything that befalls, accuses him. Would he ask contributions for the
missions, foreign or domestic? Instantly his face is suffused with
shame, to propose to his parish, that they should send money a hundred
or a thousand miles, to furnish such poor fare as they have at home, and
would do well to go the hundred or the thousand miles to escape. Would
he urge people to a godly way of living;--and can he ask a
fellow-creature to come to Sabbath meetings, when he and they all know
what is the poor uttermost they can hope for therein? Will he invite
them privately to the Lord’s Supper? He dares not. If no heart warm this
rite, the hollow, dry, creaking formality is too plain, than that he can
face a man of wit and energy, and put the invitation without terror. In
the street, what has he to say to the bold village blasphemer? The
village blasphemer sees fear in the face, form, and gait of the
minister.
Let me not taint the sincerity of this plea by any oversight of the
claims of good men. I know and honor the purity and strict conscience of
numbers of the clergy. What life the public worship retains, it owes to
the scattered company of pious men, who minister here and there in the
churches, and who, sometimes accepting with too great tenderness the
tenet of the elders, have not accepted from others, but from their own
heart, the genuine impulses of virtue, and so still command our love and
awe, to the sanctity of character. Moreover, the exceptions are not so
much to be found in a few eminent preachers, as in the better hours, the
truer inspirations of all,--nay, in the sincere moments of every man.
But with whatever exception, it is still true, that tradition
characterizes the preaching of this country; that it comes out of the
memory, and not out of the soul; that it aims at what is usual, and not
at what is necessary and eternal; that thus, historical Christianity
destroys the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration
of the moral nature of man, where the sublime is, where are the
resources of astonishment and power. What a cruel injustice it is to
that Law, the joy of the whole earth, which alone can make thought dear
and rich; that Law whose fatal sureness the astronomical orbits poorly
emulate, that it is travestied and depreciated, that it is behooted and
behowled, and not a trait, not a word of it articulated. The pulpit in
losing sight of this Law, loses its reason, and gropes after it knows
not what. And for want of this culture, the soul of the community is
sick and faithless. It wants nothing so much as a stern, high, stoical,
Christian discipline, to make it know itself and the divinity that
speaks through it. Now man is ashamed of himself; he skulks and sneaks
through the world, to be tolerated, to be pitied, and scarcely in a
thousand years does any man dare to be wise and good, and so draw after
him the tears and blessings of his kind.
Certainly there have been periods when, from the inactivity of the
intellect on certain truths, a greater faith was possible in names and
persons. The Puritans in England and America, found in the Christ of the
Catholic Church, and in the dogmas inherited from Rome, scope for their
austere piety, and their longings for civil freedom. But their creed is
passing away, and none arises in its room. I think no man can go with
his thoughts about him, into one of our churches, without feeling, that
what hold the public worship had on men is gone, or going. It has lost
its grasp on the affection of the good, and the fear of the bad. In the
country, neighborhoods, half parishes are _signing off_, to use the
local term. It is already beginning to indicate character and religion
to withdraw from the religious meetings. I have heard a devout person,
who prized the Sabbath, say in bitterness of heart, “On Sundays, it
seems wicked to go to church.” And the motive, that holds the best
there, is now only a hope and a waiting. What was once a mere
circumstance, that the best and the worst men in the parish, the poor
and the rich, the learned and the ignorant, young and old, should meet
one day as fellows in one house, in sign of an equal right in the soul,
has come to be a paramount motive for going thither.
My friends, in these two errors, I think, I find the causes of a
decaying church and a wasting unbelief. And what greater calamity can
fall upon a nation, than the loss of worship? Then all things go to
decay. Genius leaves the temple, to haunt the senate, or the market.
Literature becomes frivolous. Science is cold. The eye of youth is not
lighted by the hope of other worlds, and age is without honor. Society
lives to trifles, and when men die, we do not mention them.
And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these desponding days can be
done by us? The remedy is already declared in the ground of our
complaint of the Church. We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In
the soul, then, let the redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes,
there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. When a man comes, all
books are legible, all things transparent, all religions are forms. He
is religious. Man is the wonderworker. He is seen amid miracles. All men
bless and curse. He saith yea and nay, only. The stationariness of
religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the
Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by
representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the
falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show
us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake. The true
Christianity,--a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man,--is lost.
None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old
and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this
saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot
see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society wiser
than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser
than the whole world. See how nations and races flit by on the sea of
time, and leave no ripple to tell where they floated or sunk, and one
good soul shall make the name of Moses, or of Zeno, or of Zoroaster,
reverend forever. None assayeth the stern ambition to be the Self of the
nation, and of nature, but each would be an easy secondary to some
Christian scheme, or sectarian connection, or some eminent man. Once
leave your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take secondary
knowledge, as St. Paul’s, or George Fox’s, or Swedenborg’s, and you get
wide from God with every year this secondary form lasts, and if, as now,
for centuries,--the chasm yawns to that breath, that men can scarcely be
convinced there is in them anything divine.
Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good
models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare
to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you shall find who
will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and
Prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, ‘I also am a man.’
Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to
hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him,
and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is
natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of
another man’s.
Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,--cast behind you all
conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first
and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money, are
nothing to you,--are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot
see,--but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too
anxious to visit periodically all families and each family in your
parish connection,--when you meet one of these men or women, be to them
a divine man; be to them thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations
find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted
out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted,
and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own
heart, you shall gain more confidence in other men. For all our
penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to
be doubted, that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the
few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up
into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few
interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with
souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told
us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we inly were. Discharge
to men the priestly office, and, present or absent, you shall be
followed with their love as by an angel.
And, to this end, let us not aim at common degrees of merit. Can we not
leave, to such as love it, the virtue that glitters for the commendation
of society, and ourselves pierce the deep solitudes of absolute ability
and worth? We easily come up to the standard of goodness in society.
Society’s praise can be cheaply secured, and almost all men are content
with those easy merits; but the instant effect of conversing with God,
will be, to put them away. There are persons who are not actors, not
speakers, but influences; persons too great for fame, for display; who
disdain eloquence; to whom all we call art and artist, seems too nearly
allied to show and by-ends, to the exaggeration of the finite and
selfish, and loss of the universal. The orators, the poets, the
commanders encroach on us only as fair women do, by our allowance and
homage. Slight them by preoccupation of mind, slight them, as you can
well afford to do, by high and universal aims, and they instantly feel
that you have right, and that it is in lower places that they must
shine. They also feel your right; for they with you are open to the
influx of the all-knowing Spirit, which annihilates before its broad
noon the little shades and gradations of intelligence in the
compositions we call wiser and wisest.
In such high communion, let us study the grand strokes of rectitude: a
bold benevolence, an independence of friends, so that not the unjust
wishes of those who love us, shall impair our freedom, but we shall
resist for truth’s sake the freest flow of kindness, and appeal to
sympathies far in advance; and,--what is the highest form in which we
know this beautiful element,--a certain solidity of merit, that has
nothing to do with opinion, and which is so essentially and manifestly
virtue, that it is taken for granted, that the right, the brave, the
generous step will be taken by it, and nobody thinks of commending it.
You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not
praise an angel. The silence that accepts merit as the most natural
thing in the world, is the highest applause. Such souls, when they
appear, are the Imperial Guard of Virtue, the perpetual reserve, the
dictators of fortune. One needs not praise their courage,--they are the
heart and soul of nature. O my friends, there are resources in us on
which we have not drawn. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing a
threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the
majority,--demanding not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but
comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice,--comes
graceful and beloved as a bride. Napoleon said to Massena, that he was
not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the
dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination,
and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises,
in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of
question, that the angel is shown. But these are heights that we can
scarce remember and look up to, without contrition and shame. Let us
thank God that such things exist.
And now let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched
fire on the altar. The evils of the church that now is are manifest. The
question returns, What shall we do? I confess, all attempts to project
and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith
makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to
contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the
French to the goddess of Reason,--to-day, pasteboard and fillagree, and
ending to-morrow in madness and murder. Rather let the breath of new
life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once
you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The
remedy to their deformity is, first, soul, and second, soul, and
evermore, soul. A whole popedom of forms, one pulsation of virtue can
uplift and vivify. Two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us;
first; the Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole world; whose light dawns
welcome alike into the closet of the philosopher, into the garret of
toil, and into prison-cells, and everywhere suggests, even to the vile,
the dignity of spiritual being. Let us stand forevermore, a temple,
which new love, new faith, new sight shall restore to more than its
first splendor to mankind. And secondly, the institution of
preaching,--the speech of man to men,--essentially the most flexible of
all organs, of all forms. What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits,
in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men
or your own occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, as your life
and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men
with new hope and new revelation?
I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty, which ravished the souls
of those eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their
lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew
and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that have been bread of
life to millions. But they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary;
are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new
Teacher, that shall follow so far those shining laws, that he shall see
them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall
see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of
the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the
Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.
LITERARY ETHICS.
AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE,
JULY 24, 1838.
ORATION.
GENTLEMEN,
The invitation to address you this day, with which you have honored me,
was a call so welcome, that I made haste to obey it. A summons to
celebrate with scholars a literary festival, is so alluring to me, as to
overcome the doubts I might well entertain of my ability to bring you
any thought worthy of your attention. I have reached the middle age of
man; yet I believe I am not less glad or sanguine at the meeting of
scholars, than when, a boy, I first saw the graduates of my own College
assembled at their anniversary. Neither years nor books have yet availed
to extirpate a prejudice then rooted in me, that a scholar is the
favorite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the
happiest of men. His duties lead him directly into the holy ground
where other men’s aspirations only point. His successes are occasions of
the purest joy to all men. Eyes is he to the blind; feet is he to the
lame. His failures, if he is worthy, are inlets to higher advantages.
And because the scholar, by every thought he thinks, extends his
dominion into the general mind of men, he is not one, but many. The few
scholars in each country, whose genius I know, seem to me not
individuals, but societies; and, when events occur of great import, I
count over these representatives of opinion, whom they will affect, as
if I were counting nations. And, even if his results were
incommunicable; if they abode in his own spirit; the intellect hath
somewhat so sacred in its possessions, that the fact of his existence
and pursuits would be a happy omen.
Meantime I know that a very different estimate of the scholar’s
profession prevails in this country, and the importunity, with which
society presses its claim upon young men, tends to pervert the views of
the youth in respect to the culture of the intellect. Hence the
historical failure, on which Europe and America have so freely
commented. This country has not fulfilled what seemed the reasonable
expectation of mankind. Men looked, when all feudal straps and bandages
were snapped asunder, that nature, too long the mother of dwarfs,
should reimburse itself by a brood of Titans, who should laugh and leap
in the continent, and run up the mountains of the West with the errand
of genius and of love. But the mark of American merit in painting, in
sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence, seems to be a certain
grace without grandeur, and itself not new but derivative; a vase of
fair outline, but empty,--which whoso sees, may fill with what wit and
character is in him, but which does not, like the charged cloud,
overflow with terrible beauty, and emit lightnings on all beholders.
I will not lose myself in the desultory questions, what are the
limitations, and what the causes of the fact. It suffices me to say, in
general, that the diffidence of mankind in the soul has crept over the
American mind; that men here, as elsewhere, are indisposed to
innovation, and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery productive
of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought.
Yet, in every sane hour, the service of thought appears reasonable, the
despotism of the senses insane. The scholar may lose himself in schools,
in words, and become a pedant; but when he comprehends his duties, he
above all men is a realist, and converses with things. For, the scholar
is the student of the world, and of what worth the world is, and with
what emphasis it accosts the soul of man, such is the worth, such the
call of the scholar.
The want of the times, and the propriety of this anniversary, concur to
draw attention to the doctrine of Literary Ethics. What I have to say on
that doctrine distributes itself under the topics of the resources, the
subject, and the discipline of the scholar.
I. The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in
the attributes of the Intellect. The resources of the scholar are
coextensive with nature and truth, yet can never be his, unless claimed
by him with an equal greatness of mind. He cannot know them until he has
beheld with awe the infinitude and impersonality of the intellectual
power. When he has seen, that it is not his, nor any man’s, but that it
is the soul which made the world, and that it is all accessible to him,
he will know that he, as its minister, may rightfully hold all things
subordinate and answerable to it. A divine pilgrim in nature, all things
attend his steps. Over him stream the flying constellations; over him
streams Time, as they, scarcely divided into months and years. He
inhales the year as a vapor: its fragrant midsummer breath, its
sparkling January heaven. And so pass into his mind, in bright
transfiguration, the grand events of history, to take a new order and
scale from him. He is the world; and the epochs and heroes of chronology
are pictorial images, in which his thoughts are told. There is no event
but sprung somewhere from the soul of man; and therefore there is none
but the soul of man can interpret. Every presentiment of the mind is
executed somewhere in a gigantic fact. What else is Greece, Rome,
England, France, St. Helena? What else are churches, literatures, and
empires? The new man must feel that he is new, and has not come into the
world mortgaged to the opinions and usages of Europe, and Asia, and
Egypt. The sense of spiritual independence is like the lovely varnish of
the dew, whereby the old, hard, peaked earth, and its old self-same
productions, are made new every morning, and shining with the last touch
of the artist’s hand. A false humility, a complaisance to reigning
schools, or to the wisdom of antiquity, must not defraud me of supreme
possession of this hour. If any person have less love of liberty, and
less jealousy to guard his integrity, shall he therefore dictate to you
and me? Say to such doctors, We are thankful to you, as we are to
history, to the pyramids, and the authors; but now our day is come; we
have been born out of the eternal silence; and now will we live,--live
for ourselves,--and not as the pall-bearers of a funeral, but as the
upholders and creators of our age; and neither Greece nor Rome, nor the
three Unities of Aristotle, nor the three Kings of Cologne, nor the
College of the Sorbonne, nor the Edinburgh Review, is to command any
longer. Now that we are here, we will put our own interpretation on
things, and our own things for interpretation. Please himself with
complaisance who will,--for me, things must take my scale, not I theirs.
I will say with the warlike king, “God gave me this crown, and the whole
world shall not take it away.”
The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust,
by demonstrating what man can be and do. This is the moral of the
Plutarchs, the Cudworths, the Tennemanns, who give us the story of men
or of opinions. Any history of philosophy fortifies my faith, by showing
me, that what high dogmas I had supposed were the rare and late fruit of
a cumulative culture, and only now possible to some recent Kant or
Fichte,--were the prompt improvisations of the earliest inquirers; of
Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Xenophanes. In view of these students, the
soul seems to whisper, ‘There is a better way than this indolent
learning of another. Leave me alone; do not teach me out of Leibnitz or
Schelling, and I shall find it all out myself.’
Still more do we owe to biography the fortification of our hope. If you
would know the power of character, see how much you would impoverish the
world, if you could take clean out of history the lives of Milton,
Shakspeare, and Plato,--these three, and cause them not to be. See you
not, how much less the power of man would be? I console myself in the
poverty of my thoughts; in the paucity of great men, in the malignity
and dulness of the nations, by falling back on these sublime
recollections, and seeing what the prolific soul could beget on actual
nature;--seeing that Plato was, and Shakspeare, and Milton,--three
irrefragable facts. Then I dare; I also will essay to be. The humblest,
the most hopeless, in view of these radiant facts, may now theorize and
hope. In spite of all the rueful abortions that squeak and gibber in the
street, in spite of slumber and guilt, in spite of the army, the
bar-room, and the jail, _have been_ these glorious manifestations of the
mind; and I will thank my great brothers so truly for the admonition of
their being, as to endeavor also to be just and brave, to aspire and to
speak. Plotinus too, and Spinoza, and the immortal bards of
philosophy,--that which they have written out with patient courage,
makes me bold. No more will I dismiss, with haste, the visions which
flash and sparkle across my sky; but observe them, approach them,
domesticate them, brood on them, and draw out of the past, genuine life
for the present hour.
To feel the full value of these lives, as occasions of hope and
provocation, you must come to know, that each admirable genius is but a
successful diver in that sea whose floor of pearls is all your own. The
impoverishing philosophy of ages has laid stress on the distinctions of
the individual, and not on the universal attributes of man. The youth,
intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only
a projection of his own soul, which he admires. In solitude, in a remote
village, the ardent youth loiters and mourns. With inflamed eye, in this
sleeping wilderness, he has read the story of the Emperor Charles the
Fifth, until his fancy has brought home to the surrounding woods, the
faint roar of cannonades in the Milanese, and marches in Germany. He is
curious concerning that man’s day. What filled it? the crowded orders,
the stern decisions, the foreign despatches, the Castilian etiquette?
The soul answers--Behold his day here! In the sighing of these woods, in
the quiet of these gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of
these northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens, you
meet,--in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of
the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of
vigor; in the great idea, and the puny execution;--behold Charles the
Fifth’s day; another, yet the same; behold Chatham’s, Hampden’s,
Bayard’s, Alfred’s, Scipio’s, Pericles’s day,--day of all that are born
of women. The difference of circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting
the self-same life,--its sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which I so
admire in other men. Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable,
obliterated past, what it cannot tell,--the details of that nature, of
that day, called Byron, or Burke;--but ask it of the enveloping Now; the
more quaintly you inspect its evanescent beauties, its wonderful
details, its spiritual causes, its astounding whole,--so much the more
you master the biography of this hero, and that, and every hero. Be lord
of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history
books.
An intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of injury
which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their possible
progress. We resent all criticism, which denies us any thing that lies
in our line of advance. Say to the man of letters, that he cannot paint
a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a grand-marshal,--and he
will not seem to himself depreciated. But deny to him any quality of
literary or metaphysical power, and he is piqued. Concede to him genius,
which is a sort of Stoical _plenum_ annulling the comparative, and he is
content; but concede him talents never so rare, denying him genius, and
he is aggrieved. What does this mean? Why simply, that the soul has
assurance, by instincts and presentiments, of _all_ power in the
direction of its ray, as well as of the special skills it has already
acquired.
In order to a knowledge of the resources of the scholar, we must not
rest in the use of slender accomplishments,--of faculties to do this and
that other feat with words; but we must pay our vows to the highest
power, and pass, if it be possible, by assiduous love and watching, into
the visions of absolute truth. The growth of the intellect is strictly
analogous in all individuals. It is larger reception. Able men, in
general, have good dispositions, and a respect for justice; because an
able man is nothing else than a good, free, vascular organization,
whereinto the universal spirit freely flows; so that his fund of justice
is not only vast, but infinite. All men, in the abstract, are just and
good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary
predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The
condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual
tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the
exclusion of the law of universal being. The hero is great by means of
the predominance of the universal nature; he has only to open his mouth,
and it speaks; he has only to be forced to act, and it acts. All men
catch the word, or embrace the deed, with the heart, for it is verily
theirs as much as his; but in them this disease of an excess of
organization cheats them of equal issues. Nothing is more simple than
greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. The vision of genius
comes by renouncing the too officious activity of the understanding, and
giving leave and amplest privilege to the spontaneous sentiment. Out of
this must all that is alive and genial in thought go. Men grind and
grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put
in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought,
then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, all flock to their
aid. Observe the phenomenon of extempore debate. A man of cultivated
mind, but reserved habits, sitting silent, admires the miracle of free,
impassioned, picturesque speech, in the man addressing an assembly;--a
state of being and power, how unlike his own! Presently his own emotion
rises to his lips, and overflows in speech. He must also rise and say
somewhat. Once embarked, once having overcome the novelty of the
situation, he finds it just as easy and natural to speak,--to speak with
thoughts, with pictures, with rhythmical balance of sentences,--as it
was to sit silent; for, it needs not to do, but to suffer; he only
adjusts himself to the free spirit which gladly utters itself through
him; and motion is as easy as rest.
II. I pass now to consider the task offered to the intellect of this
country. The view I have taken of the resources of the scholar,
presupposes a subject as broad. We do not seem to have imagined its
riches. We have not heeded the invitation it holds out. To be as good a
scholar as Englishmen are; to have as much learning as our
contemporaries; to have written a book that is read; satisfies us. We
assume, that all thought is already long ago adequately set down in
books,--all imaginations in poems; and what we say, we only throw in as
confirmatory of this supposed complete body of literature. A very
shallow assumption. Say rather, all literature is yet to be written.
Poetry has scarce chanted its first song. The perpetual admonition of
nature to us, is, ‘The world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I
give you the universe a virgin to-day.’
By Latin and English poetry, we were born and bred in an oratorio of
praises of nature,--flowers, birds, mountains, sun, and moon;--yet the
naturalist of this hour finds that he knows nothing, by all their poems,
of any of these fine things; that he has conversed with the mere surface
and show of them all; and of their essence, or of their history, knowing
nothing. Further inquiry will discover that nobody,--that not these
chanting poets themselves, knew any thing sincere of these handsome
natures they so commended; that they contented themselves with the
passing chirp of a bird, that they saw one or two mornings, and
listlessly looked at sunsets, and repeated idly these few glimpses in
their song. But go into the forest, you shall find all new and
undescribed. The hawking of the wild geese flying by night; the thin
note of the companionable titmouse, in the winter day; the fall of
swarms of flies, in autumn, from combats high in the air, pattering down
on the leaves like rain; the angry hiss of the woodbirds; the pine
throwing out its pollen for the benefit of the next century; the
turpentine exuding from the tree;--and, indeed, any vegetation; any
animation; any and all, are alike unattempted. The man who stands on the
seashore, or who rambles in the woods, seems to be the first man that
ever stood on the shore, or entered a grove, his sensations and his
world are so novel and strange. Whilst I read the poets, I think that
nothing new can be said about morning and evening. But when I see the
daybreak, I am not reminded of these Homeric, or Shakspearian, or
Miltonic, or Chaucerian pictures. No; but I feel perhaps the pain of an
alien world; a world not yet subdued by the thought; or, I am cheered by
the moist, warm, glittering, budding, melodious hour, that takes down
the narrow walls of my soul, and extends its life and pulsation to the
very horizon. _That_ is morning, to cease for a bright hour to be a
prisoner of this sickly body, and to become as large as nature.
The noonday darkness of the American forest, the deep, echoing,
aboriginal woods, where the living columns of the oak and fir tower up
from the ruins of the trees of the last millennium; where, from year to
year, the eagle and the crow see no intruder; the pines, bearded with
savage moss, yet touched with grace by the violets at their feet; the
broad, cold lowland, which forms its coat of vapor with the stillness of
subterranean crystallization; and where the traveller, amid the
repulsive plants that are native in the swamp, thinks with pleasing
terror of the distant town; this beauty,--haggard and desert beauty,
which the sun and the moon, the snow and the rain, repaint and vary, has
never been recorded by art, yet is not indifferent to any passenger. All
men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness
overcomes them sometimes. What mean these journeys to Niagara; these
pilgrims to the White Hills? Men believe in the adaptations of utility,
always: in the mountains, they may believe in the adaptations of the
eye. Undoubtedly, the changes of geology have a relation to the
prosperous sprouting of the corn and peas in my kitchen garden; but not
less is there a relation of beauty between my soul and the dim crags of
Agiocochook up there in the clouds. Every man, when this is told,
hearkens with joy, and yet his own conversation with nature is still
unsung.
Is it otherwise with civil history? Is it not the lesson of our
experience that every man, were life long enough, would write history
for himself? What else do these volumes of extracts and manuscript
commentaries, that every scholar writes, indicate? Greek history is one
thing to me; another to you. Since the birth of Niebuhr and Wolf, Roman
and Greek History have been written anew. Since Carlyle wrote French
History, we see that no history, that we have, is safe, but a new
classifier shall give it new and more philosophical arrangement.
Thucydides, Livy, have only provided materials. The moment a man of
genius pronounces the name of the Pelasgi, of Athens, of the Etrurian,
of the Roman people, we see their state under a new aspect. As in poetry
and history, so in the other departments. There are few masters or none.
Religion is yet to be settled on its fast foundations in the breast of
man; and politics, and philosophy, and letters, and art. As yet we have
nothing but tendency and indication.
This starting, this warping of the best literary works from the adamant
of nature, is especially observable in philosophy. Let it take what tone
of pretension it will, to this complexion must it come, at last. Take,
for example, the French Eclecticism, which Cousin esteems so
conclusive; there is an optical illusion in it. It avows great
pretensions. It looks as if they had all truth, in taking all the
systems, and had nothing to do, but to sift and wash and strain, and the
gold and diamonds would remain in the last colander. But, Truth is such
a flyaway, such a slyboots, so untransportable and unbarrelable a
commodity, that it is as bad to catch as light. Shut the shutters never
so quick, to keep all the light in, it is all in vain; it is gone before
you can cry, Hold. And so it happens with our philosophy. Translate,
collate, distil all the systems, it steads you nothing; for truth will
not be compelled, in any mechanical manner. But the first observation
you make, in the sincere act of your nature, though on the veriest
trifle, may open a new view of nature and of man, that, like a
menstruum, shall dissolve all theories in it; shall take up Greece,
Rome, Stoicism, Eclecticism, and what not, as mere data and food for
analysis, and dispose of your world-containing system, as a very little
unit. A profound thought, anywhere, classifies all things: a profound
thought will lift Olympus. The book of philosophy is only a fact, and no
more inspiring fact than another, and no less; but a wise man will never
esteem it anything final and transcending. Go and talk with a man of
genius, and the first word he utters, sets all your so-called knowledge
afloat and at large. Then Plato, Bacon, Kant, and the Eclectic Cousin,
condescend instantly to be men and mere facts.
I by no means aim, in these remarks, to disparage the merit of these or
of any existing compositions; I only say that any particular portraiture
does not in any manner exclude or forestall a new attempt, but, when
considered by the soul, warps and shrinks away. The inundation of the
spirit sweeps away before it all our little architecture of wit and
memory, as straws and straw-huts before the torrent. Works of the
intellect are great only by comparison with each other; Ivanhoe and
Waverley compared with Castle Radcliffe and the Porter novels; but
nothing is great,--not mighty Homer and Milton,--beside the infinite
Reason. It carries them away as a flood. They are as a sleep.
Thus is justice done to each generation and individual,--wisdom teaching
man that he shall not hate, or fear, or mimic his ancestors; that he
shall not bewail himself, as if the world was old, and thought was
spent, and he was born into the dotage of things; for, by virtue of the
Deity, thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day, and the thing
whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject with
countless relations.
III. Having thus spoken of the resources and the subject of the scholar,
out of the same faith proceeds also the rule of his ambition and life.
Let him know that the world is his, but he must possess it by putting
himself into harmony with the constitution of things. He must be a
solitary, laborious, modest, and charitable soul.
He must embrace solitude as a bride. He must have his glees and his
glooms alone. His own estimate must be measure enough, his own praise
reward enough for him. And why must the student be solitary and silent?
That he may become acquainted with his thoughts. If he pines in a lonely
place, hankering for the crowd, for display, he is not in the lonely
place; his heart is in the market; he does not see; he does not hear; he
does not think. But go cherish your soul; expel companions; set your
habits to a life of solitude; then, will the faculties rise fair and
full within, like forest trees and field flowers; you will have results,
which, when you meet your fellow-men, you can communicate, and they will
gladly receive. Do not go into solitude only that you may presently come
into public. Such solitude denies itself; is public and stale. The
public can get public experience, but they wish the scholar to replace
to them those private, sincere, divine experiences, of which they have
been defrauded by dwelling in the street. It is the noble, manlike, just
thought, which is the superiority demanded of you, and not crowds but
solitude confers this elevation. Not insulation of place, but
independence of spirit is essential, and it is only as the garden, the
cottage, the forest, and the rock, are a sort of mechanical aids to
this, that they are of value. Think alone, and all places are friendly
and sacred. The poets who have lived in cities have been hermits still.
Inspiration makes solitude anywhere. Pindar, Raphael, Angelo, Dryden, De
Staël, dwell in crowds, it may be, but the instant thought comes, the
crowd grows dim to their eye; their eye fixes on the horizon,--on vacant
space; they forget the bystanders; they spurn personal relations; they
deal with abstractions, with verities, with ideas. They are alone with
the mind.
Of course, I would not have any superstition about solitude. Let the
youth study the uses of solitude and of society. Let him use both, not
serve either. The reason why an ingenious soul shuns society, is to the
end of finding society. It repudiates the false, out of love of the
true. You can very soon learn all that society can teach you for one
while. Its foolish routine, an indefinite multiplication of balls,
concerts, rides, theatres, can teach you no more than a few can. Then
accept the hint of shame, of spiritual emptiness and waste, which true
nature gives you, and retire, and hide; lock the door; shut the
shutters; then welcome falls the imprisoning rain,--dear hermitage of
nature. Re-collect the spirits. Have solitary prayer and praise. Digest
and correct the past experience; and blend it with the new and divine
life.
You will pardon me, Gentlemen, if I say, I think that we have need of a
more rigorous scholastic rule; such an asceticism, I mean, as only the
hardihood and devotion of the scholar himself can enforce. We live in
the sun and on the surface,--a thin, plausible, superficial existence,
and talk of muse and prophet, of art and creation. But out of our
shallow and frivolous way of life, how can greatness ever grow? Come
now, let us go and be dumb. Let us sit with our hands on our mouths, a
long, austere, Pythagorean lustrum. Let us live in corners, and do
chores, and suffer, and weep, and drudge, with eyes and hearts that love
the Lord. Silence, seclusion, austerity, may pierce deep into the
grandeur and secret of our being, and so diving, bring up out of secular
darkness, the sublimities of the moral constitution. How mean to go
blazing, a gaudy butterfly, in fashionable or political saloons, the
fool of society, the fool of notoriety, a topic for newspapers, a piece
of the street, and forfeiting the real prerogative of the russet coat,
the privacy, and the true and warm heart of the citizen!
Fatal to the man of letters, fatal to man, is the lust of display, the
seeming that unmakes our being. A mistake of the main end to which they
labor, is incident to literary men, who, dealing with the organ of
language,--the subtlest, strongest, and longest-lived of man’s
creations, and only fitly used as the weapon of thought and of
justice,--learn to enjoy the pride of playing with this splendid engine,
but rob it of its almightiness by failing to work with it. Extricating
themselves from the tasks of the world, the world revenges itself by
exposing, at every turn, the folly of these incomplete, pedantic,
useless, ghostly creatures. The scholar will feel, that the richest
romance,--the noblest fiction that was ever woven,--the heart and soul
of beauty,--lies enclosed in human life. Itself of surpassing value, it
is also the richest material for his creations. How shall he know its
secrets of tenderness, of terror, of will, and of fate? How can he catch
and keep the strain of upper music that peals from it? Its laws are
concealed under the details of daily action. All action is an experiment
upon them. He must bear his share of the common load. He must work with
men in houses, and not with their names in books. His needs, appetites,
talents, affections, accomplishments, are keys that open to him the
beautiful museum of human life. Why should he read it as an Arabian
tale, and not know, in his own beating bosom, its sweet and smart? Out
of love and hatred, out of earnings, and borrowings, and lendings, and
losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of
travelling, and voting, and watching, and caring; out of disgrace and
contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws. Let him
not slur his lesson; let him learn it by heart. Let him endeavor
exactly, bravely, and cheerfully, to solve the problem of that life
which is set before _him_. And this, by punctual action, and not by
promises or dreams. Believing, as in God, in the presence and favor of
the grandest influences, let him deserve that favor, and learn how to
receive and use it, by fidelity also to the lower observances.
This lesson is taught with emphasis in the life of the great actor of
this age, and affords the explanation of his success. Bonaparte
represents truly a great recent revolution, which we in this country,
please God, shall carry to its farthest consummation. Not the least
instructive passage in modern history, seems to me a trait of Napoleon,
exhibited to the English when he became their prisoner. On coming on
board the Bellerophon, a file of English soldiers drawn up on deck, gave
him a military salute. Napoleon observed, that their manner of handling
their arms differed from the French exercise, and, putting aside the
guns of those nearest him, walked up to a soldier, took his gun, and
himself went through the motion in the French mode. The English officers
and men looked on with astonishment, and inquired if such familiarity
was usual with the Emperor.
In this instance, as always, that man, with whatever defects or vices,
represented performance in lieu of pretension. Feudalism and Orientalism
had long enough thought it majestic to do nothing; the modern majesty
consists in work. He belonged to a class fast growing in the world, who
think, that what a man can do is his greatest ornament, and that he
always consults his dignity by doing it. He was not a believer in luck;
he had a faith, like sight, in the application of means to ends. Means
to ends, is the motto of all his behavior. He believed that the great
captains of antiquity performed their exploits only by correct
combinations, and by justly comparing the relation between means and
consequences; efforts and obstacles. The vulgar call good fortune that
which really is produced by the calculations of genius. But Napoleon,
thus faithful to facts, had also this crowning merit; that, whilst he
believed in number and weight, and omitted no part of prudence, he
believed also in the freedom and quite incalculable force of the soul. A
man of infinite caution, he neglected never the least particular of
preparation, of patient adaptation; yet nevertheless he had a sublime
confidence, as in his all, in the sallies of the courage, and the faith
in his destiny, which, at the right moment, repaired all losses, and
demolished cavalry, infantry, king, and kaisar, as with irresistible
thunderbolts. As they say the bough of the tree has the character of the
leaf, and the whole tree of the bough, so, it is curious to remark,
Bonaparte’s army partook of this double strength of the captain; for,
whilst strictly supplied in all its appointments, and everything
expected from the valor and discipline of every platoon, in flank and
centre, yet always remained his total trust in the prodigious
revolutions of fortune, which his reserved Imperial Guard were capable
of working, if, in all else, the day was lost. Here he was sublime. He
no longer calculated the chance of the cannon ball. He was faithful to
tactics to the uttermost,--and when all tactics had come to an end,
then, he dilated, and availed himself of the mighty saltations of the
most formidable soldiers in nature.
Let the scholar appreciate this combination of gifts, which, applied to
better purpose, make true wisdom. He is a revealer of things. Let him
first learn the things. Let him not, too eager to grasp some badge of
reward, omit the work to be done. Let him know, that, though the success
of the market is in the reward, true success is the doing; that, in the
private obedience to his mind; in the sedulous inquiry, day after day,
year after year, to know how the thing stands; in the use of all means,
and most in the reverence of the humble commerce and humble needs of
life,--to hearken what _they_ say, and so, by mutual reaction of thought
and life, to make thought solid, and life wise; and in a contempt for
the gabble of to-day’s opinions, the secret of the world is to be
learned, and the skill truly to unfold it is acquired. Or, rather, is it
not, that, by this discipline, the usurpation of the senses is
overcome, and the lower faculties of man are subdued to docility;
through which, as an unobstructed channel, the soul now easily and
gladly flows?
The good scholar will not refuse to bear the yoke in his youth; to know,
if he can, the uttermost secret of toil and endurance; to make his own
hands acquainted with the soil by which he is fed, and the sweat that
goes before comfort and luxury. Let him pay his tithe, and serve the
world as a true and noble man; never forgetting to worship the immortal
divinities, who whisper to the poet, and make him the utterer of
melodies that pierce the ear of eternal time. If he have this twofold
goodness,--the drill and the inspiration,--then he has health; then he
is a whole, and not a fragment; and the perfection of his endowment will
appear in his compositions. Indeed, this twofold merit characterizes
ever the productions of great masters. The man of genius should occupy
the whole space between God or pure mind, and the multitude of
uneducated men. He must draw from the infinite Reason, on one side; and
he must penetrate into the heart and sense of the crowd, on the other.
From one, he must draw his strength; to the other he must owe his aim.
The one yokes him to the real; the other, to the apparent. At one pole,
is Reason; at the other, Common Sense. If he be defective at either
extreme of the scale, his philosophy will seem low and utilitarian; or
it will appear too vague and indefinite for the uses of life.
The student, as we all along insist, is great only by being passive to
the superincumbent spirit. Let this faith, then, dictate all his action.
Snares and bribes abound to mislead him; let him be true nevertheless.
His success has its perils too. There is somewhat inconvenient and
injurious in his position. They whom his thoughts have entertained or
inflamed, seek him before yet they have learned the hard conditions of
thought. They seek him, that he may turn his lamp on the dark riddles
whose solution they think is inscribed on the walls of their being. They
find that he is a poor, ignorant man, in a white-seamed, rusty coat,
like themselves, no wise emitting a continuous stream of light, but now
and then a jet of luminous thought, followed by total darkness;
moreover, that he cannot make of his infrequent illumination a portable
taper to carry whither he would, and explain now this dark riddle, now
that. Sorrow ensues. The scholar regrets to damp the hope of ingenuous
boys; and the youth has lost a star out of his new flaming firmament.
Hence the temptation to the scholar to mystify; to hear the question;
to sit upon it; to make an answer of words, in lack of the oracle of
things. Not the less let him be cold and true, and wait in patience,
knowing that truth can make even silence eloquent and memorable. Truth
shall be policy enough for him. Let him open his breast to all honest
inquiry, and be an artist superior to tricks of art. Show frankly as a
saint would do, your experience, methods, tools, and means. Welcome all
comers to the freest use of the same. And out of this superior frankness
and charity, you shall learn higher secrets of your nature, which gods
will bend and aid you to communicate.
If, with a high trust, he can thus submit himself, he will find that
ample returns are poured into his bosom, out of what seemed hours of
obstruction and loss. Let him not grieve too much on account of unfit
associates. When he sees how much thought he owes to the disagreeable
antagonism of various persons who pass and cross him, he can easily
think that in a society of perfect sympathy, no word, no act, no record,
would be. He will learn, that it is not much matter what he reads, what
he does. Be a scholar, and he shall have the scholar’s part of every
thing. As, in the counting-room, the merchant cares little whether the
cargo be hides or barilla; the transaction, a letter of credit or a
transfer of stocks; be it what it may, his commission comes gently out
of it; so you shall get your lesson out of the hour, and the object,
whether it be a concentrated or a wasteful employment, even in reading a
dull book, or working off a stint of mechanical day labor, which your
necessities or the necessities of others impose.
* * * * *
Gentlemen, I have ventured to offer you these considerations upon the
scholar’s place, and hope, because I thought, that, standing, as many of
you now do, on the threshold of this College, girt and ready to go and
assume tasks, public and private, in your country, you would not be
sorry to be admonished of those primary duties of the intellect, whereof
you will seldom hear from the lips of your new companions. You will hear
every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear, that the first
duty is to get land and money, place and name. ‘What is this Truth you
seek? what is this Beauty?’ men will ask, with derision. If,
nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be
bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, ‘As others do, so will I: I
renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of
the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more
convenient season;’--then dies the man in you; then once more perish the
buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a
thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your
history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. It is
this domineering temper of the sensual world, that creates the extreme
need of the priests of science; and it is the office and right of the
intellect to make and not take its estimate. Bend to the persuasion
which is flowing to you from every object in nature, to be its tongue to
the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is
wisdom. Forewarned that the vice of the times and the country is an
excessive pretension, let us seek the shade, and find wisdom in neglect.
Be content with a little light, so it be your own. Explore, and explore.
Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual
inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor accept another’s dogmatism. Why should
you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for
the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its
roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and
mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall
not take away your property in all men’s possessions, in all men’s
affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.
You will not fear, that I am enjoining too stern an asceticism. Ask not,
Of what use is a scholarship that systematically retreats? or, Who is
the better for the philosopher who conceals his accomplishments, and
hides his thoughts from the waiting world? Hides his thoughts! Hide the
sun and moon. Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the
universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous
organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It
will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love
and expectation of generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Nature,
which is one and perfect, it shall yield every sincere good that is in
the soul, to the scholar beloved of earth and heaven.
THE METHOD OF NATURE.
AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE SOCIETY OF THE ADELPHI, IN WATERVILLE
COLLEGE, MAINE, AUGUST 11, 1841.
THE METHOD OF NATURE.
GENTLEMEN,
Let us exchange congratulations on the enjoyments and the promises of
this literary anniversary. The land we live in has no interest so dear,
if it knew its want, as the fit consecration of days of reason and
thought. Where there is no vision, the people perish. The scholars are
the priests of that thought which establishes the foundations of the
earth. No matter what is their special work or profession, they stand
for the spiritual interest of the world, and it is a common calamity if
they neglect their post in a country where the material interest is so
predominant as it is in America. We hear something too much of the
results of machinery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a puny and a
fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following, are our diseases. The
rapid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the
incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of
all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe
acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the
school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.
I do not wish to look with sour aspect at the industrious manufacturing
village, or the mart of commerce. I love the music of the water-wheel; I
value the railway; I feel the pride which the sight of a ship inspires;
I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me
discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each of these works an
act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken;
that act or step is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition
of the same a thousand times. And I will not be deceived into admiring
the routine of handicrafts and mechanics, how splendid soever the
result, any more than I admire the routine of the scholars or clerical
class. That splendid results ensue from the labors of stupid men, is the
fruit of higher laws than their will, and the routine is not to be
praised for it. I would not have the laborer sacrificed to the
result,--I would not have the laborer sacrificed to my convenience and
pride, nor to that of a great class of such as me. Let there be worse
cotton and better men. The weaver should not be bereaved of his
superiority to his work, and his knowledge that the product or the skill
is of no value, except so far as it embodies his spiritual prerogatives.
If I see nothing to admire in the unit, shall I admire a million units?
Men stand in awe of the city, but do not honor any individual citizen;
and are continually yielding to this dazzling result of numbers, that
which they would never yield to the solitary example of any one.
Whilst the multitude of men degrade each other, and give currency to
desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a bringer of hope, and must
reinforce man against himself. I sometimes believe that our literary
anniversaries will presently assume a greater importance, as the eyes of
men open to their capabilities. Here, a new set of distinctions, a new
order of ideas, prevail. Here, we set a bound to the respectability of
wealth, and a bound to the pretensions of the law and the church. The
bigot must cease to be a bigot to-day. Into our charmed circle, power
cannot enter; and the sturdiest defender of existing institutions feels
the terrific inflammability of this air which condenses heat in every
corner that may restore to the elements the fabrics of ages. Nothing
solid is secure; every thing tilts and rocks. Even the scholar is not
safe; he too is searched and revised. Is his learning dead? Is he living
in his memory? The power of mind is not mortification, but life. But
come forth, thou curious child! hither, thou loving, all-hoping poet!
hither, thou tender, doubting heart, who has not yet found any place in
the world’s market fit for thee; any wares which thou couldst buy or
sell,--so large is thy love and ambition,--thine and not theirs is the
hour. Smooth thy brow, and hope and love on, for the kind heaven
justifies thee, and the whole world feels that thou art in the right.
We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy. Not thanks,
not prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for our communication
with the infinite,--but glad and conspiring reception,--reception that
becomes giving in its turn, as the receiver is only the All-Giver in
part and in infancy. I cannot,--nor can any man,--speak precisely of
things so sublime, but it seems to me, the wit of man, his strength, his
grace, his tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It
is beyond explanation. When all is said and done, the rapt saint is
found the only logician. Not exhortation, not argument becomes our
lips, but pæans of joy and praise. But not of adulation; we are too
nearly related in the deep of the mind to that we honor. It is God in us
which checks the language of petition by a grander thought. In the
bottom of the heart, it is said; ‘I am, and by me, O child! this fair
body and world of thine stands and grows. I am; all things are mine: and
all mine are thine.’
The festival of the intellect, and the return to its source, cast a
strong light on the always interesting topics of Man and Nature. We are
forcibly reminded of the old want. There is no man; there hath never
been. The Intellect still asks that a man may be born. The flame of life
flickers feebly in human breasts. We demand of men a richness and
universality we do not find. Great men do not content us. It is their
solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous. There is
somewhat indigent and tedious about them. They are poorly tied to one
thought. If they are prophets, they are egotists; if polite and various,
they are shallow. How tardily men arrive at any result! how tardily they
pass from it to another! The crystal sphere of thought is as
concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and
rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men’s thinkings run
laterally, never vertically. Here comes by a great inquisitor with auger
and plumb-line, and will bore an Artesian well through our conventions
and theories, and pierce to the core of things. But as soon as he probes
the crust, behold gimlet, plumb-line, and philosopher take a lateral
direction, in spite of all resistance, as if some strong wind took
everything off its feet, and if you come month after month to see what
progress our reformer has made,--not an inch has he pierced,--you still
find him with new words in the old place, floating about in new parts of
the same old vein or crust. The new book says, ‘I will give you the key
to nature,’ and we expect to go like a thunderbolt to the centre. But
the thunder is a surface phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does
the sage. The wedge turns out to be a rocket. Thus a man lasts but a
very little while, for his monomania becomes insupportably tedious in a
few months. It is so with every book and person: and yet--and yet--we do
not take up a new book, or meet a new man, without a pulse-beat of
expectation. And this invincible hope of a more adequate interpreter is
the sure prediction of his advent.
In the absence of man, we turn to nature, which stands next. In the
divine order, intellect is primary; nature, secondary; it is the memory
of the mind. That which once existed in intellect as pure law, has now
taken body as Nature. It existed already in the mind in solution; now,
it has been precipitated, and the bright sediment is the world. We can
never be quite strangers or inferiors in nature. It is flesh of our
flesh, and bone of our bone. But we no longer hold it by the hand; we
have lost our miraculous power; our arm is no more as strong as the
frost; nor our will equivalent to gravity and the elective attractions.
Yet we can use nature as a convenient standard, and the meter of our
rise and fall. It has this advantage as a witness, it cannot be
debauched. When man curses, nature still testifies to truth and love. We
may, therefore, safely study the mind in nature, because we cannot
steadily gaze on it in mind; as we explore the face of the sun in a
pool, when our eyes cannot brook his direct splendors.
It seems to me, therefore, that it were some suitable pæan, if we should
piously celebrate this hour by exploring the _method of nature_. Let us
see _that_, as nearly as we can, and try how far it is transferable to
the literary life. Every earnest glance we give to the realities around
us, with intent to learn, proceeds from a holy impulse, and is really
songs of praise. What difference can it make whether it take the shape
of exhortation, or of passionate exclamation, or of scientific
statement? These are forms merely. Through them we express, at last, the
fact, that God has done thus or thus.
In treating a subject so large, in which we must necessarily appeal to
the intuition, and aim much more to suggest, then to describe, I know it
is not easy to speak with the precision attainable on topics of less
scope. I do not wish in attempting to paint a man, to describe an
air-fed, unimpassioned, impossible ghost. My eyes and ears are revolted
by any neglect of the physical facts, the limitations of man. And yet
one who conceives the true order of nature, and beholds the visible as
proceeding from the invisible, cannot state his thought, without seeming
to those who study the physical laws, to do them some injustice. There
is an intrinsic defect in the organ. Language overstates. Statements of
the infinite, are usually felt to be unjust to the finite, and
blasphemous. Empedocles undoubtedly spoke a truth of thought, when he
said, “I am God;” but the moment it was out of his mouth, it became a
lie to the ear; and the world revenged itself for the seeming arrogance,
by the good story about his shoe. How can I hope for better hap in my
attempts to enunciate spiritual facts? Yet let us hope, that as far as
we receive the truth, so far shall we be felt by every true person to
say what is just.
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it? That rushing stream
will not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature in a corner;
never find the end of a thread; never tell where to set the first stone.
The bird hastens to lay her egg: the egg hastens to be a bird. The
wholeness we admire in the order of the world, is the result of infinite
distribution. Its smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch of the
cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation. Every natural fact
is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also,
and from every emanation is a new emanation. If anything could stand
still, it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted,
and if it were a mind, would be crazed; as insane persons are those who
hold fast to one thought, and do not flow with the course of nature. Not
the cause, but an ever novel effect, nature descends always from above.
It is unbroken obedience. The beauty of these fair objects is imported
into them from a metaphysical and eternal spring. In all animal and
vegetable forms, the physiologist concedes that no chemistry, no
mechanics, can account for the facts, but a mysterious principle of life
must be assumed, which not only inhabits the organ, but makes the organ.
How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert
an atom,--in graceful succession, in equal fulness, in balanced beauty,
the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like
a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will
not be dissected, nor unravelled, nor shown. Away profane philosopher!
seekest thou in nature the cause? This refers to that, and that to the
next, and the next to the third, and everything refers. Thou must ask in
another mood, thou must feel it and love it, thou must behold it in a
spirit as grand as that by which it exists, ere thou canst know the law.
Known it will not be, but gladly beloved and enjoyed.
The simultaneous life throughout the whole body, the equal serving of
innumerable ends without the least emphasis or preference to any, but
the steady degradation of each to the success of all, allows the
understanding no place to work. Nature can only be conceived as existing
to a universal and not to a particular end, to a universe of ends, and
not to one,--a work of _ecstasy_, to be represented by a circular
movement, as intention might be signified by a straight line of definite
length. Each effect strengthens every other. There is no revolt in all
the kingdoms from the commonweal: no detachment of an individual. Hence
the catholic character which makes every leaf an exponent of the world.
When we behold the landscape in a poetic spirit, we do not reckon
individuals. Nature knows neither palm nor oak, but only vegetable life,
which sprouts into forests, and festoons the globe with a garland of
grasses and vines.
That no single end may be selected, and nature judged thereby, appears
from this, that if man himself be considered as the end, and it be
assumed that the final cause of the world is to make holy or wise or
beautiful men, we see that it has not succeeded. Read alternately in
natural and in civil history, a treatise of astronomy, for example, with
a volume of French _Memoires pour servir_. When we have spent our wonder
in computing this wasteful hospitality with which boon nature turns off
new firmaments without end into her wide common, as fast as the
madrepores make coral,--suns and planets hospitable to souls,--and then
shorten the sight to look into this court of Louis Quatorze, and see
the game that is played there,--duke and marshal, abbé and madame,--a
gambling table where each is laying traps for the other, where the end
is ever by some lie or fetch to outwit your rival and ruin him with this
solemn fop in wig and stars,--the king; one can hardly help asking if
this planet is a fair specimen of the so generous astronomy, and if so,
whether the experiment have not failed, and whether it be quite worth
while to make more, and glut the innocent space with so poor an article.
I think we feel not much otherwise if, instead of beholding foolish
nations, we take the great and wise men, the eminent souls, and narrowly
inspect their biography. None of them seen by himself--and his
performance compared with his promise or idea, will justify the cost of
that enormous apparatus of means by which this spotted and defective
person was at last procured.
To questions of this sort, nature replies, ‘I grow.’ All is nascent,
infant. When we are dizzied with the arithmetic of the savant toiling to
compute the length of her line, the return of her curve, we are steadied
by the perception that a great deal is doing; that all seems just begun;
remote aims are in active accomplishment. We can point nowhere to
anything final; but tendency appears on all hands: planet, system,
constellation, total nature is growing like a field of maize in July; is
becoming somewhat else; is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not
more strive to be man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends
to be a ring, a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars. Why should not
then these messieurs of Versailles strut and plot for tabourets and
ribbons, for a season, without prejudice to their faculty to run on
better errands by and by.
But nature seems further to reply, ‘I have ventured so great a stake as
my success, in no single creature. I have not yet arrived at any end.
The gardener aims to produce a fine peach or pear, but my aim is the
health of the whole tree,--root, stem, leaf, flower, and seed,--and by
no means the pampering of a monstrous pericarp at the expense of all the
other functions.’
In short, the spirit and peculiarity of that impression nature makes on
us, is this, that it does not exist to any one or to any number of
particular ends, but to numberless and endless benefit; that there is in
it no private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by
one superincumbent tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life
which in conscious beings we call _ecstasy_.
With this conception of the genius or method of nature, let us go back
to man. It is true, he pretends to give account of himself to himself,
but, at last, what has he to recite but the fact that there is a Life
not to be described or known otherwise than by possession? What account
can he give of his essence more than _so it was to be_? The _royal_
reason, the Grace of God seems the only description of our multiform but
ever identical fact. There is virtue, there is genius, there is success,
or there is not. There is the incoming or the receding of God: that is
all we can affirm; and we can show neither how nor why. Self-accusation,
remorse, and the didactic morals of self-denial and strife with sin, is
a view we are constrained by our constitution to take of the fact seen
from the platform of action; but seen from the platform of intellection,
there is nothing for us but praise and wonder.
The termination of the world in a man, appears to be the last victory of
intelligence. The universal does not attract us until housed in an
individual. Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? The ocean is
everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen with the shore
or the ship. Who would value any number of miles of Atlantic brine
bounded by lines of latitude and longitude? Confine it by granite
rocks, let it wash a shore where wise men dwell, and it is filled with
expression; and the point of greatest interest is where the land and
water meet. So must we admire in man, the form of the formless, the
concentration of the vast, the house of reason, the cave of memory. See
the play of thoughts! what nimble gigantic creatures are these! what
saurians, what palaiotheria shall be named with these agile movers? The
great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify the
beautiful variety of things and the firmament, his coat of stars,--was
but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man! thou palace of
sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and
the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, the geometry of the City of God;
in thy heart, the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong. An
individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form
and ripen. The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats
itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown
into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from
disorder into order. Each individual soul is such, in virtue of its
being a power to translate the world into some particular language of
its own; if not into a picture, a statue, or a dance,--why, then, into a
trade, an art, a science, a mode of living, a conversation, a character,
an influence. You admire pictures, but it is as impossible for you to
paint a right picture, as for grass to bear apples. But when the genius
comes, it makes fingers: it is pliancy, and the power of transferring
the affair in the street into oils and colors. Raphael must be born, and
Salvator must be born.
There is no attractiveness like that of a new man. The sleepy nations
are occupied with their political routine. England, France and America
read Parliamentary Debates, which no high genius now enlivens; and
nobody will read them who trusts his own eye: only they who are deceived
by the popular repetition of distinguished names. But when Napoleon
unrolls his map, the eye is commanded by original power. When Chatham
leads the debate, men may well listen, because they must listen. A man,
a personal ascendency is the only great phenomenon. When nature has work
to be done, she creates a genius to do it. Follow the great man, and you
shall see what the world has at heart in these ages. There is no omen
like that.
But what strikes us in the fine genius is that which belongs of right to
every one. A man should know himself for a necessary actor. A link was
wanting between two craving parts of nature, and he was hurled into
being as the bridge over that yawning need, the mediator betwixt two
else unmarriageable facts. His two parents held each of one of the
wants, and the union of foreign constitutions in him enables him to do
gladly and gracefully what the assembled human race could not have
sufficed to do. He knows his materials; he applies himself to his work;
he cannot read, or think, or look, but he unites the hitherto separated
strands into a perfect cord. The thoughts he delights to utter are the
reason of his incarnation? Is it for him to account himself cheap and
superfluous, or to linger by the wayside for opportunities? Did he not
come into being because something must be done which he and no other is
and does? If only he _sees_, the world will be visible enough. He need
not study where to stand, nor to put things in favorable lights; in him
is the light, from him all things are illuminated to their centre. What
patron shall he ask for employment and reward? Hereto was he born, to
deliver the thought of his heart from the universe to the universe, to
do an office which nature could not forego, nor he be discharged from
rendering, and then immerge again into the holy silence and eternity
out of which as a man he arose. God is rich, and many more men than one
he harbors in his bosom, biding their time and the needs and the beauty
of all. Is not this the theory of every man’s genius or faculty? Why
then goest thou as some Boswell or listening worshipper to this saint or
to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here art thou with whom so long
the universe travailed in labor; darest thou think meanly of thyself
whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite his ragged sides, to shoot
the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?
Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and
erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences
from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act.
The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life
which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends
are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But
there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the
life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run
away with the workman, the human with the divine. I conceive a man as
always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn his head and see the
speaker. In all the millions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the
face. As children in their play run behind each other, and seize one by
the ears and make him walk before them, so is the spirit our unseen
pilot. That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs all men,
and none ever caught a glimpse of its form. If the man will exactly obey
it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longer separate it from
himself in his thought, he shall seem to be it, he shall be it. If he
listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is taught him,
the sound swells to a ravishing music, he is borne away as with a flood,
he becomes careless of his food and of his house, he is the fool of
ideas, and leads a heavenly life. But if his eye is set on the things to
be done, and not on the truth that is still taught, and for the sake of
which the things are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last
is but a humming in his ears. His health and greatness consist in his
being the channel through which heaven flows to earth, in short, in the
fulness in which an ecstatical state takes place in him. It is pitiful
to be an artist, when, by forbearing to be artists, we might be vessels
filled with the divine overflowings, enriched by the circulations of
omniscience and omnipresence. Are there not moments in the history of
heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only
the Influenced, was God in distribution, God rushing into multiform
benefit? It is sublime to receive, sublime to love, but this lust of
imparting as from _us_, this desire to be loved, the wish to be
recognized as individuals,--is finite, comes of a lower strain.
Shall I say, then, that, as far as we can trace the natural history of
the soul, its health consists in the fulness of its reception,--call it
piety, call it veneration--in the fact, that enthusiasm is organized
therein. What is best in any work of art, but that part which the work
itself seems to require and do; that which the man cannot do again, that
which flows from the hour and the occasion, like the eloquence of men in
a tumultuous debate? It was always the theory of literature, that the
word of a poet was authoritative and final. He was supposed to be the
mouth of a divine wisdom. We rather envied his circumstance than his
talent. We too could have gladly prophesied standing in that place. We
so quote our Scriptures; and the Greeks so quoted Homer, Theognis,
Pindar, and the rest. If the theory has receded out of modern criticism,
it is because we have not had poets. Whenever they appear, they will
redeem their own credit.
This ecstatical state seems to direct a regard to the whole and not to
the parts; to the cause and not to the ends; to the tendency, and not to
the act. It respects genius and not talent; hope, and not possession:
the anticipation of all things by the intellect, and not the history
itself; art, and not works of art; poetry, and not experiment; virtue,
and not duties.
There is no office or function of man but is rightly discharged by this
divine method, and nothing that is not noxious to him if detached from
its universal relations. Is it his work in the world to study nature, or
the laws of the world? Let him beware of proposing to himself any end.
Is it for use? nature is debased, as if one looking at the ocean can
remember only the price of fish. Or is it for pleasure? he is mocked:
there is a certain infatuating air in woods and mountains which draws on
the idler to want and misery. There is something social and intrusive in
the nature of all things; they seek to penetrate and overpower, each the
nature of every other creature, and itself alone in all modes and
throughout space and spirit to prevail and possess. Every star in heaven
is discontented and insatiable. Gravitation and chemistry cannot content
them. Ever they woo and court the eye of every beholder. Every man who
comes into the world they seek to fascinate and possess, to pass into
his mind, for they desire to republish themselves in a more delicate
world than that they occupy. It is not enough that they are Jove, Mars,
Orion, and the North Star, in the gravitating firmament: they would have
such poets as Newton, Herschel and Laplace, that they may re-exist and
re-appear in the finer world of rational souls, and fill that realm with
their fame. So is it with all immaterial objects. These beautiful
basilisks set their brute, glorious eyes on the eye of every child, and,
if they can, cause their nature to pass through his wondering eyes into
him, and so all things are mixed.
Therefore man must be on his guard against this cup of enchantments, and
must look at nature with a supernatural eye. By piety alone, by
conversing with the cause of nature, is he safe and commands it. And
because all knowledge is assimilation to the object of knowledge, as the
power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the
description of it be. The poet must be a rhapsodist: his inspiration a
sort of bright casualty: his will in it only the surrender of will to
the Universal Power, which will not be seen face to face, but must be
received and sympathetically known. It is remarkable that we have out of
the deeps of antiquity in the oracles ascribed to the half fabulous
Zoroaster, a statement of this fact, which every lover and seeker of
truth will recognize. “It is not proper,” said Zoroaster, “to understand
the Intelligible with vehemence, but if you incline your mind, you will
apprehend it: not too earnestly, but bringing a pure and inquiring eye.
You will not understand it as when understanding some particular thing,
but with the flower of the mind. Things divine are not attainable by
mortals who understand sensual things, but only the light-armed arrive
at the summit.”
And because ecstasy is the law and cause of nature, therefore you cannot
interpret it in too high and deep a sense. Nature represents the best
meaning of the wisest man. Does the sunset landscape seem to you the
place of Friendship,--those purple skies and lovely waters the
amphitheatre dressed and garnished only for the exchange of thought and
love of the purest souls? It is that. All other meanings which base men
have put on it are conjectural and false. You cannot bathe twice in the
same river, said Heraclitus; and I add, a man never sees the same object
twice: with his own enlargement the object acquires new aspects.
Does not the same law hold for virtue? It is vitiated by too much will.
He who aims at progress, should aim at an infinite, not at a special
benefit. The reforms whose fame now fills the land with Temperance,
Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and
generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for
themselves as an end. To every reform, in proportion to its energy,
early disgusts are incident, so that the disciple is surprised at the
very hour of his first triumphs, with chagrins, and sickness, and a
general distrust: so that he shuns his associates, hates the enterprise
which lately seemed so fair, and meditates to cast himself into the arms
of that society and manner of life which he had newly abandoned with so
much pride and hope. Is it that he attached the value of virtue to some
particular practices, as, the denial of certain appetites in certain
specified indulgences, and, afterward, found himself still as wicked and
as far from happiness in that abstinence, as he had been in the abuse?
But the soul can be appeased not by a deed but by a tendency. It is in a
hope that she feels her wings. You shall love rectitude and not the
disuse of money or the avoidance of trade: an unimpeded mind, and not a
monkish diet; sympathy and usefulness, and not hoeing or coopering. Tell
me not how great your project is, the civil liberation of the world,
its conversion into a Christian church, the establishment of public
education, cleaner diet, a new division of labor and of land, laws of
love for laws of property;--I say to you plainly there is no end to
which your practical faculty can aim, so sacred or so large, that, if
pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence to
the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with
objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible to
the senses; then will it be a god always approached,--never touched;
always giving health. A man adorns himself with prayer and love, as an
aim adorns an action. What is strong but goodness, and what is energetic
but the presence of a brave man? The doctrine in vegetable physiology of
the _presence_, or the general influence of any substance over and above
its chemical influence, as of an alkali or a living plant, is more
predicable of man. You need not speak to me, I need not go where you
are, that you should exert magnetism on me. Be you only whole and
sufficient, and I shall feel you in every part of my life and fortune,
and I can as easily dodge the gravitation of the globe as escape your
influence.
But there are other examples of this total and supreme influence,
besides Nature and the conscience. “From the poisonous tree, the
world,” say the Brahmins, “two species of fruit are produced, sweet as
the waters of life, Love or the society of beautiful souls, and Poetry,
whose taste is like the immortal juice of Vishnu.” What is Love, and why
is it the chief good, but because it is an overpowering enthusiasm?
Never self-possessed or prudent, it is all abandonment. Is it not a
certain admirable wisdom, preferable to all other advantages, and
whereof all others are only secondaries and indemnities, because this is
that in which the individual is no longer his own foolish master, but
inhales an odorous and celestial air, is wrapped round with awe of the
object, blending for the time that object with the real and only good,
and consults every omen in nature with tremulous interest. When we speak
truly,--is not he only unhappy who is not in love? his fancied freedom
and self-rule--is it not so much death? He who is in love is wise and is
becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved,
drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it
possesses. Therefore if the object be not itself a living and expanding
soul, he presently exhausts it. But the love remains in his mind, and
the wisdom it brought him; and it craves a new and higher object. And
the reason why all men honor love, is because it looks up and not down;
aspires and not despairs.
And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the
flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or
copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from
within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward. Talent finds its
models, methods, and ends, in society, exists for exhibition, and goes
to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its
means and the style of its architecture from within, going abroad only
for audience, and spectator, as we adapt our voice and phrase to the
distance and character of the ear we speak to. All your learning of all
literatures would never enable you to anticipate one of its thoughts or
expressions, and yet each is natural and familiar as household words.
Here about us coils forever the ancient enigma, so old and so
unutterable. Behold! there is the sun, and the rain, and the rocks: the
old sun, the old stones. How easy were it to describe all this fitly;
yet no word can pass. Nature is a mute, and man, her articulate speaking
brother, lo! he also is a mute. Yet when Genius arrives, its speech is
like a river; it has no straining to describe, more than there is
straining in nature to exist. When thought is best, there is most of
it. Genius sheds wisdom like perfume, and advertises us that it flows
out of a deeper source than the foregoing silence, that it knows so
deeply and speaks so musically, because it is itself a mutation of the
thing it describes. It is sun and moon and wave and fire in music, as
astronomy is thought and harmony in masses of matter.
What is all history but the work of ideas, a record of the incomputable
energy which his infinite aspirations infuse into man? Has any thing
grand and lasting been done? Who did it? Plainly not any man, but all
men: it was the prevalence and inundation of an idea. What brought the
pilgrims here? One man says, civil liberty; another, the desire of
founding a church; and a third, discovers that the motive force was
plantation and trade. But if the Puritans could rise from the dust, they
could not answer. It is to be seen in what they were, and not in what
they designed; it was the growth and expansion of the human race, and
resembled herein the sequent Revolution, which was not begun in Concord,
or Lexington, or Virginia, but was the overflowing of the sense of
natural right in every clear and active spirit of the period. Is a man
boastful and knowing, and his own master?--we turn from him without
hope: but let him be filled with awe and dread before the Vast and the
Divine, which uses him glad to be used, and our eye is riveted to the
chain of events. What a debt is ours to that old religion which, in the
childhood of most of us, still dwelt like a sabbath morning in the
country of New England, teaching privation, self-denial and sorrow! A
man was born not for prosperity, but to suffer for the benefit of
others, like the noble rock-maple which all around our villages bleeds
for the service of man. Not praise, not men’s acceptance of our doing,
but the spirit’s holy errand through us absorbed the thought. How
dignified was this! How all that is called talents and success, in our
noisy capitals, becomes buzz and din before this man-worthiness! How our
friendships and the complaisances we use, shame us now! Shall we not
quit our companions, as if they were thieves and pot-companions, and
betake ourselves to some desert cliff of mount Katahdin, some unvisited
recess in Moosehead Lake, to bewail our innocency and to recover it, and
with it the power to communicate again with these sharers of a more
sacred idea?
And what is to replace for us the piety of that race? We cannot have
theirs: it glides away from us day by day, but we also can bask in the
great morning which rises forever out of the eastern sea, and be
ourselves the children of the light. I stand here to say, Let us worship
the mighty and transcendent Soul. It is the office, I doubt not, of this
age to annul that adulterous divorce which the superstition of many ages
has effected between the intellect and holiness. The lovers of goodness
have been one class, the students of wisdom another, as if either could
exist in any purity without the other. Truth is always holy, holiness
always wise. I will that we keep terms with sin, and a sinful literature
and society, no longer, but live a life of discovery and performance.
Accept the intellect, and it will accept us. Be the lowly ministers of
that pure omniscience, and deny it not before men. It will burn up all
profane literature, all base current opinions, all the false powers of
the world, as in a moment of time. I draw from nature the lesson of an
intimate divinity. Our health and reason as men needs our respect to
this fact, against the heedlessness and against the contradiction of
society. The sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force. His
nobility needs the assurance of this inexhaustible reserved power. How
great soever have been its bounties, they are a drop to the sea whence
they flow. If you say, ‘the acceptance of the vision is also the act of
God:’--I shall not seek to penetrate the mystery, I admit the force of
what you say. If you ask, ‘How can any rules be given for the attainment
of gifts so sublime?’ I shall only remark that the solicitations of this
spirit, as long as there is life, are never forborne. Tenderly,
tenderly, they woo and court us from every object in nature, from every
fact in life, from every thought in the mind. The one condition coupled
with the gift of truth is its use. That man shall be learned who
reduceth his learning to practice. Emanuel Swedenborg affirmed that it
was opened to him, “that the spirits who knew truth in this life, but
did it not, at death shall lose their knowledge.” “If knowledge,” said
Ali the Caliph, “calleth unto practice, well; if not, it goeth away.”
The only way into nature is to enact our best insight. Instantly we are
higher poets, and can speak a deeper law. Do what you know, and
perception is converted into character, as islands and continents were
built by invisible infusories, or, as these forest leaves absorb light,
electricity, and volatile gases, and the gnarled oak to live a thousand
years is the arrest and fixation of the most volatile and ethereal
currents. The doctrine of this Supreme Presence is a cry of joy and
exultation. Who shall dare think he has come late into nature, or has
missed anything excellent in the past, who seeth the admirable stars of
possibility, and the yet untouched continent of hope glittering with all
its mountains in the vast West? I praise with wonder this great reality,
which seems to drown all things in the deluge of its light. What man
seeing this, can lose it from his thoughts, or entertain a meaner
subject? The entrance of this into his mind seems to be the birth of
man. We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know
that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which
house to-day in this mortal frame, shall ever re-assemble in equal
activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a natural
history like that of this body you see before you; but this one thing I
know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick
with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that they circulate
through the Universe: before the world was, they were. Nothing can bar
them out, or shut them in, but they penetrate the ocean and land, space
and time, form and essence, and hold the key to universal nature. I draw
from this faith courage and hope. All things are known to the soul. It
is not to be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater than
it. Let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in her native
realm, and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich
as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn; they
are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goes out
through universal love to universal power.
MAN THE REFORMER.
A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE MECHANICS’ APPRENTICES’ LIBRARY ASSOCIATION,
BOSTON, JANUARY 25, 1841.
MAN THE REFORMER.
MR. PRESIDENT, AND GENTLEMEN,
I wish to offer to your consideration some thoughts on the particular
and general relations of man as a reformer. I shall assume that the aim
of each young man in this association is the very highest that belongs
to a rational mind. Let it be granted, that our life, as we lead it, is
common and mean; that some of those offices and functions for which we
were mainly created are grown so rare in society, that the memory of
them is only kept alive in old books and in dim traditions; that
prophets and poets, that beautiful and perfect men, we are not now, no,
nor have even seen such; that some sources of human instruction are
almost unnamed and unknown among us; that the community in which we live
will hardly bear to be told that every man should be open to ecstasy or
a divine illumination, and his daily walk elevated by intercourse with
the spiritual world. Grant all this, as we must, yet I suppose none of
my auditors will deny that we ought to seek to establish ourselves in
such disciplines and courses as will deserve that guidance and clearer
communication with the spiritual nature. And further, I will not
dissemble my hope, that each person whom I address has felt his own call
to cast aside all evil customs, timidities, and limitations, and to be
in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor, not
content to slip along through the world like a footman or a spy,
escaping by his nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as he can, but a
brave and upright man, who must find or cut a straight road to
everything excellent in the earth, and not only go honorably himself,
but make it easier for all who follow him, to go in honor and with
benefit.
In the history of the world the doctrine of Reform had never such scope
as at the present hour. Lutherans, Hernhutters, Jesuits, Monks, Quakers,
Knox, Wesley, Swedenborg, Bentham, in their accusations of society, all
respected something,--church or state, literature or history, domestic
usages, the market town, the dinner table, coined money. But now all
these and all things else hear the trumpet, and must rush to
judgment,--Christianity, the laws, commerce, schools, the farm, the
laboratory; and not a kingdom, town, statute, rite, calling, man, or
woman, but is threatened by the new spirit.
What if some of the objections whereby our institutions are assailed are
extreme and speculative, and the reformers tend to idealism; that only
shows the extravagance of the abuses which have driven the mind into the
opposite extreme. It is when your facts and persons grow unreal and
fantastic by too much falsehood, that the scholar flies for refuge to
the world of ideas, and aims to recruit and replenish nature from that
source. Let ideas establish their legitimate sway again in society, let
life be fair and poetic, and the scholars will gladly be lovers,
citizens, and philanthropists.
It will afford no security from the new ideas, that the old nations, the
laws of centuries, the property and institutions of a hundred cities,
are built on other foundations. The demon of reform has a secret door
into the heart of every lawmaker, of every inhabitant of every city. The
fact, that a new thought and hope have dawned in your breasts, should
apprize you that in the same hour a new light broke in upon a thousand
private hearts. That secret which you would fain keep,--as soon as you
go abroad, lo! there is one standing on the doorstep, to tell you the
same. There is not the most bronzed and sharpened money-catcher, who
does not, to your consternation, almost, quail and shake the moment he
hears a question prompted by the new ideas. We thought he had some
semblance of ground to stand upon, that such as he at least would die
hard; but he trembles and flees. Then the scholar says, ‘Cities and
coaches shall never impose on me again; for, behold every solitary dream
of mine is rushing to fulfilment. That fancy I had, and hesitated to
utter because you would laugh,--the broker, the attorney, the market-man
are saying the same thing. Had I waited a day longer to speak, I had
been too late. Behold, State Street thinks, and Wall Street doubts, and
begins to prophecy!’
It cannot be wondered at, that this general inquest into abuses should
arise in the bosom of society, when one considers the practical
impediments that stand in the way of virtuous young men. The young man,
on entering life, finds the way to lucrative employments blocked with
abuses. The ways of trade are grown selfish to the borders of theft, and
supple to the borders (if not beyond the borders) of fraud. The
employments of commerce are not intrinsically unfit for a man, or less
genial to his faculties, but these are now in their general course so
vitiated by derelictions and abuses at which all connive, that it
requires more vigor and resources than can be expected of every young
man, to right himself in them; he is lost in them; he cannot move hand
or foot in them. Has he genius and virtue? the less does he find them
fit for him to grow in, and if he would thrive in them, he must
sacrifice all the brilliant dreams of boyhood and youth as dreams; he
must forget the prayers of his childhood; and must take on him the
harness of routine and obsequiousness. If not so minded, nothing is left
him but to begin the world anew, as he does who puts the spade into the
ground for food. We are all implicated, of course, in this charge; it is
only necessary to ask a few questions as to the progress of the articles
of commerce from the fields where they grew, to our houses, to become
aware that we eat and drink and wear perjury and fraud in a hundred
commodities. How many articles of daily consumption are furnished us
from the West Indies; yet it is said, that, in the Spanish islands, the
venality of the officers of the government has passed into usage, and
that no article passes into our ships which has not been fraudulently
cheapened. In the Spanish islands, every agent or factor of the
Americans, unless he be a consul, has taken oath that he is a Catholic,
or has caused a priest to make that declaration for him. The
abolitionist has shown us our dreadful debt to the southern negro. In
the island of Cuba, in addition to the ordinary abominations of slavery,
it appears, only men are bought for the plantations, and one dies in ten
every year, of these miserable bachelors, to yield us sugar. I leave for
those who have the knowledge the part of sifting the oaths of our
custom-houses; I will not inquire into the oppression of the sailors; I
will not pry into the usages of our retail trade. I content myself with
the fact, that the general system of our trade, (apart from the blacker
traits, which, I hope, are exceptions denounced and unshared by all
reputable men,) is a system of selfishness; is not dictated by the high
sentiments of human nature; is not measured by the exact law of
reciprocity; much less by the sentiments of love and heroism, but is a
system of distrust, of concealment, of superior keenness, not of giving
but of taking advantage. It is not that which a man delights to unlock
to a noble friend; which he meditates on with joy and self-approval in
his hour of love and aspiration; but rather what he then puts out of
sight, only showing the brilliant result, and atoning for the manner of
acquiring, by the manner of expending it. I do not charge the merchant
or the manufacturer. The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no
individual. One plucks, one distributes, one eats. Every body partakes,
every body confesses,--with cap and knee volunteers his confession, yet
none feels himself accountable. He did not create the abuse; he cannot
alter it. What is he? an obscure private person who must get his bread.
That is the vice,--that no one feels himself called to act for man, but
only as a fraction of man. It happens therefore that all such ingenuous
souls as feel within themselves the irrepressible strivings of a noble
aim, who by the law of their nature must act simply, find these ways of
trade unfit for them, and they come forth from it. Such cases are
becoming more numerous every year.
But by coming out of trade you have not cleared yourself. The trail of
the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions and practices of
man. Each has it own wrongs. Each finds a tender and very intelligent
conscience a disqualification for success. Each requires of the
practitioner a certain shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness and
compliance, an acceptance of customs, a sequestration from the
sentiments of generosity and love, a compromise of private opinion and
lofty integrity. Nay, the evil custom reaches into the whole institution
of property, until our laws which establish and protect it, seem not to
be the issue of love and reason, but of selfishness. Suppose a man is so
unhappy as to be born a saint, with keen perceptions, but with the
conscience and love of an angel, and he is to get his living in the
world; he finds himself excluded from all lucrative works; he has no
farm, and he cannot get one; for, to earn money enough to buy one,
requires a sort of concentration toward money, which is the selling
himself for a number of years, and to him the present hour is as sacred
and inviolable as any future hour. Of course, whilst another man has no
land, my title to mine, your title to yours, is at once vitiated.
Inextricable seem to be the twinings and tendrils of this evil, and we
all involve ourselves in it the deeper by forming connections, by wives
and children, by benefits and debts.
Considerations of this kind have turned the attention of many
philanthropic and intelligent persons to the claims of manual labor, as
a part of the education of every young man. If the accumulated wealth of
the past generation is thus tainted,--no matter how much of it is
offered to us,--we must begin to consider if it were not the nobler part
to renounce it, and to put ourselves into primary relations with the
soil and nature, and abstaining from whatever is dishonest and unclean,
to take each of us bravely his part, with his own hands, in the manual
labor of the world.
But it is said, ‘What! will you give up the immense advantages reaped
from the division of labor, and set every man to make his own shoes,
bureau, knife, wagon, sails, and needle? This would be to put men back
into barbarism by their own act.’ I see no instant prospect of a
virtuous revolution; yet I confess, I should not be pained at a change
which threatened a loss of some of the luxuries or conveniences of
society, if it proceeded from a preference of the agricultural life out
of the belief, that our primary duties as men could be better discharged
in that calling. Who could regret to see a high conscience and a purer
taste exercising a sensible effect on young men in their choice of
occupation, and thinning the ranks of competition in the labors of
commerce, of law, and of state? It is easy to see that the inconvenience
would last but a short time. This would be great action, which always
opens the eyes of men. When many persons shall have done this, when the
majority shall admit the necessity of reform in all these institutions,
their abuses will be redressed, and the way will be open again to the
advantages which arise from the division of labor, and a man may select
the fittest employment for his peculiar talent again, without
compromise.
But quite apart from the emphasis which the times give to the doctrine,
that the manual labor of society ought to be shared among all the
members, there are reasons proper to every individual, why he should not
be deprived of it. The use of manual labor is one which never grows
obsolete, and which is inapplicable to no person. A man should have a
farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our
higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and
philosophy, in the work of our hands. We must have an antagonism in the
tough world for all the variety of our spiritual faculties, or they will
not be born. Manual labor is the study of the external world. The
advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with the
heir. When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such
an exhileration and health, that I discover that I have been defrauding
myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have
done with my own hands. But not only health, but education is in the
work. Is it possible that I who get indefinite quantities of sugar,
hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, and letter paper, by simply
signing my name once in three months to a cheque in favor of John Smith
and Co. traders, get the fair share of exercise to my faculties by that
act, which nature intended for me in making all these farfetched matters
important to my comfort? It is Smith himself, and his carriers, and
dealers, and manufacturers; it is the sailor, the hidedrogher, the
butcher, the negro, the hunter, and the planter, who have intercepted
the sugar of the sugar, and the cotton of the cotton. They have got the
education, I only the commodity. This were all very well if I were
necessarily absent, being detained by work of my own, like theirs, work
of the same faculties; then should I be sure of my hands and feet, but
now I feel some shame before my wood-chopper, my ploughman, and my cook,
for they have some sort of self-sufficiency, they can contrive without
my aid to bring the day and year round, but I depend on them, and have
not earned by use a right to my arms and feet.
Consider further the difference between the first and second owner of
property. Every species of property is preyed on by its own enemies, as
iron by rust; timber by rot; cloth by moths; provisions by mould,
putridity, or vermin; money by thieves; an orchard by insects; a planted
field by weeds and the inroad of cattle; a stock of cattle by hunger; a
road by rain and frost; a bridge by freshets. And whoever takes any of
these things into his possession, takes the charge of defending them
from this troop of enemies, or of keeping them in repair. A man who
supplies his own want, who builds a raft or a boat to go a fishing,
finds it easy to caulk it, or put in a thole-pin, or mend the rudder.
What he gets only as fast as he wants for his own ends, does not
embarrass him, or take away his sleep with looking after. But when he
comes to give all the goods he has year after year collected, in one
estate to his son, house, orchard, ploughed land, cattle, bridges,
hardware, wooden-ware, carpets, cloths, provisions, books, money, and
cannot give him the skill and experience which made or collected these,
and the method and place they have in his own life, the son finds his
hands full,--not to use these things,--but to look after them and defend
them from their natural enemies. To him they are not means, but masters.
Their enemies will not remit; rust, mould, vermin, rain, sun, freshet,
fire, all seize their own, fill him with vexation, and he is converted
from the owner into a watchman or a watch-dog to this magazine of old
and new chattels. What a change! Instead of the masterly good humor, and
sense of power, and fertility of resource in himself; instead of those
strong and learned hands, those piercing and learned eyes, that supple
body, and that mighty and prevailing heart, which the father had, whom
nature loved and feared, whom snow and rain, water and land, beast and
fish seemed all to know and to serve, we have now a puny, protected
person, guarded by walls and curtains, stoves and down beds, coaches,
and men servants and women-servants from the earth and the sky, and who,
bred to depend on all these, is made anxious by all that endangers those
possessions, and is forced to spend so much time in guarding them, that
he has quite lost sight of their original use, namely, to help him to
his ends,--to the prosecution of his love; to the helping of his friend,
to the worship of his God, to the enlargement of his knowledge, to the
serving of his country, to the indulgence of his sentiment, and he is
now what is called a rich man,--the menial and runner of his riches.
Hence it happens that the whole interest of history lies in the fortunes
of the poor. Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the victories of man over his
necessities, his march to the dominion of the world. Every man ought to
have this opportunity to conquer the world for himself. Only such
persons interest us, Spartans, Romans, Saracens, English, Americans, who
have stood in the jaws of need, and have by their own wit and might
extricated themselves, and made man victorious.
I do not wish to overstate this doctrine of labor, or insist that every
man should be a farmer, any more than that every man should be a
lexicographer. In general, one may say, that the husbandman’s is the
oldest, and most universal profession, and that where a man does not yet
discover in himself any fitness for one work more than another, this may
be preferred. But the doctrine of the Farm is merely this, that every
man ought to stand in primary relations with the work of the world,
ought to do it himself, and not to suffer the accident of his having a
purse in his pocket, or his having been bred to some dishonorable and
injurious craft, to sever him from those duties; and for this reason,
that labor is God’s education; that he only is a sincere learner, he
only can become a master, who learns the secrets of labor, and who by
real cunning extorts from nature its sceptre.
Neither would I shut my ears to the plea of the learned professions, of
the poet, the priest, the lawgiver, and men of study generally; namely,
that in the experience of all men of that class, the amount of manual
labor which is necessary to the maintenance of a family, indisposes and
disqualifies for intellectual exertion. I know, it often, perhaps
usually, happens, that where there is a fine organization apt for poetry
and philosophy, that individual finds himself compelled to wait on his
thoughts, to waste several days that he may enhance and glorify one; and
is better taught by a moderate and dainty exercise, such as rambling in
the fields, rowing, skating, hunting, than by the downright drudgery of
the farmer and the smith. I would not quite forget the venerable counsel
of the Egyptian mysteries, which declared that “there were two pairs of
eyes in man, and it is requisite that the pair which are beneath should
be closed, when the pair that are above them perceive, and that when the
pair above are closed, those which are beneath should be opened.” Yet I
will suggest that no separation from labor can be without some loss of
power and of truth to the seer himself; that, I doubt not, the faults
and vices of our literature and philosophy, their too great fineness,
effeminacy, and melancholy, are attributable to the enervated and sickly
habits of the literary class. Better that the book should not be quite
so good, and the bookmaker abler and better, and not himself often a
ludicrous contrast to all that he has written.
But granting that for ends so sacred and dear, some relaxation must be
had, I think, that if a man find in himself any strong bias to poetry,
to art, to the contemplative life, drawing him to these things with a
devotion incompatible with good husbandry, that man ought to reckon
early with himself, and, respecting the compensations of the Universe,
ought to ransom himself from the duties of economy, by a certain rigor
and privation in his habits. For privileges so rare and grand, let him
not stint to pay a great tax. Let him be a cænobite, a pauper, and if
need be, celibate also. Let him learn to eat his meals standing, and to
relish the taste of fair water and black bread. He may leave to others
the costly conveniences of housekeeping, and large hospitality, and the
possession of works of art. Let him feel that genius is a hospitality,
and that he who can create works of art needs not collect them. He must
live in a chamber, and postpone his self-indulgence, forewarned and
forearmed against that frequent misfortune of men of genius,--the taste
for luxury. This is the tragedy of genius,--attempting to drive along
the ecliptic with one horse of the heavens and one horse of the earth,
there is only discord and ruin and downfall to chariot and charioteer.
The duty that every man should assume his own vows, should call the
institutions of society to account, and examine their fitness to him,
gains in emphasis, if we look at our modes of living. Is our
housekeeping sacred and honorable? Does it raise and inspire us, or does
it cripple us instead? I ought to be armed by every part and function of
my household, by all my social function, by my economy, by my feasting,
by my voting, by my traffic. Yet I am almost no party to any of these
things. Custom does it for me, gives me no power therefrom, and runs me
in debt to boot. We spend our incomes for paint and paper, for a hundred
trifles, I know not what, and not for the things of a man. Our expense
is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; ’tis
not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so
much. Why needs any man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine
garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses and places of
amusement? Only for want of thought. Give his mind a new image, and he
flees into a solitary garden or garret to enjoy it, and is richer with
that dream, than the fee of a county could make him. But we are first
thoughtless, and then find that we are moneyless. We are first sensual,
and then must be rich. We dare not trust our wit for making our house
pleasant to our friend, and so we buy ice-creams. He is accustomed to
carpets, and we have not sufficient character to put floor cloths out of
his mind whilst he stays in the house, and so we pile the floor with
carpets. Let the house rather be a temple of the Furies of Lacedæmon,
formidable and holy to all, which none but a Spartan may enter or so
much as behold. As soon as there is faith, as soon as there is society,
comfits and cushions will be left to slaves. Expense will be inventive
and heroic. We shall eat hard and lie hard, we shall dwell like the
ancient Romans in narrow tenements, whilst our public edifices, like
theirs, will be worthy for their proportion of the landscape in which we
set them, for conversation, for art, for music, for worship. We shall be
rich to great purposes; poor only for selfish ones.
Now what help for these evils? How can the man who has learned but one
art, procure all the conveniences of life honestly? Shall we say all we
think?--Perhaps with his own hands. Suppose he collects or makes them
ill;--yet he has learned their lesson. If he cannot do that.--Then
perhaps he can go without. Immense wisdom and riches are in that. It is
better to go without, than to have them at too great a cost. Let us
learn the meaning of economy. Economy is a high, humane office, a
sacrament, when its aim is grand; when it is the prudence of simple
tastes, when it practised for freedom, or love, or devotion. Much of the
economy which we see in houses, is of a base origin, and is best kept
out of sight. Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast fowl to my
dinner on Sunday, is a baseness; but parched corn and a house with one
apartment, that I may be free of all perturbations, that I may be serene
and docile to what the mind shall speak, and girt and roadready for the
lowest mission of knowledge or goodwill, is frugality for gods and
heroes.
Can we not learn the lesson of self-help? Society is full of infirm
people, who incessantly summon others to serve them. They contrive
everywhere to exhaust for their single comfort the entire means and
appliances of that luxury to which our invention has yet attained.
Sofas, ottomans, stoves, wine, game-fowl, spices, perfumes, rides, the
theatre, entertainments,--all these they want, they need, and whatever
can be suggested more than these, they crave also, as if it was the
bread which should keep them from starving; and if they miss any one,
they represent themselves as the most wronged and most wretched persons
on earth. One must have been born and bred with them to know how to
prepare a meal for their learned stomach. Meantime, they never bestir
themselves to serve another person; not they! they have a great deal
more to do for themselves than they can possibly perform, nor do they
once perceive the cruel joke of their lives, but the more odious they
grow, the sharper is the tone of their complaining and craving. Can
anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one’s
self, so as to have somewhat left to give, instead of being always
prompt to grab? It is more elegant to answer one’s own needs, than to be
richly served; inelegant perhaps it may look to-day, and to a few, but
it is an elegance forever and to all.
I do not wish to be absurd and pedantic in reform. I do not wish to push
my criticism on the state of things around me to that extravagant mark,
that shall compel me to suicide, or to an absolute isolation from the
advantages of civil society. If we suddenly plant our foot, and say,--I
will neither eat nor drink nor wear nor touch any food or fabric which I
do not know to be innocent, or deal with any person whose whole manner
of life is not clear and rational, we shall stand still. Whose is so?
Not mine; not thine; not his. But I think we must clear ourselves each
one by the interrogation, whether we have earned our bread to-day by the
hearty contribution of our energies to the common benefit? and we must
not cease to _tend_ to the correction of these flagrant wrongs, by
laying one stone aright every day.
But the idea which now begins to agitate society has a wider scope than
our daily employments, our households, and the institutions of property.
We are to revise the whole of our social structure, the state, the
school, religion, marriage, trade, science, and explore their
foundations in our own nature; we are to see that the world not only
fitted the former men, but fits us, and to clear ourselves of every
usage which has not its roots in our own mind. What is a man born for
but to be a Reformer, a Re-maker of what man has made; a renouncer of
lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which
embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every
hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with
every pulsation a new life? Let him renounce everything which is not
true to him, and put all his practices back on their first thoughts, and
do nothing for which he has not the whole world for his reason. If there
are inconveniences, and what is called ruin in the way, because we have
so enervated and maimed ourselves, yet it would be like dying of
perfumes to sink in the effort to reattach the deeds of every day to the
holy and mysterious recesses of life.
The power, which is at once spring and regulator in all efforts of
reform, is the conviction that there is an infinite worthiness in man
which will appear at the call of worth, and that all particular reforms
are the removing of some impediment. Is it not the highest duty that man
should be honored in us? I ought not to allow any man, because he has
broad lands, to feel that he is rich in my presence. I ought to make him
feel that I can do without his riches, that I cannot be bought,--neither
by comfort, neither by pride,--and though I be utterly penniless, and
receiving bread from him, that he is the poor man beside me. And if, at
the same time, a woman or a child discovers a sentiment of piety, or a
juster way of thinking than mine, I ought to confess it by my respect
and obedience, though it go to alter my whole way of life.
The Americans have many virtues, but they have not Faith and Hope. I
know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of. We use these
words as if they were as obsolete as Selah and Amen. And yet they have
the broadest meaning, and the most cogent application to Boston in 1841.
The Americans have no faith. They rely on the power of a dollar; they
are deaf to a sentiment. They think you may talk the north wind down as
easily as raise society; and no class more faithless than the scholars
or intellectual men. Now if I talk with a sincere wise man, and my
friend, with a poet, with a conscientious youth who is still under the
dominion of his own wild thoughts, and not yet harnessed in the team of
society to drag with us all in the ruts of custom, I see at once how
paltry is all this generation of unbelievers, and what a house of cards
their institutions are, and I see what one brave man, what one great
thought executed might effect. I see that the reason of the distrust of
the practical man in all theory, is his inability to perceive the means
whereby we work. Look, he says, at the tools with which this world of
yours is to be built. As we cannot make a planet, with atmosphere,
rivers, and forests, by means of the best carpenters’ or engineers’
tools, with chemist’s laboratory and smith’s forge to boot,--so neither
can we ever construct that heavenly society you prate of, out of
foolish, sick, selfish men and women, such as we know them to be. But
the believer not only beholds his heaven to be possible, but already to
begin to exist,--not by the men or materials the statesman uses, but by
men transfigured and raised above themselves by the power of principles.
To principles something else is possible that transcends all the power
of expedients.
Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the
triumph of some enthusiasm. The victories of the Arabs after Mahomet,
who, in a few years, from a small and mean beginning, established a
larger empire than that of Rome, is an example. They did they knew not
what. The naked Derar, horsed on an idea, was found an overmatch for a
troop of Roman cavalry. The women fought like men, and conquered the
Roman men. They were miserably equipped, miserably fed. They were
Temperance troops. There was neither brandy nor flesh needed to feed
them. They conquered Asia, and Africa, and Spain, on barley. The Caliph
Omar’s walking-stick struck more terror into those who saw it, than
another man’s sword. His diet was barley bread; his sauce was salt; and
oftentimes by way of abstinence he ate his bread without salt. His drink
was water. His palace was built of mud; and when he left Medina to go to
the conquest of Jerusalem, he rode on a red camel, with a wooden platter
hanging at his saddle, with a bottle of water and two sacks, one holding
barley, and the other dried fruits.
But there will dawn ere long on our politics, on our modes of living, a
nobler morning than that Arabian faith, in the sentiment of love. This
is the one remedy for all ills, the panacea of nature. We must be
lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible. Our age and
history, for these thousand years, has not been the history of kindness,
but of selfishness. Our distrust is very expensive. The money we spend
for courts and prisons is very ill laid out. We make, by distrust, the
thief, and burglar, and incendiary, and by our court and jail we keep
him so. An acceptance of the sentiment of love throughout Christendom
for a season, would bring the felon and the outcast to our side in
tears, with the devotion of his faculties to our service. See this wide
society of laboring men and women. We allow ourselves to be served by
them, we live apart from them, and meet them without a salute in the
streets. We do not greet their talents, nor rejoice in their good
fortune, nor foster their hopes, nor in the assembly of the people vote
for what is dear to them. Thus we enact the part of the selfish noble
and king from the foundation of the world. See, this tree always bears
one fruit. In every household, the peace of a pair is poisoned by the
malice, slyness, indolence, and alienation of domestics. Let any two
matrons meet, and observe how soon their conversation turns on the
troubles from their “_help_,” as our phrase is. In every knot of
laborers, the rich man does not feel himself among his friends,--and at
the polls he finds them arrayed in a mass in distinct opposition to him.
We complain that the politics of masses of the people are controlled by
designing men, and led in opposition to manifest justice and the common
weal, and to their own interest. But the people do not wish to be
represented or ruled by the ignorant and base. They only vote for these,
because they were asked with the voice and semblance of kindness. They
will not vote for them long. They inevitably prefer wit and probity. To
use an Egyptian metaphor, it is not their will for any long time “to
raise the nails of wild beasts, and to depress the heads of the sacred
birds.” Let our affection flow out to our fellows; it would operate in a
day the greatest of all revolutions. It is better to work on
institutions by the sun than by the wind. The state must consider the
poor man, and all voices must speak for him. Every child that is born
must have a just chance for his bread. Let the amelioration in our laws
of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the
grasping of the poor. Let us begin by habitual imparting. Let us
understand that the equitable rule is, that no one should take more than
his share, let him be ever so rich. Let me feel that I am to be a lover.
I am to see to it that the world is the better for me, and to find my
reward in the act. Love would put a new face on this weary old world in
which we dwell as pagans and enemies too long, and it would warm the
heart to see how fast the vain diplomacy of statesmen, the impotence of
armies, and navies, and lines of defence, would be superseded by this
unarmed child. Love will creep where it cannot go, will accomplish that
by imperceptible methods,--being its own lever, fulcrum, and
power,--which force could never achieve. Have you not seen in the woods,
in a late autumn morning, a poor fungus or mushroom,--a plant without
any solidity, nay, that seemed nothing but a soft mush or jelly,--by its
constant, total, and inconceivably gentle pushing, manage to break its
way up through the frosty ground, and actually to lift a hard crust on
its head? It is the symbol of the power of kindness. The virtue of this
principle in human society in application to great interests is obsolete
and forgotten. Once or twice in history it has been tried in illustrious
instances, with signal success. This great, overgrown, dead Christendom
of ours still keeps alive at least the name of a lover of mankind. But
one day all men will be lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved in
the universal sunshine.
Will you suffer me to add one trait more to this portrait of man the
reformer? The mediator between the spiritual and the actual world should
have a great prospective prudence. An Arabian poet describes his hero by
saying,
“Sunshine was he
In the winter day;
And in the midsummer
Coolness and shade.”
He who would help himself and others, should not be a subject of
irregular and interrupted impulses of virtue, but a continent,
persisting, immovable person,--such as we have seen a few scattered up
and down in time for the blessing of the world; men who have in the
gravity of their nature a quality which answers to the fly-wheel in a
mill, which distributes the motion equably over all the wheels, and
hinders it from falling unequally and suddenly in destructive shocks. It
is better that joy should be spread over all the day in the form of
strength, than that it should be concentrated into ecstasies, full of
danger and followed by reactions. There is a sublime prudence, which is
the very highest that we know of man, which, believing in a vast
future,--sure of more to come than is yet seen,--postpones always the
present hour to the whole life; postpones talent to genius, and special
results to character. As the merchant gladly takes money from his income
to add to his capital, so is the great man very willing to lose
particular powers and talents, so that he gain in the elevation of his
life. The opening of the spiritual senses disposes men ever to greater
sacrifices, to leave their signal talents, their best means and skill of
procuring a present success their power and their fame,--to cast all
things behind, in the insatiable thirst for divine communications. A
purer fame, a greater power rewards the sacrifice. It is the conversion
of our harvest into seed. As the farmer casts into the ground the
finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold
nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we now possess into
means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon
for seeds.
LECTURE ON THE TIMES.
READ AT THE MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, DECEMBER 2, 1841.
LECTURE ON THE TIMES.
The Times, as we say--or the present aspects of our social state, the
Laws, Divinity, Natural Science, Agriculture, Art, Trade, Letters, have
their root in an invisible spiritual reality. To appear in these
aspects, they must first exist, or have some necessary foundation.
Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the
existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grand and immovable,
often unsuspected behind it in silence. The Times are the masquerade of
the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents
to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the
quarry out of which the genius of to-day is building up the Future. The
Times--the nations, manners, institutions, opinions, votes, are to be
studied as omens, as sacred leaves, whereon a weighty sense is
inscribed, if we have the wit and the love to search it out. Nature
itself seems to propound to us this topic, and to invite us to explore
the meaning of the conspicuous facts of the day. Everything that is
popular, it has been said, deserves the attention of the philosopher:
and this for the obvious reason, that although it may not be of any
worth in itself, yet it characterizes the people.
Here is very good matter to be handled, if we are skilful; an abundance
of important practical questions which it behoves us to understand. Let
us examine the pretensions of the attacking and defending parties. Here
is this great fact of Conservatism, entrenched in its immense redoubts,
with Himmaleh for its front, and Atlas for its flank, and Andes for its
rear, and the Atlantic and Pacific seas for its ditches and trenches,
which has planted its crosses, and crescents, and stars and stripes, and
various signs and badges of possession, over every rood of the planet,
and says, ‘I will hold fast; and to whom I will, will I give; and whom I
will, will I exclude and starve:’ so says Conservatism; and all the
children of men attack the colossus in their youth, and all, or all but
a few, bow before it when they are old. A necessity not yet commanded, a
negative imposed on the will of man by his condition, a deficiency in
his force, is the foundation on which it rests. Let this side be fairly
stated. Meantime, on the other part, arises Reform, and offers the
sentiment of Love as an overmatch to this material might. I wish to
consider well this affirmative side, which has a loftier port and reason
than heretofore, which encroaches on the other every day, puts it out of
countenance, out of reason, and out of temper, and leaves it nothing but
silence and possession.
The fact of aristocracy, with its two weapons of wealth and manners, is
as commanding a feature of the nineteenth century, and the American
republic, as of old Rome, or modern England. The reason and influence of
wealth, the aspect of philosophy and religion, and the tendencies which
have acquired the name of Transcendentalism in Old and New England; the
aspect of poetry, as the exponent and interpretation of these things;
the fuller development and the freer play of Character as a social and
political agent;--these and other related topics will in turn come to be
considered.
But the subject of the Times is not an abstract question. We talk of the
world, but we mean a few men and women. If you speak of the age, you
mean your own platoon of people, as Milton and Dante painted in colossal
their platoons, and called them Heaven and Hell. In our idea of
progress, we do not go out of this personal picture. We do not think the
sky will be bluer, or honey sweeter, or our climate more temperate, but
only that our relation to our fellows will be simpler and happier. What
is the reason to be given for this extreme attraction which _persons_
have for us, but that they are the Age? they are the results of the
Past; they are the heralds of the Future. They indicate,--these witty,
suffering, blushing, intimidating figures of the only race in which
there are individuals or changes, how far on the Fate has gone, and what
it drives at. As trees make scenery, and constitute the hospitality of
the landscape, so persons are the world to persons. A cunning mystery by
which the Great Desart of thoughts and of planets takes this engaging
form, to bring, as it would seem, its meanings nearer to the mind.
Thoughts walk and speak, and look with eyes at me, and transport me into
new and magnificent scenes. These are the pungent instructors who thrill
the heart of each of us, and make all other teaching formal and cold.
How I follow them with aching heart, with pining desire! I count myself
nothing before them. I would die for them with joy. They can do what
they will with me. How they lash us with those tongues! How they make
the tears start, make us blush and turn pale, and lap us in Elysium to
soothing dreams, and castles in the air! By tones of triumph; of dear
love; by threats; by pride that freezes; these have the skill to make
the world look bleak and inhospitable, or seem the nest of tenderness
and joy. I do not wonder at the miracles which poetry attributes to the
music of Orpheus, when I remember what I have experienced from the
varied notes of the human voice. They are an incalculable energy which
countervails all other forces in nature, because they are the channel of
supernatural powers. There is no interest or institution so poor and
withered, but if a new strong man could be born into it, he would
immediately redeem and replace it. A personal ascendency,--that is the
only fact much worth considering. I remember, some years ago, somebody
shocked a circle of friends of order here in Boston, who supposed that
our people were identified with their religious denominations, by
declaring that an eloquent man,--let him be of what sect soever,--would
be ordained at once in one of our metropolitan churches. To be sure he
would; and not only in ours, but in any church, mosque, or temple, on
the planet; but he must be eloquent, able to supplant our method and
classification, by the superior beauty of his own. Every fact we have
was brought here by some person; and there is none that will not change
and pass away before a person, whose nature is broader than the person
which the fact in question represents. And so I find the Age walking
about in happy and hopeful natures, in strong eyes, and pleasant
thoughts, and think I read it nearer and truer so, than in the
statute-book, or in the investments of capital, which rather celebrate
with mournful music the obsequies of the last age. In the brain of a
fanatic; in the wild hope of a mountain boy, called by city boys very
ignorant, because they do not know what his hope has certainly apprised
him shall be; in the love-glance of a girl; in the hair-splitting
conscientiousness of some eccentric person, who has found some new
scruple to embarrass himself and his neighbors withal; is to be found
that which shall constitute the times to come, more than in the now
organized and accredited oracles. For, whatever is affirmative and now
advancing, contains it. I think that only is real, which men love and
rejoice in; not what they tolerate, but what they choose; what they
embrace and avow, and not the things which chill, benumb, and terrify
them.
And so why not draw for these times a portrait gallery? Let us paint
the painters. Whilst the Daguerreotypist, with camera-obscura and silver
plate, begins now to traverse the land, let us set up our Camera also,
and let the sun paint the people. Let us paint the agitator, and
the man of the old school, and the member of Congress, and the
college-professor, the formidable editor, the priest, and reformer, the
contemplative girl, and the fair aspirant for fashion and opportunities,
the woman of the world who has tried and knows;--let us examine how well
she knows. Could we indicate the indicators, indicate those who most
accurately represent every good and evil tendency of the general mind,
in the just order which they take on this canvass of Time; so that all
witnesses should recognise a spiritual law, as each well known form
flitted for a moment across the wall, we should have a series of
sketches which would report to the next ages the color and quality of
ours.
Certainly, I think, if this were done, there would be much to admire as
well as to condemn; souls of as lofty a port, as any in Greek or Roman
fame, might appear; men of great heart, of strong hand, and of
persuasive speech; subtle thinkers, and men of wide sympathy, and an
apprehension which looks over all history, and everywhere recognises its
own. To be sure, there will be fragments and hints of men, more than
enough: bloated promises, which end in nothing or little. And then truly
great men, but with some defect in their composition, which neutralizes
their whole force. Here is a Damascus blade, such as you may search
through nature in vain to parallel, laid up on the shelf in some village
to rust and ruin. And how many seem not quite available for that idea
which they represent? Now and then comes a bolder spirit, I should
rather say, a more surrendered soul, more informed and led by God, which
is much in advance of the rest, quite beyond their sympathy, but
predicts what shall soon be the general fulness; as when we stand by the
seashore, whilst the tide is coming in, a wave comes up the beach far
higher than any foregoing one, and recedes; and for a long while none
comes up to that mark; but after some time the whole sea is there and
beyond it.
But we are not permitted to stand as spectators of the pageant which the
times exhibit; we are parties also, and have a responsibility which is
not to be declined. A little while this interval of wonder and
comparison is permitted us, but to the end that we shall play a manly
part. As the solar system moves forward in the heavens, certain stars
open before us, and certain stars close up behind us; so is man’s life.
The reputations that were great and inaccessible change and tarnish. How
great were once Lord Bacon’s dimensions! he is now reduced almost to the
middle height; and many another star has turned out to be a planet or an
asteroid: only a few are the fixed stars which have no parallax, or none
for us. The change and decline of old reputations are the gracious marks
of our own growth. Slowly, like light of morning, it steals on us, the
new fact, that we, who were pupils or aspirants, are now society: do
compose a portion of that head and heart we are wont to think worthy of
all reverence and heed. We are the representatives of religion and
intellect, and stand in the light of Ideas, whose rays stream through us
to those younger and more in the dark. What further relations we
sustain, what new lodges we are entering, is now unknown. To-day is a
king in disguise. To-day always looks mean to the thoughtless, in the
face of an uniform experience, that all good and great and happy actions
are made up precisely of these blank to-days. Let us not be so deceived.
Let us unmask the king as he passes. Let us not inhabit times of
wonderful and various promise without divining their tendency. Let us
not see the foundations of nations, and of a new and better order of
things laid, with roving eyes, and an attention preoccupied with
trifles.
The two omnipresent parties of History, the party of the Past and the
party of the Future, divide society to-day as of old. Here is the
innumerable multitude of those who accept the state and the church from
the last generation, and stand on no argument but possession. They have
reason also, and, as I think, better reason than is commonly stated. No
Burke, no Metternich has yet done full justice to the side of
conservatism. But this class, however large, relying not on the
intellect but on the instinct, blends itself with the brute forces of
nature, is respectable only as nature is, but the individuals have no
attraction for us. It is the dissenter, the theorist, the aspirant, who
is quitting this ancient domain to embark on seas of adventure, who
engages our interest. Omitting then for the present all notice of the
stationary class, we shall find that the movement party divides itself
into two classes, the actors, and the students.
The actors constitute that great army of martyrs who, at least in
America, by their conscience and philanthropy, occupy the ground which
Calvinism occupied in the last age, and compose the visible church of
the existing generation. The present age will be marked by its harvest
of projects for the reform of domestic, civil, literary, and
ecclesiastical institutions. The leaders of the crusades against War,
Negro slavery, Intemperance, Government based on force, Usages of trade,
Court and Custom-house Oaths, and so on to the agitators on the system
of Education and the laws of Property, are the right successors of
Luther, Knox, Robinson, Fox, Penn, Wesley, and Whitfield. They have the
same virtues and vices; the same noble impulse, and the same bigotry.
These movements are on all accounts important; they not only check the
special abuses, but they educate the conscience and the intellect of the
people. How can such a question as the Slave-trade be agitated for forty
years by all the Christian nations, without throwing great light on
ethics into the general mind? The fury, with which the slave-trader
defends every inch of his bloody deck, and his howling auction-platform,
is a trumpet to alarm the ear of mankind, to wake the dull, and drive
all neutrals to take sides, and to listen to the argument and the
verdict. The Temperance-question, which rides the conversation of ten
thousand circles, and is tacitly recalled at every public and at every
private table, drawing with it all the curious ethics of the Pledge, of
the Wine-question, of the equity of the manufacture and the trade, is a
gymnastic training to the casuistry and conscience of the time.
Antimasonry had a deep right and wrong, which gradually emerged to sight
out of the turbid controversy. The political questions touching the
Banks; the Tariff; the limits of the executive power; the right of the
constituent to instruct the representative; the treatment of the
Indians; the Boundary wars; the Congress of nations; are all pregnant
with ethical conclusions; and it is well if government and our social
order can extricate themselves from these alembics, and find themselves
still government and social order. The student of history will hereafter
compute the singular value of our endless discussion of questions, to
the mind of the period.
Whilst each of these aspirations and attempts of the people for the
Better is magnified by the natural exaggeration of its advocates, until
it excludes the others from sight, and repels discreet persons by the
unfairness of the plea, the movements are in reality all parts of one
movement. There is a perfect chain,--see it, or see it not,--of reforms
emerging from the surrounding darkness, each cherishing some part of the
general idea, and all must be seen, in order to do justice to any one.
Seen in this their natural connection, they are sublime. The conscience
of the Age demonstrates itself in this effort to raise the life of man
by putting it in harmony with his idea of the Beautiful and the Just.
The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the
idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our
imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily
employments. They appear to us unfit, unworthy of the faculties we spend
on them. In conversation with a wise man, we find ourselves apologizing
for our employments; we speak of them with shame. Nature, literature,
science, childhood, appear to us beautiful; but not our own daily work;
not the ripe fruit and considered labors of man. This beauty which the
fancy finds in everything else, certainly accuses the manner of life we
lead. Why should it be hateful? Why should it contrast thus with all
natural beauty? Why should it not be poetic, and invite and raise us? Is
there a necessity that the works of man should be sordid? Perhaps
not.--Out of this fair Idea in the mind springs the effort at the
Perfect. It is the interior testimony to a fairer possibility of life
and manners, which agitates society every day with the offer of some new
amendment. If we would make more strict inquiry concerning its origin,
we find ourselves rapidly approaching the inner boundaries of thought,
that term where speech becomes silence, and science conscience. For the
origin of all reform is in that mysterious fountain of the moral
sentiment in man, which, amidst the natural, ever contains the
supernatural for men. That is new and creative. That is alive. That
alone can make a man other than he is. Here or nowhere resides unbounded
energy, unbounded power.
The new voices in the wilderness crying “Repent,” have revived a hope,
which had wellnigh perished out of the world, that the thoughts of the
mind may yet, in some distant age, in some happy hour, be executed by
the hands. That is the hope, of which all other hopes are parts. For
some ages, these ideas have been consigned to the poet and musical
composer, to the prayers and the sermons of churches; but the thought,
that they can ever have any footing in real life, seems long since to
have been exploded by all judicious persons. Milton, in his best tract,
describes a relation between religion and the daily occupations, which
is true until this time.
“A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and to his profits, finds
religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many piddling accounts,
that of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock going upon that
trade. What should he do? Fain he would have the name to be religious;
fain he would bear up with his neighbors in that. What does he,
therefore, but resolve to give over toiling, and to find himself out
some factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing
of his religious affairs; some divine of note and estimation that must
be. To him he adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with
all the locks and keys, into his custody; and indeed makes the very
person of that man his religion; esteems his associating with him a
sufficient evidence and commendatory of his own piety. So that a man may
say, his religion is now no more within himself, but is become a
dividual moveable, and goes and comes near him, according as that good
man frequents the house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him,
lodges him; his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally
supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted, and after the
malmsey, or some well spiced beverage, and better breakfasted than he
whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs between
Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves
his kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his
religion.”
This picture would serve for our times. Religion was not invited to eat
or drink or sleep with us, or to make or divide an estate, but was a
holiday guest. Such omissions judge the church; as the compromise made
with the slaveholder, not much noticed at first, every day appears more
flagrant mischief to the American constitution. But now the purists are
looking into all these matters. The more intelligent are growing uneasy
on the subject of Marriage. They wish to see the character represented
also in that covenant. There shall be nothing brutal in it, but it shall
honor the man and the woman, as much as the most diffusive and universal
action. Grimly the same spirit looks into the law of Property, and
accuses men of driving a trade in the great boundless providence which
had given the air, the water, and the land to men, to use and not to
fence in and monopolize. It casts its eye on Trade, and Day Labor, and
so it goes up and down, paving the earth with eyes, destroying privacy
and making thorough-lights. Is all this for nothing? Do you suppose that
the reformers, which are preparing, will be as superficial as those we
know?
By the books it reads and translates, judge what books it will presently
print. A great deal of the profoundest thinking of antiquity, which had
become as good as obsolete for us, is now re-appearing in extracts and
allusions, and in twenty years will get all printed anew. See how daring
is the reading, the speculation, the experimenting of the time. If now
some genius shall arise who could unite these scattered rays! And always
such a genius does embody the ideas of each time. Here is great variety
and richness of mysticism, each part of which now only disgusts, whilst
it forms the sole thought of some poor Perfectionist or “Comer out,”
yet, when it shall be taken up as the garniture of some profound and
all-reconciling thinker, will appear the rich and appropriate decoration
of his robes.
These reforms are our contemporaries; they are ourselves; our own light,
and sight, and conscience; they only name the relation which subsists
between us and the vicious institutions which they go to rectify. They
are the simplest statements of man in these matters; the plain right and
wrong. I cannot choose but allow and honor them. The impulse is good,
and the theory; the practice is less beautiful. The Reformers affirm the
inward life, but they do not trust it, but use outward and vulgar means.
They do not rely on precisely that strength which wins me to their
cause; not on love, not on a principle, but on men, on multitudes, on
circumstances, on money, on party; that is, on fear, on wrath, and
pride. The love which lifted men to the sight of these better ends, was
the true and best distinction of this time, the disposition to trust a
principle more than a material force. I think _that_ the soul of reform;
the conviction, that not sensualism, not slavery, not war, not
imprisonment, not even government, are needed,--but in lieu of them all,
reliance on the sentiment of man, which will work best the more it is
trusted; not reliance on numbers, but, contrariwise, distrust of
numbers, and the feeling that then are we strongest, when most private
and alone. The young men, who have been vexing society for these last
years with regenerative methods, seem to have made this mistake; they
all exaggerated some special means, and all failed to see that the
Reform of Reforms must be accomplished without means.
The Reforms have their high origin in an ideal justice, but they do not
retain the purity of an idea. They are quickly organized in some low,
inadequate form, and present no more poetic image to the mind, than the
evil tradition which they reprobated. They mix the fire of the moral
sentiment with personal and party heats, with measureless exaggerations,
and the blindness that prefers some darling measure to justice and
truth. Those, who are urging with most ardor what are called the
greatest benefits of mankind, are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men,
and affect us as the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also. I
think the work of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done
around him; but when I have seen it near, I do not like it better. It is
done in the same way, it is done profanely, not piously; by management,
by tactics, and clamor. It is a buzz in the ear. I cannot feel any
pleasure in sacrifices which display to me such partiality of character.
We do not want actions, but men; not a chemical drop of water, but rain;
the spirit that sheds and showers actions, countless, endless actions.
You have on some occasion played a bold part. You have set your heart
and face against society, when you thought it wrong, and returned it
frown for frown. Excellent: now can you afford to forget it, reckoning
all your action no more than the passing of your hand through the air,
or a little breath of your mouth? The world leaves no track in space,
and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea. To the youth
diffident of his ability, and full of compunction at his unprofitable
existence, the temptation is always great to lend himself to public
movements, and as one of a party accomplish what he cannot hope to
effect alone. But he must resist the degradation of a man to a measure.
I must act with truth, though I should never come to act, as you call
it, with effect. I must consent to inaction. A patience which is grand;
a brave and cold neglect of the offices which prudence exacts, so it be
done in a deep upper piety; a consent to solitude and inaction, which
proceeds out of an unwillingness to violate character, is the century
which makes the gem. Whilst therefore I desire to express the respect
and joy I feel before this sublime connection of reforms, now in their
infancy around us, I urge the more earnestly the paramount duties of
self-reliance. I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my
sense of the sacredness of private integrity. All men, all things, the
state, the church, yea the friends of the heart are phantasms and unreal
beside the sanctuary of the heart. With so much awe, with so much fear,
let it be respected.
The great majority of men, unable to judge of any principle until its
light falls on a fact, are not aware of the evil that is around them,
until they see it in some gross form, as in a class of intemperate men,
or slaveholders, or soldiers, or fraudulent persons. Then they are
greatly moved; and magnifying the importance of that wrong, they fancy
that if that abuse were redressed, all would go well, and they fill the
land with clamor to correct it. Hence the missionary and other religious
efforts. If every island and every house had a Bible, if every child was
brought into the Sunday School, would the wounds of the world heal, and
man be upright?
But the man of ideas, accounting the circumstance nothing, judges of the
commonwealth from the state of his own mind. ‘If,’ he says, ‘I am
selfish, then is there slavery, or the effort to establish it, wherever
I go. But if I am just, then is there no slavery, let the laws say what
they will. For if I treat all men as gods, how to me can there be any
such thing as a slave?’ But how frivolous is your war against
circumstances. This denouncing philanthropist is himself a slaveholder
in every word and look. Does he free me? Does he cheer me? He is the
state of Georgia, or Alabama, with their sanguinary slave-laws, walking
here on our northeastern shores. We are all thankful he has no more
political power, as we are fond of liberty ourselves. I am afraid our
virtue is a little geographical. I am not mortified by our vice; that is
obduracy; it colors and palters, it curses and swears, and I can see to
the end of it; but, I own, our virtue makes me ashamed; so sour and
narrow, so thin and blind, virtue so vice-like. Then again, how trivial
seem the contests of the abolitionist, whilst he aims merely at the
circumstance of the slave. Give the slave the least elevation of
religious sentiment, and he is no slave: you are the slave: he not only
in his humility feels his superiority, feels that much deplored
condition of his to be a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too. He
is the master. The exaggeration, which our young people make of his
wrongs, characterizes themselves. What are no trifles to them, they
naturally think are no trifles to Pompey.
We say, then, that the reforming movement is sacred in its origin; in
its management and details timid and profane. These benefactors hope to
raise man by improving his circumstances: by combination of that which
is dead, they hope to make something alive. In vain. By new infusions
alone of the spirit by which he is made and directed, can he be re-made
and reinforced. The sad Pestalozzi, who shared with all ardent spirits
the hope of Europe on the outbreak of the French Revolution, after
witnessing its sequel, recorded his conviction, that “the amelioration
of outward circumstances will be the effect, but can never be the means
of mental and moral improvement.” Quitting now the class of actors, let
us turn to see how it stands with the other class of which we spoke,
namely, the students.
A new disease has fallen on the life of man. Every Age, like every human
body, has its own distemper. Other times have had war, or famine, or a
barbarism domestic or bordering, as their antagonism. Our forefathers
walked in the world and went to their graves, tormented with the fear of
Sin, and the terror of the Day of Judgment. These terrors have lost
their force, and our torment is Unbelief, the Uncertainty as to what we
ought to do; the distrust of the value of what we do, and the distrust
that the Necessity (which we all at last believe in) is fair and
beneficent. Our Religion assumes the negative form of rejection. Out of
love of the true, we repudiate the false: and the Religion is an
abolishing criticism. A great perplexity hangs like a cloud on the brow
of all cultivated persons, a certain imbecility in the best spirits,
which distinguishes the period. We do not find the same trait in the
Arabian, in the Hebrew, in Greek, Roman, Norman, English periods; no,
but in other men a natural firmness. The men did not see beyond the need
of the hour. They planted their foot strong, and doubted nothing. We
mistrust every step we take. We find it the worst thing about time, that
we know not what to do with it. We are so sharp-sighted that we can
neither work nor think, neither read Plato nor not read him.
Then there is what is called a too intellectual tendency. Can there be
too much intellect? We have never met with any such excess. But the
criticism, which is levelled at the laws and manners, ends in thought,
without causing a new method of life. The genius of the day does not
incline to a deed, but to a beholding. It is not that men do not wish to
act; they pine to be employed, but are paralyzed by the uncertainty what
they should do. The inadequacy of the work to the faculties, is the
painful perception which keeps them still. This happens to the best.
Then, talents bring their usual temptations, and the current literature
and poetry with perverse ingenuity draw us away from life to solitude
and meditation. This could well be borne, if it were great and
involuntary; if the men were ravished by their thought, and hurried into
ascetic extravagances. Society could then manage to release their
shoulder from its wheel, and grant them for a time this privilege of
sabbath. But they are not so. Thinking, which was a rage, is become an
art. The thinker gives me results, and never invites me to be present
with him at his invocation of truth, and to enjoy with him its
proceeding into his mind.
So little action amidst such audacious and yet sincere profession, that
we begin to doubt if that great revolution in the art of war, which has
made it a game of posts instead of a game of battles, has not operated
on Reform; whether this be not also a war of posts, a paper blockade, in
which each party is to display the utmost resources of his spirit and
belief, and no conflict occur; but the world shall take that course
which the demonstration of the truth shall indicate.
But we must pay for being too intellectual, as they call it. People are
not as light-hearted for it. I think men never loved life less. I
question if care and doubt ever wrote their names so legibly on the
faces of any population. This _Ennui_, for which we Saxons had no name,
this word of France has got a terrific significance. It shortens life,
and bereaves the day of its light. Old age begins in the nursery, and
before the young American is put into jacket and trowsers, he says, ‘I
want something which I never saw before;’ and ‘I wish I was not I.’ I
have seen the same gloom on the brow even of those adventurers from the
intellectual class, who had dived deepest and with most success into
active life. I have seen the authentic sign of anxiety and perplexity on
the greatest forehead of the state. The canker worms have crawled to the
topmost bough of the wild elm, and swing down from that. Is there less
oxygen in the atmosphere? What has checked in this age the animal
spirits which gave to our forefathers their bounding pulse?
But have a little patience with this melancholy humor. Their unbelief
arises out of a greater Belief; their inaction out of a scorn of
inadequate action. By the side of these men, the hot agitators have a
certain cheap and ridiculous air; they even look smaller than the
others. Of the two, I own, I like the speculators best. They have some
piety which looks with faith to a fair Future, unprofaned by rash and
unequal attempts to realize it. And truly we shall find much to console
us, when we consider the cause of their uneasiness. It is the love of
greatness, it is the need of harmony, the contrast of the dwarfish
Actual with the exorbitant Idea. No man can compare the ideas and
aspirations of the innovators of the present day, with those of former
periods, without feeling how great and high this criticism is. The
revolutions that impend over society are not now from ambition and
rapacity, from impatience of one or another form of government, but from
new modes of thinking, which shall recompose society after a new order,
which shall animate labor by love and science, which shall destroy the
value of many kinds of property, and replace all property within the
dominion of reason and equity. There was never so great a thought
laboring in the breasts of men, as now. It almost seems as if what was
aforetime spoken fabulously and hieroglyphically, was now spoken
plainly, the doctrine, namely, of the indwelling of the Creator in man.
The spiritualist wishes this only, that the spiritual principle should
be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible
applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything
unspiritual, that is, anything positive, dogmatic, or personal. The
excellence of this class consists in this, that they have believed;
that, affirming the need of new and higher modes of living and action,
they have abstained from the recommendation of low methods. Their fault
is that they have stopped at the intellectual perception; that their
will is not yet inspired from the Fountain of Love. But whose fault is
this? and what a fault, and to what inquiry does it lead! We have come
to that which is the spring of all power, of beauty and virtue, of art
and poetry; and who shall tell us according to what law its inspirations
and its informations are given or withholden?
I do not wish to be guilty of the narrowness and pedantry of inferring
the tendency and genius of the Age from a few and insufficient facts or
persons. Every age has a thousand sides and signs and tendencies; and it
is only when surveyed from inferior points of view, that great varieties
of character appear. Our time too is full of activity and performance.
Is there not something comprehensive in the grasp of a society which to
great mechanical invention, and the best institutions of property, adds
the most daring theories; which explores the subtlest and most universal
problems? At the manifest risk of repeating what every other Age has
thought of itself, we might say, we think the Genius of this Age more
philosophical than any other has been, righter in its aims, truer, with
less fear, less fable, less mixture of any sort.
But turn it how we will, as we ponder this meaning of the times, every
new thought drives us to the deep fact, that the Time is the child of
the Eternity. The main interest which any aspects of the Times can have
for us, is the great spirit which gazes through them, the light which
they can shed on the wonderful questions, What we are? and Whither we
tend? We do not wish to be deceived. Here we drift, like white sail
across the wild ocean, now bright on the wave, now darkling in the
trough of the sea;--but from what port did we sail? Who knows? Or to
what port are we bound? Who knows? There is no one to tell us but such
poor weather-tossed mariners as ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or
who have hoisted some signal, or floated to us some letter in a bottle
from far. But what know they more than we? They also found themselves on
this wondrous sea. No; from the older sailors, nothing. Over all their
speaking-trumpets, the gray sea and the loud winds answer, Not in us;
not in Time. Where then but in Ourselves, where but in that Thought
through which we communicate with absolute nature, and are made aware
that, whilst we shed the dust of which we are built, grain by grain,
till it is all gone, the law which clothes us with humanity remains
anew? where, but in the intuitions which are vouchsafed us from within,
shall we learn the Truth? Faithless, faithless, we fancy that with the
dust we depart and are not; and do not know that the law and the
perception of the law are at last one; that only as much as the law
enters us, becomes us, we are living men,--immortal with the immortality
of this law. Underneath all these appearances, lies that which is, that
which lives, that which causes. This ever renewing generation of
appearances rests on a reality, and a reality that is alive.
To a true scholar the attraction of the aspects of nature, the
departments of life, and the passages of his experience, is simply the
information they yield him of this supreme nature which lurks within
all. That reality, that causing force is moral. The Moral Sentiment is
but its other name. It makes by its presence or absence right and wrong,
beauty and ugliness, genius or depravation. As the granite comes to the
surface, and towers into the highest mountains, and, if we dig down, we
find it below the superficial strata, so in all the details of our
domestic or civil life, is hidden the elemental reality, which ever and
anon comes to the surface, and forms the grand men, who are the leaders
and examples, rather than the companions of the race. The granite is
curiously concealed under a thousand formations and surfaces, under
fertile soils, and grasses, and flowers, under well-manured, arable
fields, and large towns and cities, but it makes the foundation of
these, and is always indicating its presence by slight but sure signs.
So is it with the Life of our life; so close does that also hide. I read
it in glad and in weeping eyes: I read it in the pride and in the
humility of people: it is recognized in every bargain and in every
complaisance, in every criticism, and in all praise: it is voted for at
elections; it wins the cause with juries; it rides the stormy eloquence
of the senate, sole victor; histories are written of it, holidays
decreed to it; statues, tombs, churches, built to its honor; yet men
seem to fear and to shun it, when it comes barely to view in our
immediate neighborhood.
For that reality let us stand: that let us serve: and for that speak.
Only as far as _that_ shines through them, are these times or any times
worth consideration. I wish to speak of the politics, education,
business, and religion around us, without ceremony or false deference.
You will absolve me from the charge of flippancy, or malignity, or the
desire to say smart things at the expense of whomsoever, when you see
that reality is all we prize, and that we are bound on our entrance into
nature to speak for that. Let it not be recorded in our own memories,
that in this moment of the Eternity, when we who were named by our
names, flitted across the light, we were afraid of any fact, or
disgraced the fair Day by a pusillanimous preference of our bread to our
freedom. What is the scholar, what is the man _for_, but for hospitality
to every new thought of his time? Have you leisure, power, property,
friends? you shall be the asylum and patron of every new thought, every
unproven opinion, every untried project, which proceeds out of good will
and honest seeking. All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will
of course at first defame what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day,
not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it: and the
highest compliment man ever receives from heaven, is the sending to him
its disguised and discredited angels.
THE CONSERVATIVE.
A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, DECEMBER 9, 1841.
THE CONSERVATIVE.
The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and
that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of
the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil
history. The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies and
monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician and
plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and accommodation to
new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in all countries and
times. The war rages not only in battle-fields, in national councils,
and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every man’s bosom with opposing
advantages every hour. On rolls the old world meantime, and now one, now
the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the
first time, under new names and hot personalities.
Such an irreconcilable antagonism, of course, must have a correspondent
depth of seat in the human constitution. It is the opposition of Past
and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason. It
is the primal antagonism, the appearance in trifles of the two poles of
nature.
There is a fragment of old fable which seems somehow to have been
dropped from the current mythologies, which may deserve attention, as it
appears to relate to this subject.
Saturn grew weary of sitting alone, or with none but the great Uranus or
Heaven beholding him, and he created an oyster. Then he would act again,
but he made nothing more, but went on creating the race of oysters. Then
Uranus cried, ‘a new work, O Saturn! the old is not good again.’
Saturn replied, ‘I fear. There is not only the alternative of making and
not making, but also of unmaking. Seest thou the great sea, how it ebbs
and flows? so is it with me; my power ebbs; and if I put forth my hands,
I shall not do, but undo. Therefore I do what I have done; I hold what I
have got; and so I resist Night and Chaos.’
‘O Saturn,’ replied Uranus, ‘thou canst not hold thine own, but by
making more. Thy oysters are barnacles and cockles, and with the next
flowing of the tide, they will be pebbles and sea-foam.’
‘I see,’ rejoins Saturn, ‘thou art in league with Night, thou art become
an evil eye; thou spakest from love; now thy words smite me with hatred.
I appeal to Fate, must there not be rest?’--‘I appeal to Fate also,’
said Uranus, ‘must there not be motion?’--But Saturn was silent, and
went on making oysters for a thousand years.
After that, the word of Uranus came into his mind like a ray of the sun,
and he made Jupiter; and then he feared again; and nature froze, the
things that were made went backward, and, to save the world, Jupiter
slew his father Saturn.
This may stand for the earliest account of a conversation on politics
between a Conservative and a Radical, which has come down to us. It is
ever thus. It is the counteraction of the centripetal and the
centrifugal forces. Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the
pause on the last movement. ‘That which is was made by God,’ saith
Conservatism. ‘He is leaving that, he is entering this other;’ rejoins
Innovation.
There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism,
joined with a certain superiority in its fact. It affirms because it
holds. Its fingers clutch the fact, and it will not open its eyes to see
a better fact. The castle, which conservatism is set to defend, is the
actual state of things, good and bad. The project of innovation is the
best possible state of things. Of course, conservatism always has the
worst of the argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity,
pleading that to change would be to deteriorate; it must saddle itself
with the mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny
the possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet;
whilst innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and
sure of final success. Conservatism stands on man’s confessed
limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on
circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of
the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself;
conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual and
imperious. We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter,
we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.
Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for
comfort, reform for truth. Conservatism is more candid to behold
another’s worth; reform more disposed to maintain and increase its own.
Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it
is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry. It
makes a great difference to your figure and to your thought, whether
your foot is advancing or receding. Conservatism never puts the foot
forward; in the hour when it does that, it is not establishment, but
reform. Conservatism tends to universal seeming and treachery, believes
in a negative fate; believes that men’s temper governs them; that for
me, it avails not to trust in principles; they will fail me; I must bend
a little; it distrusts nature; it thinks there is a general law without
a particular application,--law for all that does not include any one.
Reform in its antagonism inclines to asinine resistance, to kick with
hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated self-conceit; it runs to a
bodiless pretension, to unnatural refining and elevation, which ends in
hypocrisy and sensual reaction.
And so whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be safely
affirmed of these two metaphysical antagonists, that each is a good
half, but an impossible whole. Each exposes the abuses of the other, but
in a true society, in a true man, both must combine. Nature does not
give the crown of its approbation, namely, beauty, to any action or
emblem or actor, but to one which combines both these elements; not to
the rock which resists the waves from age to age, nor to the wave which
lashes incessantly the rock, but the superior beauty is with the oak
which stands with its hundred arms against the storms of a century, and
grows every year like a sapling; or the river which ever flowing, yet is
found in the same bed from age to age; or, greatest of all, the man who
has subsisted for years amid the changes of nature, yet has distanced
himself, so that when you remember what he was, and see what he is, you
say, what strides! what a disparity is here!
Throughout nature the past combines in every creature with the present.
Each of the convolutions of the sea-shell, each node and spine marks one
year of the fish’s life, what was the mouth of the shell for one season,
with the addition of new matter by the growth of the animal, becoming an
ornamental node. The leaves and a shell of soft wood are all that the
vegetation of this summer has made, but the solid columnar stem, which
lifts that bank of foliage into the air to draw the eye and to cool us
with its shade, is the gift and legacy of dead and buried years.
In nature, each of these elements being always present, each theory has
a natural support. As we take our stand on Necessity, or on Ethics,
shall we go for the conservative, or for the reformer. If we read the
world historically, we shall say, Of all the ages, the present hour and
circumstance is the cumulative result; this is the best throw of the
dice of nature that has yet been, or that is yet possible. If we see it
from the side of Will, or the Moral Sentiment, we shall accuse the Past
and the Present, and require the impossible of the Future.
But although this bifold fact lies thus united in real nature, and so
united that no man can continue to exist in whom both these elements do
not work, yet men are not philosophers, but are rather very foolish
children, who, by reason of their partiality, see everything in the most
absurd manner, and are the victims at all times of the nearest object.
There is even no philosopher who is a philosopher at all times. Our
experience, our perception is conditioned by the need to acquire in
parts and in succession, that is, with every truth a certain falsehood.
As this is the invariable method of our training, we must give it
allowance, and suffer men to learn as they have done for six
millenniums, a word at a time, to pair off into insane parties, and
learn the amount of truth each knows, by the denial of an equal amount
of truth. For the present, then, to come at what sum is attainable to
us, we must even hear the parties plead as parties.
That which is best about conservatism, that which, though it cannot be
expressed in detail, inspires reverence in all, is the Inevitable. There
is the question not only, what the conservative says for himself? but,
why must he say it? What insurmountable fact binds him to that side?
Here is the fact which men call Fate, and fate in dread degrees, fate
behind fate, not to be disposed of by the consideration that the
Conscience commands this or that, but necessitating the question,
whether the faculties of man will play him true in resisting the facts
of universal experience? For although the commands of the Conscience are
_essentially_ absolute, they are _historically_ limitary. Wisdom does
not seek a literal rectitude, but an useful, that is, a conditioned one,
such a one as the faculties of man and the constitution of things will
warrant. The reformer, the partisan loses himself in driving to the
utmost some specialty of right conduct, until his own nature and all
nature resist him; but Wisdom attempts nothing enormous and
disproportioned to its powers, nothing which it cannot perform or
nearly perform. We have all a certain intellection or presentiment of
reform existing in the mind, which does not yet descend into the
character, and those who throw themselves blindly on this lose
themselves. Whatever they attempt in that direction, fails, and reacts
suicidally on the actor himself. This is the penalty of having
transcended nature. For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot
with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is
the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.
Reform converses with possibilities, perchance with impossibilities; but
here is sacred fact. This also was true, or it could not be: it had life
in it, or it could not have existed; it has life in it, or it could not
continue. Your schemes may be feasible, or may not be, but this has the
endorsement of nature and a long friendship and cohabitation with the
powers of nature. This will stand until a better cast of the dice is
made. The contest between the Future and the Past is one between
Divinity entering, and Divinity departing. You are welcome to try your
experiments, and, if you can, to displace the actual order by that ideal
republic you announce, for nothing but God will expel God. But plainly
the burden of proof must lie with the projector. We hold to this, until
you can demonstrate something better.
The system of property and law goes back for its origin to barbarous and
sacred times; it is the fruit of the same mysterious cause as the
mineral or animal world. There is a natural sentiment and prepossession
in favor of age, of ancestors, of barbarous and aboriginal usages, which
is a homage to the element of necessity and divinity which is in them.
The respect for the old names of places, of mountains, and streams, is
universal. The Indian and barbarous name can never be supplanted without
loss. The ancients tell us that the gods loved the Ethiopians for their
stable customs; and the Egyptians and Chaldeans, whose origin could not
be explored, passed among the junior tribes of Greece and Italy for
sacred nations.
Moreover, so deep is the foundation of the existing social system, that
it leaves no one out of it. We may be partial, but Fate is not. All men
have their root in it. You who quarrel with the arrangements of society,
and are willing to embroil all, and risk the indisputable good that
exists, for the chance of better, live, move, and have your being in
this, and your deeds contradict your words every day. For as you cannot
jump from the ground without using the resistance of the ground, nor
put out the boat to sea, without shoving from the shore, nor attain
liberty without rejecting obligation, so you are under the necessity of
using the Actual order of things, in order to disuse it; to live by it,
whilst you wish to take away its life. The past has baked your loaf, and
in the strength of its bread you would break up the oven. But you are
betrayed by your own nature. You also are conservatives. However men
please to style themselves, I see no other than a conservative party.
You are not only identical with us in your needs, but also in your
methods and aims. You quarrel with my conservatism, but it is to build
up one of your own; it will have a new beginning, but the same course
and end, the same trials, the same passions; among the lovers of the new
I observe that there is a jealousy of the newest, and that the seceder
from the seceder is as damnable as the pope himself.
On these and the like grounds of general statement, conservatism plants
itself without danger of being displaced. Especially before this
_personal_ appeal, the innovator must confess his weakness, must confess
that no man is to be found good enough to be entitled to stand champion
for the principle. But when this great tendency comes to practical
encounters, and is challenged by young men, to whom it is no
abstraction, but a fact of hunger, distress, and exclusion from
opportunities, it must needs seem injurious. The youth, of course, is an
innovator by the fact of his birth. There he stands, newly born on the
planet, a universal beggar, with all the reason of things, one would
say, on his side. In his first consideration how to feed, clothe, and
warm himself, he is met by warnings on every hand, that this thing and
that thing have owners, and he must go elsewhere. Then he says; If I am
born in the earth, where is my part? have the goodness, gentlemen of
this world, to show me my wood-lot, where I may fell my wood, my field
where to plant my corn, my pleasant ground where to build my cabin.
‘Touch any wood, or field, or house-lot, on your peril,’ cry all the
gentlemen of this world; ‘but you may come and work in ours, for us, and
we will give you a piece of bread.’
And what is that peril?
Knives and muskets, if we meet you in the act; imprisonment, if we find
you afterward.
And by what authority, kind gentlemen?
By our law.
And your law,--is it just?
As just for you as it was for us. We wrought for others under this law,
and got our lands so.
I repeat the question, Is your law just?
Not quite just, but necessary. Moreover, it is juster now than it was
when we were born; we have made it milder and more equal.
I will none of your law, returns the youth; it encumbers me. I cannot
understand, or so much as spare time to read that needless library of
your laws. Nature has sufficiently provided me with rewards and sharp
penalties, to bind me not to transgress. Like the Persian noble of old,
I ask “that I may neither command nor obey.” I do not wish to enter into
your complex social system. I shall serve those whom I can, and they who
can will serve me. I shall seek those whom I love, and shun those whom I
love not, and what more can all your laws render me?
With equal earnestness and good faith, replies to this plaintiff an
upholder of the establishment, a man of many virtues:
Your opposition is feather-brained and over-fine. Young man, I have no
skill to talk with you, but look at me; I have risen early and sat late,
and toiled honestly, and painfully for very many years. I never dreamed
about methods; I laid my bones to, and drudged for the good I possess;
it was not got by fraud, nor by luck, but by work, and you must show me
a warrant like these stubborn facts in your own fidelity and labor,
before I suffer you, on the faith of a few fine words, to ride into my
estate, and claim to scatter it as your own.
Now you touch the heart of the matter, replies the reformer. To that
fidelity and labor, I pay homage. I am unworthy to arraign your manner
of living, until I too have been tried. But I should be more unworthy,
if I did not tell you why I cannot walk in your steps. I find this vast
network, which you call property, extended over the whole planet. I
cannot occupy the bleakest crag of the White Hills or the Alleghany
Range, but some man or corporation steps up to me to show me that it is
his. Now, though I am very peaceable, and on my private account could
well enough die, since it appears there was some mistake in my creation,
and that I have been _mis_sent to this earth, where all the seats were
already taken,--yet I feel called upon in behalf of rational nature,
which I represent, to declare to you my opinion, that, if the Earth is
yours, so also is it mine. All your aggregate existences are less to me
a fact than is my own; as I am born to the earth, so the Earth is given
to me, what I want of it to till and to plant; nor could I, without
pusillanimity, omit to claim so much. I must not only have a name to
live, I must live. My genius leads me to build a different manner of
life from any of yours. I cannot then spare you the whole world. I love
you better. I must tell you the truth practically; and take that which
you call yours. It is God’s world and mine; yours as much as you want,
mine as much as I want. Besides, I know your ways; I know the symptoms
of the disease. To the end of your power, you will serve this lie which
cheats you. Your want is a gulf which the possession of the broad earth
would not fill. Yonder sun in heaven you would pluck down from shining
on the universe, and make him a property and privacy, if you could; and
the moon and the north star you would quickly have occasion for in your
closet and bed-chamber. What you do not want for use, you crave for
ornament, and what your convenience could spare, your pride cannot.
On the other hand, precisely the defence which was set up for the
British Constitution, namely, that with all its admitted defects, rotten
boroughs and monopolies, it worked well, and substantial justice was
somehow done; the wisdom and the worth did get into parliament, and
every interest did by right, or might, or sleight, get represented;--the
same defence is set up for the existing institutions. They are not the
best; they are not just; and in respect to you, personally, O brave
young man! they cannot be justified. They have, it is most true, left
you no acre for your own, and no law but our law, to the ordaining of
which you were no party. But they do answer the end, they are really
friendly to the good; unfriendly to the bad; they second the
industrious, and the kind; they foster genius. They really have so much
flexibility as to afford your talent and character, on the whole, the
same chance of demonstration and success which they might have, if there
was no law and no property.
It is trivial and merely superstitious to say that nothing is given you,
no outfit, no exhibition; for in this institution of _credit_, which is
as universal as honesty and promise in the human countenance, always
some neighbor stands ready to be bread and land and tools and stock to
the young adventurer. And if in any one respect they have come short,
see what ample retribution of good they have made. They have lost no
time and spared no expense to collect libraries, museums, galleries,
colleges, palaces, hospitals, observatories, cities. The ages have not
been idle, nor kings slack, nor the rich niggardly. Have we not atoned
for this small offence (which we could not help) of leaving you no
right in the soil, by this splendid indemnity of ancestral and national
wealth? Would you have been born like a gipsy in a hedge, and preferred
your freedom on a heath, and the range of a planet which had no shed or
boscage to cover you from sun and wind,--to this towered and citied
world? to this world of Rome, and Memphis, and Constantinople, and
Vienna, and Paris, and London, and New York? For thee Naples, Florence,
and Venice, for thee the fair Mediterranean, the sunny Adriatic; for
thee both Indies smile; for thee the hospitable North opens its heated
palaces under the polar circle; for thee roads have been cut in every
direction across the land, and fleets of floating palaces with every
security for strength, and provision for luxury, swim by sail and by
steam through all the waters of this world. Every island for thee has a
town; every town a hotel. Though thou wast born landless, yet to thy
industry and thrift and small condescension to the established
usage,--scores of servants are swarming in every strange place with cap
and knee to thy command, scores, nay hundreds and thousands, for thy
wardrobe, thy table, thy chamber, thy library, thy leisure; and every
whim is anticipated and served by the best ability of the whole
population of each country. The king on the throne governs for thee,
and the judge judges; the barrister pleads; the farmer tills, the joiner
hammers, the postman rides. Is it not exaggerating a trifle to insist on
a formal acknowledgment of your claims, when these substantial
advantages have been secured to you? Now can your children be educated,
your labor turned to their advantage, and its fruits secured to them
after your death. It is frivolous to say, you have no acre, because you
have not a mathematically measured piece of land. Providence takes care
that you shall have a place, that you are waited for, and come
accredited; and, as soon as you put your gift to use, you shall have
acre or acre’s worth according to your exhibition of desert,--acre, if
you need land;--acre’s worth, if you prefer to draw, or carve, or make
shoes, or wheels, to the tilling of the soil.
Besides, it might temper your indignation at the supposed wrong which
society has done you, to keep the question before you, how society got
into this predicament? Who put things on this false basis? No single
man, but all men. No man voluntarily and knowingly; but it is the result
of that degree of culture there is in the planet. The order of things is
as good as the character of the population permits. Consider it as the
work of a great and beneficent and progressive necessity, which, from
the first pulsation of the first animal life, up to the present high
culture of the best nations, has advanced thus far. Thank the rude
fostermother though she has taught you a better wisdom than her own, and
has set hopes in your heart which shall be history in the next ages. You
are yourself the result of this manner of living, this foul compromise,
this vituperated Sodom. It nourished you with care and love on its
breast, as it had nourished many a lover of the right, and many a poet,
and prophet, and teacher of men. Is it so irremediably bad? Then again,
if the mitigations are considered, do not all the mischiefs virtually
vanish? The form is bad, but see you not how every personal character
reacts on the form, and makes it new? A strong person makes the law and
custom null before his own will. Then the principle of love and truth
reappears in the strictest courts of fashion and property. Under the
richest robes, in the darlings of the selectest circles of European or
American aristocracy, the strong heart will beat with love of mankind,
with impatience of accidental distinctions, with the desire to achieve
its own fate, and make every ornament it wears authentic and real.
Moreover, as we have already shown that there is no pure reformer, so
it is to be considered that there is no pure conservative, no man who
from the beginning to the end of his life maintains the defective
institutions; but he who sets his face like a flint against every
novelty, when approached in the confidence of conversation, in the
presence of friendly and generous persons, has also his gracious and
relenting motions, and espouses for the time the cause of man; and even
if this be a shortlived emotion, yet the remembrance of it in private
hours mitigates his selfishness and compliance with custom.
The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of
mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry
leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set
forth to go to Rome to reform the corruption of mankind. On his way he
encountered many travellers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins
of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants.
When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced
him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked
with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how
much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their
daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. ‘What!’ he
said, ‘and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with
cunning sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of
books about you?’--‘Look at our pictures and books, they said, and we
will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are
stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices made
in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last
evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers
discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times.’ Then
came in the men, and they said, ‘What cheer, brother? Does thy convent
want gifts?’ Then the friar Bernard went home swiftly with other
thoughts than he brought, saying, ‘This way of life is wrong, yet these
Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers; what
can I do?’
The reformer concedes that these mitigations exist, and that, if he
proposed comfort, he should take sides with the establishment. Your
words are excellent, but they do not tell the whole. Conservatism is
affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning juggle in riches. I
observe that they take somewhat for everything they give. I look bigger,
but am less; I have more clothes, but am not so warm; more armor, but
less courage; more books, but less wit. What you say of your planted,
builded and decorated world, is true enough, and I gladly avail myself
of its convenience; yet I have remarked that what holds in particular,
holds in general, that the plant Man does not require for his most
glorious flowering this pomp of preparation and convenience, but the
thoughts of some beggarly Homer who strolled, God knows when, in the
infancy and barbarism of the old world; the gravity and sense of some
slave Moses who leads away his fellow slaves from their masters; the
contemplation of some Scythian Anacharsis; the erect, formidable valor
of some Dorian townsmen in the town of Sparta; the vigor of Clovis the
Frank, and Alfred the Saxon, and Alaric the Goth, and Mahomet, Ali, and
Omar the Arabians, Saladin the Curd, and Othman the Turk, sufficed, to
build what you call society, on the spot and in the instant when the
sound mind in a sound body appeared. Rich and fine is your dress, O
conservatism! your horses are of the best blood; your roads are well cut
and well paved; your pantry is full of meats and your cellar of wines,
and a very good state and condition are you for gentlemen and ladies to
live under; but every one of these goods steals away a drop of my
blood. I want the necessity of supplying my own wants. All this costly
culture of yours is not necessary. Greatness does not need it. Yonder
peasant, who sits neglected there in a corner, carries a whole
revolution of man and nature in his head, which shall be a sacred
history to some future ages. For man is the end of nature; nothing so
easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no
lichen is so easily born; and he takes along with him and puts out from
himself the whole apparatus of society and condition _extempore_, as an
army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand,
creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for
feasting, for conversation, and for love.
These considerations, urged by those whose characters and whose fortunes
are yet to be formed, must needs command the sympathy of all reasonable
persons. But beside that charity which should make all adult persons
interested for the youth, and engage them to see that he has a free
field and fair play on his entrance into life, we are bound to see that
the society, of which we compose a part, does not permit the formation
or continuance of views and practices injurious to the honor and welfare
of mankind. The objection to conservatism, when embodied in a party,
is, that in its love of acts, it hates principles; it lives in the
senses, not in truth; it sacrifices to despair; it goes for
availableness in its candidate, not for worth; and for expediency in its
measures, and not for the right. Under pretence of allowing for
friction, it makes so many additions and supplements to the machine of
society, that it will play smoothly and softly, but will no longer grind
any grist.
The conservative party in the universe concedes that the radical would
talk sufficiently to the purpose, if we were still in the garden of
Eden; he legislates for man as he ought to be; his theory is right, but
he makes no allowance for friction; and this omission makes his whole
doctrine false. The idealist retorts, that the conservative falls into a
far more noxious error in the other extreme. The conservative assumes
sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total
legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and
flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea. Sickness
gets organized as well as health, the vice as well as the virtue. Now
that a vicious system of trade has existed so long, it has stereotyped
itself in the human generation, and misers are born. And now that
sickness has got such a foothold, leprosy has grown cunning, has got
into the ballot-box; the lepers outvote the clean; society has resolved
itself into a Hospital Committee, and all its laws are quarantine. If
any man resist, and set up a foolish hope he has entertained as good
against the general despair, society frowns on him, shuts him out of her
opportunities, her granaries, her refectories, her water and bread, and
will serve him a sexton’s turn. Conservatism takes as low a view of
every part of human action and passion. Its religion is just as bad; a
lozenge for the sick; a dolorous tune to beguile the distemper;
mitigations of pain by pillows and anodynes; always mitigations, never
remedies; pardons for sin, funeral honors,--never self-help, renovation,
and virtue. Its social and political action has no better aim; to keep
out wind and weather, to bring the day and year about, and make the
world last our day; not to sit on the world and steer it; not to sink
the memory of the past in the glory of a new and more excellent
creation; a timid cobbler and patcher, it degrades whatever it touches.
The cause of education is urged in this country with the utmost
earnestness,--on what ground? why on this, that the people have the
power, and if they are not instructed to sympathize with the
intelligent, reading, trading, and governing class, inspired with a
taste for the same competitions and prizes, they will upset the fair
pageant of Judicature, and perhaps lay a hand on the sacred muniments of
wealth itself, and new distribute the land. Religion is taught in the
same spirit. The contractors who were building a road out of Baltimore,
some years ago, found the Irish laborers quarrelsome and refractory, to
a degree that embarrassed the agents, and seriously interrupted the
progress of the work. The corporation were advised to call off the
police, and build a Catholic chapel; which they did; the priest
presently restored order, and the work went on prosperously. Such hints,
be sure, are too valuable to be lost. If you do not value the Sabbath,
or other religious institutions, give yourself no concern about
maintaining them. They have already acquired a market value as
conservators of property; and if priest and church-member should fail,
the chambers of commerce and the presidents of the Banks, the very
innholders and landlords of the county would muster with fury to their
support.
Of course, religion in such hands loses its essence. Instead of that
reliance, which the soul suggests on the eternity of truth and duty, men
are misled into a reliance on institutions, which, the moment they cease
to be the instantaneous creations of the devout sentiment, are
worthless. Religion among the low becomes low. As it loses its truth, it
loses credit with the sagacious. They detect the falsehood of the
preaching, but when they say so, all good citizens cry, Hush; do not
weaken the state, do not take off the strait jacket from dangerous
persons. Every honest fellow must keep up the hoax the best he can; must
patronize providence and piety, and wherever he sees anything that will
keep men amused, schools or churches or poetry, or picture-galleries or
music, or what not, he must cry “Hist-a-boy,” and urge the game on. What
a compliment we pay to the good Spirit with our superserviceable zeal!
But not to balance reasons for and against the establishment any longer,
and if it still be asked in this necessity of partial organization,
which party on the whole has the highest claims on our sympathy? I bring
it home to the private heart, where all such questions must have their
final arbitrement. How, will every strong and generous mind choose its
ground,--with the defenders of the old? or with the seekers of the new?
Which is that state which promises to edify a great, brave, and
beneficent man; to throw him on his resources, and tax the strength of
his character? On which part will each of us find himself in the hour
of health and of aspiration?
I understand well the respect of mankind for war, because that breaks up
the Chinese stagnation of society, and demonstrates the personal merits
of all men. A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is
so far valuable, that it puts every man on trial. The man of principle
is known as such, and even in the fury of faction is respected. In the
civil wars of France, Montaigne alone, among all the French gentry, kept
his castle gates unbarred, and made his personal integrity as good at
least as a regiment. The man of courage and resources is shown, and the
effeminate and base person. Those who rise above war, and those who fall
below it, it easily discriminates, as well as those, who, accepting its
rude conditions, keep their own head by their own sword.
But in peace and a commercial state we depend, not as we ought, on our
knowledge and all men’s knowledge that we are honest men, but we
cowardly lean on the virtue of others. For it is always at last the
virtue of some men in the society, which keeps the law in any reverence
and power. Is there not something shameful that I should owe my peaceful
occupancy of my house and field, not to the knowledge of my countrymen
that I am useful, but to their respect for sundry other reputable
persons, I know not whom, whose joint virtue still keep the law in good
odor?
It will never make any difference to a hero what the laws are. His
greatness will shine and accomplish itself unto the end, whether they
second him or not. If he have earned his bread by drudgery, and in the
narrow and crooked ways which were all an evil law had left him, he will
make it at least honorable by his expenditure. Of the past he will take
no heed; for its wrongs he will not hold himself responsible: he will
say, all the meanness of my progenitors shall not bereave me of the
power to make this hour and company fair and fortunate. Whatsoever
streams of power and commodity flow to me, shall of me acquire healing
virtue, and become fountains of safety. Cannot I too descend a Redeemer
into nature? Whosoever hereafter shall name my name, shall not record a
malefactor, but a benefactor in the earth. If there be power in good
intention, in fidelity, and in toil, the north wind shall be purer, the
stars in heaven shall glow with a kindlier beam, that I have lived. I am
primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to
demonstrate to all men that there is intelligence and good will at the
heart of things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings. These are my
engagements; how can your law further or hinder me in what I shall do to
men? On the other hand, these dispositions establish their relations to
me. Wherever there is worth, I shall be greeted. Wherever there are men,
are the objects of my study and love. Sooner or later all men will be my
friends, and will testify in all methods the energy of their regard. I
cannot thank your law for my protection. I protect it. It is not in its
power to protect me. It is my business to make myself revered. I depend
on my honor, my labor, and my dispositions, for my place in the
affections of mankind, and not on any conventions or parchments of
yours.
But if I allow myself in derelictions, and become idle and dissolute, I
quickly come to love the protection of a strong law, because I feel no
title in myself to my advantages. To the intemperate and covetous person
no love flows; to him mankind would pay no rent, no dividend, if force
were once relaxed; nay, if they could give their verdict, they would
say, that his self-indulgence and his oppression deserved punishment
from society, and not that rich board and lodging he now enjoys. The law
acts then as a screen of his unworthiness, and makes him worse the
longer it protects him.
In conclusion, to return from this alternation of partial views, to the
high platform of universal and necessary history, it is a happiness for
mankind that innovation has got on so far, and has so free a field
before it. The boldness of the hope men entertain transcends all former
experience. It calms and cheers them with the picture of a simple and
equal life of truth and piety. And this hope flowered on what tree? It
was not imported from the stock of some celestial plant, but grew here
on the wild crab of conservatism. It is much that this old and
vituperated system of things has borne so fair a child. It predicts that
amidst a planet peopled with conservatives, one Reformer may yet be
born.
THE TRANSCENDENTALIST.
A LECTURE READ AT THE MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, JANUARY, 1842.
THE TRANSCENDENTALIST.
The first thing we have to say respecting what are called _new views_
here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are not new, but
the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times. The
light is always identical in its composition, but it falls on a great
variety of objects, and by so falling is first revealed to us, not in
its own form, for it is formless, but in theirs; in like manner, thought
only appears in the objects it classifies. What is popularly called
Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842.
As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and
Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on
consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the
senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and
say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the
things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts,
on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man;
the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on
miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both
natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher
nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions
of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks
the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his
senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the
illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty
which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first
appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts,
degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken;
facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every
materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward
to be a materialist.
The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He does not
deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone. He
does not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of
this room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the
tapestry, as the _other end_, each being a sequel or completion of a
spiritual fact which nearly concerns him. This manner of looking at
things, transfers every object in nature from an independent and
anomalous position without there, into the consciousness. Even the
materialist Condillac, perhaps the most logical expounder of
materialism, was constrained to say, “Though we should soar into the
heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out of
ourselves; it is always our own thought that we perceive.” What more
could an idealist say?
The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at
fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes that his
life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but knows
where he stands, and what he does. Yet how easy it is to show him, that
he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need
only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions, to find his solid
universe growing dim and impalpable before his sense. The sturdy
capitalist, no matter how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite he
lays the foundations of his banking-house, or Exchange, must set it, at
last, not on a cube corresponding to the angles of his structure, but
on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot,
perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity,
and lies floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging bank and
banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not
whither,--a bit of bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small
cubic space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness. And this
wild balloon, in which his whole venture is embarked, is a just symbol
of his whole state and faculty. One thing, at least, he says is certain,
and does not give me the headache, that figures do not lie; the
multiplication table has been hitherto found unimpeachable truth; and,
moreover, if I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find it again
to-morrow;--but for these thoughts, I know not whence they are. They
change and pass away. But ask him why he believes that an uniform
experience will continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith
in his figures, and he will perceive that his mental fabric is built up
on just as strange and quaking foundations as his proud edifice of
stone.
In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the
external world, and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist
takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an
appearance. The materialist respects sensible masses, Society,
Government, social art, and luxury, every establishment, every mass,
whether majority of numbers, or extent of space, or amount of objects,
every social action. The idealist has another measure, which is
metaphysical, namely, the _rank_ which things themselves take in his
consciousness; not at all, the size or appearance. Mind is the only
reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse
reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena.
Although in his action overpowered by the laws of action, and so, warmly
coöperating with men, even preferring them to himself, yet when he
speaks scientifically, or after the order of thought, he is constrained
to degrade persons into representatives of truths. He does not respect
labor, or the products of labor, namely, property, otherwise than as a
manifold symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidelity of details the
laws of being; he does not respect government, except as far as it
reiterates the law of his mind; nor the church; nor charities; nor arts,
for themselves; but hears, as at a vast distance, what they say, as if
his consciousness would speak to him through a pantomimic scene. His
thought,--that is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold
the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing perpetually
outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of
him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a
subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid Unknown
Centre of him.
From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, this beholding
of all things in the mind, follow easily his whole ethics. It is simpler
to be self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is, to be
self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when
it does not violate me; but best when it is likest to solitude.
Everything real is self-existent. Everything divine shares the
self-existence of Deity. All that you call the world is the shadow of
that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of
thought, of those that are dependent and of those that are independent
of your will. Do not cumber yourself with fruitless pains to mend and
remedy remote effects; let the soul be erect, and all things will go
well. You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my
circumstance. Let any thought or motive of mine be different from that
they are, the difference will transform my condition and economy.
I--this thought which is called I,--is the mould into which the world is
poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays
the shape of the mould. You call it the power of circumstance, but it is
the power of me. Am I in harmony with myself? my position will seem to
you just and commanding. Am I vicious and insane? my fortunes will seem
to you obscure and descending. As I am, so shall I associate, and, so
shall I act; Cæsar’s history will paint out Cæsar. Jesus acted so,
because he thought so. I do not wish to overlook or to gainsay any
reality; I say, I make my circumstance: but if you ask me, Whence am I?
I feel like other men my relation to that Fact which cannot be spoken,
or defined, nor even thought, but which exists, and will exist.
The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine.
He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to
new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in
ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to
demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state
of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything
positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of
inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so
he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit
than its own.
In action, he easily incurs the charge of antinomianism by his avowal
that he, who has the Lawgiver, may with safety not only neglect, but
even contravene every written commandment. In the play of Othello, the
expiring Desdemona absolves her husband of the murder, to her attendant
Emilia. Afterwards, when Emilia charges him with the crime, Othello
exclaims,
“You heard her say herself it was not I.”
Emilia replies,
“The more angel she, and thou the blacker devil.”
Of this fine incident, Jacobi, the Transcendental moralist, makes use,
with other parallel instances, in his reply to Fichte. Jacobi, refusing
all measure of right and wrong except the determinations of the private
spirit, remarks that there is no crime but has sometimes been a virtue.
“I,” he says, “am that atheist, that godless person who, in opposition
to an imaginary doctrine of calculation, would lie as the dying
Desdemona lied; would lie and deceive, as Pylades when he personated
Orestes; would assassinate like Timoleon; would perjure myself like
Epaminondas, and John de Witt; I would resolve on suicide like Cato; I
would commit sacrilege with David; yea, and pluck ears of corn on the
Sabbath, for no other reason than that I was fainting for lack of food.
For, I have assurance in myself, that, in pardoning these faults
according to the letter, man exerts the sovereign right which the
majesty of his being confers on him; he sets the seal of his divine
nature to the grace he accords.”[A]
[A] Coleridge’s Translation.
In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human thought
or virtue, any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment; any
extravagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it as most in nature. The
oriental mind has always tended to this largeness. Buddhism is an
expression of it. The Buddhist who thanks no man, who says, “do not
flatter your benefactors,” but who, in his conviction that every good
deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the
benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a
Transcendentalist.
You will see by this sketch that there is no such thing as a
Transcendental _party_; that there is no pure Transcendentalist; that
we know of none but prophets and heralds of such a philosophy; that all
who by strong bias of nature have leaned to the spiritual side in
doctrine, have stopped short of their goal. We have had many harbingers
and forerunners; but of a purely spiritual life, history has afforded no
example. I mean, we have yet no man who has leaned entirely on his
character, and eaten angels’ food; who, trusting to his sentiments,
found life made of miracles; who, working for universal aims, found
himself fed, he knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew
not how, and yet it was done by his own hands. Only in the instinct of
the lower animals, we find the suggestion of the methods of it, and
something higher than our understanding. The squirrel hoards nuts, and
the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus
provided for without selfishness or disgrace.
Shall we say, then, that Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess
of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity,
excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction of
his wish. Nature is transcendental, exists primarily, necessarily, ever
works and advances, yet takes no thought for the morrow. Man owns the
dignity of the life which throbs around him in chemistry, and tree, and
animal, and in the involuntary functions of his own body; yet he is
balked when he tries to fling himself into this enchanted circle, where
all is done without degradation. Yet genius and virtue predict in man
the same absence of private ends, and of condescension to circumstances,
united with every trait and talent of beauty and power.
This way of thinking, falling on Roman times, made Stoic philosophers;
falling on despotic times, made patriot Catos and Brutuses; falling on
superstitious times, made prophets and apostles; on popish times, made
protestants and ascetic monks, preachers of Faith against the preachers
of Works; on prelatical times, made Puritans and Quakers; and falling on
Unitarian and commercial times, makes the peculiar shades of Idealism
which we know.
It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the
present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that
term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical
philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the
intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by
showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative
forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience
was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he
denominated them _Transcendental_ forms. The extraordinary profoundness
and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his
nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent, that whatever
belongs to the class of intuitive thought, is popularly called at the
present day _Transcendental_.
Although, as we have said, there is no pure Transcendentalist, yet the
tendency to respect the intuitions, and to give them, at least in our
creed, all authority over our experience, has deeply colored the
conversation and poetry of the present day; and the history of genius
and of religion in these times, though impure, and as yet not incarnated
in any powerful individual, will be the history of this tendency.
It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that
many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the
common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake
themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which
no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold
themselves aloof: they feel the disproportion between their faculties
and the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and
perish of ennui, to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions
as the city can propose to them. They are striking work, and crying out
for somewhat worthy to do! What they do, is done only because they are
overpowered by the humanities that speak on all sides; and they consent
to such labor as is open to them, though to their lofty dream the
writing of Iliads or Hamlets, or the building of cities or empires seems
drudgery.
Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and these
must. The question, which a wise man and a student of modern history
will ask, is, what that kind is? And truly, as in ecclesiastical history
we take so much pains to know what the Gnostics, what the Essenes, what
the Manichees, and what the Reformers believed, it would not misbecome
us to inquire nearer home, what these companions and contemporaries of
ours think and do, at least so far as these thoughts and actions appear
to be not accidental and personal, but common to many, and the
inevitable flower of the Tree of Time. Our American literature and
spiritual history are, we confess, in the optative mood; but whoso knows
these seething brains, these admirable radicals, these unsocial
worshippers, these talkers who talk the sun and moon away, will believe
that this heresy cannot pass away without leaving its mark.
They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely;
they repel influences; they shun general society; they incline to shut
themselves in their chamber in the house, to live in the country rather
than in the town, and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude.
Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes
to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declareth all to be unfit to
be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will
retaliate. Meantime, this retirement does not proceed from any whim on
the part of these separators; but if any one will take pains to talk
with them, he will find that this part is chosen both from temperament
and from principle; with some unwillingness, too, and as a choice of the
less of two evils; for these persons are not by nature melancholy, sour,
and unsocial,--they are not stockish or brute,--but joyous; susceptible,
affectionate; they have even more than others a great wish to be loved.
Like the young Mozart, they are rather ready to cry ten times a day,
“But are you sure you love me?” Nay, if they tell you their whole
thought, they will own that love seems to them the last and highest
gift of nature; that there are persons whom in their hearts they daily
thank for existing,--persons whose faces are perhaps unknown to them,
but whose fame and spirit have penetrated their solitude,--and for whose
sake they wish to exist. To behold the beauty of another character,
which inspires a new interest in our own; to behold the beauty lodged in
a human being, with such vivacity of apprehension, that I am instantly
forced home to inquire if I am not deformity itself: to behold in
another the expression of a love so high that it assures
itself,--assures itself also to me against every possible casualty
except my unworthiness;--these are degrees on the scale of human
happiness, to which they have ascended; and it is a fidelity to this
sentiment which has made common association distasteful to them. They
wish a just and even fellowship, or none. They cannot gossip with you,
and they do not wish, as they are sincere and religious, to gratify any
mere curiosity which you may entertain. Like fairies, they do not wish
to be spoken of. Love me, they say, but do not ask who is my cousin and
my uncle. If you do not need to hear my thought, because you can read it
in my face and behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset.
If you cannot divine it, you would not understand what I say. I will
not molest myself for you. I do not wish to be profaned.
And yet, it seems as if this loneliness, and not this love, would
prevail in their circumstances, because of the extravagant demand they
make on human nature. That, indeed, constitutes a new feature in their
portrait, that they are the most exacting and extortionate critics.
Their quarrel with every man they meet, is not with his kind, but with
his degree. There is not enough of him,--that is the only fault. They
prolong their privilege of childhood in this wise, of doing
nothing,--but making immense demands on all the gladiators in the lists
of action and fame. They make us feel the strange disappointment which
overcasts every human youth. So many promising youths, and never a
finished man! The profound nature will have a savage rudeness; the
delicate one will be shallow, or the victim of sensibility; the richly
accomplished will have some capital absurdity; and so every piece has a
crack. ’Tis strange, but this masterpiece is the result of such an
extreme delicacy, that the most unobserved flaw in the boy will
neutralize the most aspiring genius, and spoil the work. Talk with a
seaman of the hazards to life in his profession, and he will ask you,
“Where are the old sailors? do you not see that all are young men?” And
we, on this sea of human thought, in like manner inquire, Where are the
old idealists? where are they who represented to the last generation
that extravagant hope, which a few happy aspirants suggest to ours? In
looking at the class of counsel, and power, and wealth, and at the
matronage of the land, amidst all the prudence and all the triviality,
one asks, Where are they who represented genius, virtue, the invisible
and heavenly world, to these? Are they dead,--taken in early ripeness to
the gods,--as ancient wisdom foretold their fate? Or did the high idea
die out of them, and leave their unperfumed body as its tomb and tablet,
announcing to all that the celestial inhabitant, who once gave them
beauty, had departed? Will it be better with the new generation? We
easily predict a fair future to each new candidate who enters the lists,
but we are frivolous and volatile, and by low aims and ill example do
what we can to defeat this hope. Then these youths bring us a rough but
effectual aid. By their unconcealed dissatisfaction, they expose our
poverty, and the insignificance of man to man. A man is a poor limitary
benefactor. He ought to be a shower of benefits--a great influence,
which should never let his brother go, but should refresh old merits
continually with new ones; so that, though absent, he should never be
out of my mind, his name never far from my lips; but if the earth should
open at my side, or my last hour were come, his name should be the
prayer I should utter to the Universe. But in our experience, man is
cheap, and friendship wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our
friends in their absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter
comes not, they let us go. These exacting children advertise us of our
wants. There is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you
only this one compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they
severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and
persist in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they
terrible friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in
awe; and what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been
without service to the race of man.
With this passion for what is great and extraordinary, it cannot be
wondered at, that they are repelled by vulgarity and frivolity in
people. They say to themselves, It is better to be alone than in bad
company. And it is really a wish to be met,--the wish to find society
for their hope and religion,--which prompts them to shun what is called
society. They feel that they are never so fit for friendship, as when
they have quitted mankind, and taken themselves to friend. A picture, a
book, a favorite spot in the hills or the woods, which they can people
with the fair and worthy creation of the fancy, can give them often
forms so vivid, that these for the time shall seem real, and society the
illusion.
But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from
the conversation, but from the labors of the world; they are not good
citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part
of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the
public charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprises of
education, of missions foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the
slave-trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to
vote. The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not
mean sloth: they had as lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he
is a Transcendentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and can never do
anything for humanity. What right, cries the good world, has the man of
genius to retreat from work, and indulge himself? The popular literary
creed seems to be, ‘I am a sublime genius; I ought not therefore to
labor.’ But genius is the power to labor better and more availably.
Deserve thy genius: exalt it. The good, the illuminated, set apart from
the rest, censuring their dulness and vices, as if they thought that, by
sitting very grand in their chairs, the very brokers, attorneys, and
congressmen would see the error of their ways, and flock to them. But
the good and wise must learn to act, and carry salvation to the
combatants and demagogues in the dusty arena below.
On the part of these children, it is replied, that life and their
faculty seem to them gifts too rich to be squandered on such trifles as
you propose to them. What you call your fundamental institutions, your
great and holy causes, seem to them great abuses, and, when nearly seen,
paltry matters. Each ‘Cause,’ as it is called,--say Abolition,
Temperance, say Calvinism, or Unitarianism,--becomes speedily a little
shop, where the article, let it have been at first never so subtle and
ethereal, is now made up into portable and convenient cakes, and
retailed in small quantities to suit purchasers. You make very free use
of these words ‘great’ and ‘holy,’ but few things appear to them such.
Few persons have any magnificence of nature to inspire enthusiasm, and
the philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery. As to
the general course of living, and the daily employments of men, they
cannot see much virtue in these, since they are parts of this vicious
circle; and, as no great ends are answered by the men, there is nothing
noble in the arts by which they are maintained. Nay, they have made the
experiment, and found that, from the liberal professions to the coarsest
manual labor, and from the courtesies of the academy and the college to
the conventions of the cotillon-room and the morning call, there is a
spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates a frightful
skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim.
Unless the action is necessary, unless it is adequate, I do not wish to
perform it. I do not wish to do one thing but once. I do not love
routine. Once possessed of the principle, it is equally easy to make
four forty thousand applications of it. A great man will be content to
have indicated in any the slightest manner his perception of the
reigning Idea of his time, and will leave to those who like it the
multiplication of examples. When he has hit the white, the rest may
shatter the target. Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life
is. Every moment of a hero so raises and cheers us, that a twelvemonth
is an age. All that the brave Xanthus brings home from his wars, is the
recollection that, at the storming of Samos, “in the heat of the battle,
Pericles smiled on me, and passed on to another detachment.” It is the
quality of the moment, not the number of days, of events, or of actors,
that imports.
New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you want
the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the labor.
We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do
not like your work.
‘Then,’ says the world, ‘show me your own.’
‘We have none.’
‘What will you do, then?’ cries the world.
‘We will wait.’
‘How long?’
‘Until the Universe rises up and calls us to work.’
‘But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.’
‘Be it so: I can sit in a corner and _perish_, (as you call it,) but I
will not move until I have the highest command. If no call should come
for years, for centuries, then I know that the want of the Universe is
the attestation of faith by my abstinence. Your virtuous projects, so
called, do not cheer me. I know that which shall come will cheer me. If
I cannot work, at least I need not lie. All that is clearly due to-day
is not to lie. In other places, other men have encountered sharp trials,
and have behaved themselves well. The martyrs were sawn asunder, or hung
alive on meat-hooks. Cannot we screw our courage to patience and truth,
and without complaint, or even with good-humor, await our turn of action
in the Infinite Counsels?’
But, to come a little closer to the secret of these persons, we must
say, that to them it seems a very easy matter to answer the objections
of the man of the world, but not so easy to dispose of the doubts and
objections that occur to themselves. They are exercised in their own
spirit with queries, which acquaint them with all adversity, and with
the trials of the bravest heroes. When I asked them concerning their
private experience, they answered somewhat in this wise: It is not to be
denied that there must be some wide difference between my faith and
other faith; and mine is a certain brief experience, which surprised me
in the highway or in the market, in some place, at some time,--whether
in the body or out of the body, God knoweth,--and made me aware that I
had played the fool with fools all this time, but that law existed for
me and for all; that to me belonged trust, a child’s trust and
obedience, and the worship of ideas, and I should never be fool more.
Well, in the space of an hour, probably, I was let down from this
height; I was at my old tricks, the selfish member of a selfish society.
My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When
shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeing an Universe
which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for
continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.
These two states of thought diverge every moment, and stand in wild
contrast. To him who looks at his life from these moments of
illumination, it will seem that he skulks and plays a mean, shiftless,
and subaltern part in the world. That is to be done which he has not
skill to do, or to be said which others can say better, and he lies by,
or occupies his hands with some plaything, until his hour comes again.
Much of our reading, much of our labor, seems mere waiting: it was not
that we were born for. Any other could do it as well, or better. So
little skill enters into these works, so little do they mix with the
divine life, that it really signifies little what we do, whether we turn
a grindstone, or ride, or run, or make fortunes, or govern the state.
The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives,
of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very
little relation to each other, never meet and measure each other: one
prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all
infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two
discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves. Yet, what is my
faith? What am I? What but a thought of serenity and independence, an
abode in the deep blue sky? Presently the clouds shut down again; yet we
retain the belief that this petty web we weave will at last be overshot
and reticulated with veins of the blue, and that the moments will
characterize the days. Patience, then, is for us, is it not? Patience,
and still patience. When we pass, as presently we shall, into some new
infinitude, out of this Iceland of negations, it will please us to
reflect that, though we had few virtues or consolations, we bore with
our indigence, nor once strove to repair it with hypocrisy or false heat
of any kind.
But this class are not sufficiently characterized, if we omit to add
that they are lovers and worshippers of Beauty. In the eternal trinity
of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, each in its perfection including the
three, they prefer to make Beauty the sign and head. Something of the
same taste is observable in all the moral movements of the time, in the
religious and benevolent enterprises. They have a liberal, even an
æsthetic spirit. A reference to Beauty in action sounds, to be sure, a
little hollow and ridiculous in the ears of the old church. In politics,
it has often sufficed, when they treated of justice, if they kept the
bounds of selfish calculation. If they granted restitution, it was
prudence which granted it. But the justice which is now claimed for the
black, and the pauper, and the drunkard is for Beauty,--is for a
necessity to the soul of the agent, not of the beneficiary. I say, this
is the tendency, not yet the realization. Our virtue totters and trips,
does not yet walk firmly. Its representatives are austere; they preach
and denounce; their rectitude is not yet a grace. They are still liable
to that slight taint of burlesque which, in our strange world, attaches
to the zealot. A saint should be as dear as the apple of the eye. Yet we
are tempted to smile, and we flee from the working to the speculative
reformer, to escape that same slight ridicule. Alas for these days of
derision and criticism! We call the Beautiful the highest, because it
appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good, and
the heartlessness of the true.--They are lovers of nature also, and
find an indemnity in the inviolable order of the world for the violated
order and grace of man.
There is, no doubt, a great deal of well-founded objection to be spoken
or felt against the sayings and doings of this class, some of whose
traits we have selected; no doubt, they will lay themselves open to
criticism and to lampoons, and as ridiculous stories will be to be told
of them as of any. There will be cant and pretension; there will be
subtilty and moonshine. These persons are of unequal strength, and do
not all prosper. They complain that everything around them must be
denied; and if feeble, it takes all their strength to deny, before they
can begin to lead their own life. Grave seniors insist on their respect
to this institution, and that usage; to an obsolete history; to some
vocation, or college, or etiquette, or beneficiary, or charity, or
morning or evening call, which they resist, as what does not concern
them. But it costs such sleepless nights, alienations and
misgivings,--they have so many moods about it;--these old guardians
never change _their_ minds; they have but one mood on the subject,
namely, that Antony is very perverse,--that it is quite as much as
Antony can do, to assert his rights, abstain from what he thinks
foolish, and keep his temper. He cannot help the reaction of this
injustice in his own mind. He is braced-up and stilted; all freedom and
flowing genius, all sallies of wit and frolic nature are quite out of
the question; it is well if he can keep from lying, injustice, and
suicide. This is no time for gaiety and grace. His strength and spirits
are wasted in rejection. But the strong spirits overpower those around
them without effort. Their thought and emotion comes in like a flood,
quite withdraws them from all notice of these carping critics; they
surrender themselves with glad heart to the heavenly guide, and only by
implication reject the clamorous nonsense of the hour. Grave seniors
talk to the deaf,--church and old book mumble and ritualize to an
unheeding, preöccupied and advancing mind, and thus they by happiness of
greater momentum lose no time, but take the right road at first.
But all these of whom I speak are not proficients; they are novices;
they only show the road in which man should travel, when the soul has
greater health and prowess. Yet let them feel the dignity of their
charge, and deserve a larger power. Their heart is the ark in which the
fire is concealed, which shall burn in a broader and universal flame.
Let them obey the Genius then most when his impulse is wildest; then
most when he seems to lead to uninhabitable desarts of thought and
life; for the path which the hero travels alone is the highway of health
and benefit to mankind. What is the privilege and nobility of our
nature, but its persistency, through its power to attach itself to what
is permanent?
Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must behold
them with what charity it can. Possibly some benefit may yet accrue from
them to the state. In our Mechanics’ Fair, there must be not only
bridges, ploughs, carpenters’ planes, and baking troughs, but also some
few finer instruments,--rain gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and
in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few
persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character;
persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who betray the smallest
accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander. Perhaps too there
might be room for the exciters and monitors; collectors of the heavenly
spark with power to convey the electricity to others. Or, as the
storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks the frigate or ‘line packet’ to learn
its longitude, so it may not be without its advantage that we should now
and then encounter rare and gifted men, to compare the points of our
spiritual compass, and verify our bearings from superior chronometers.
Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when every voice
is raised for a new road or another statute, or a subscription of stock,
for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry, for a new house or a
larger business, for a political party, or the division of an
estate,--will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land,
speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable? Soon
these improvements and mechanical inventions will be superseded; these
modes of living lost out of memory; these cities rotted, ruined by war,
by new inventions, by new seats of trade, or the geologic changes:--all
gone, like the shells which sprinkle the seabeach with a white colony
to-day, forever renewed to be forever destroyed. But the thoughts which
these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence, as well as by speech,
not only by what they did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide
in beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest
themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed clay
than ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system.
THE YOUNG AMERICAN.
A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE MERCANTILE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, BOSTON,
FEBRUARY 7, 1844.
THE YOUNG AMERICAN.
GENTLEMEN:
It is remarkable, that our people have their intellectual culture from
one country, and their duties from another. This false state of things
is newly in a way to be corrected. America is beginning to assert itself
to the senses and to the imagination of her children, and Europe is
receding in the same degree. This their reaction on education gives a
new importance to the internal improvements and to the politics of the
country. Who has not been stimulated to reflection by the facilities now
in progress of construction for travel and the transportation of goods
in the United States?
This rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast
distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade,
inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the
Union staunch, whose days seemed already numbered by the mere
inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges, and officers
across such tedious distances of land and water. Not only is distance
annihilated, but when, as now, the locomotive and the steamboat, like
enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousand various threads
of national descent and employment, and bind them fast in one web, an
hourly assimilation goes forward, and there is no danger that local
peculiarities and hostilities should be preserved.
1. But I hasten to speak of the utility of these improvements in
creating an American sentiment. An unlooked for consequence of the
railroad, is the increased acquaintance it has given the American people
with the boundless resources of their own soil. If this invention has
reduced England to a third of its size, by bringing people so much
nearer, in this country it has given a new celerity to _time_, or
anticipated by fifty years the planting of tracts of land, the choice of
water privileges, the working of mines, and other natural advantages.
Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping
energies of land and water.
The railroad is but one arrow in our quiver, though it has great value
as a sort of yard-stick, and surveyor’s line. The bountiful continent
is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the
Pacific sea;
“Our garden is the immeasurable earth,
The heaven’s blue pillars are Medea’s house.”
The task of surveying, planting, and building upon this immense tract,
requires an education and a sentiment commensurate thereto. A
consciousness of this fact, is beginning to take the place of the purely
trading spirit and education which sprang up whilst all the population
lived on the fringe of sea-coast. And even on the coast, prudent men
have begun to see that every American should be educated with a view to
the values of land. The arts of engineering and of architecture are
studied; scientific agriculture is an object of growing attention; the
mineral riches are explored; limestone, coal, slate, and iron; and the
value of timber-lands is enhanced.
Columbus alleged as a reason for seeking a continent in the West, that
the harmony of nature required a great tract of land in the western
hemisphere, to balance the known extent of land in the eastern; and it
now appears that we must estimate the native values of this broad region
to redress the balance of our own judgments, and appreciate the
advantages opened to the human race in this country, which is our
fortunate home. The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false
and fantastic in our culture. The continent we inhabit is to be physic
and food for our mind, as well as our body. The land, with its
tranquilizing, sanative influences, is to repair the errors of a
scholastic and traditional education, and bring us into just relations
with men and things.
The habit of living in the presence of these invitations of natural
wealth is not inoperative; and this habit, combined with the moral
sentiment which, in the recent years, has interrogated every
institution, usage, and law, has, naturally, given a strong direction to
the wishes and aims of active young men to withdraw from cities, and
cultivate the soil. This inclination has appeared in the most unlooked
for quarters, in men supposed to be absorbed in business, and in those
connected with the liberal professions. And, since the walks of trade
were crowded, whilst that of agriculture cannot easily be, inasmuch as
the farmer who is not wanted by others can yet grow his own bread,
whilst the manufacturer or the trader, who is not wanted, cannot,--this
seemed a happy tendency. For, beside all the moral benefit which we may
expect from the farmer’s profession, when a man enters it
considerately, this promised the conquering of the soil, plenty, and
beyond this, the adorning of the country with every advantage and
ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man’s home, could
suggest.
Meantime, with cheap land, and the pacific disposition of the people,
every thing invites to the arts of agriculture, of gardening, and
domestic architecture. Public gardens, on the scale of such plantations
in Europe and Asia, are now unknown to us. There is no feature of the
old countries that strikes an American with more agreeable surprise than
the beautiful gardens of Europe; such as the Boboli in Florence, the
Villa Borghese in Rome, the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, the gardens at
Munich, and at Frankfort on the Maine: works easily imitated here, and
which might well make the land dear to the citizen, and inflame
patriotism. It is the fine art which is left for us, now that sculpture,
painting, and religious and civil architecture have become effete, and
have passed into second childhood. We have twenty degrees of latitude
wherein to choose a seat, and the new modes of travelling enlarge the
opportunity of selection, by making it easy to cultivate very distant
tracts, and yet remain in strict intercourse with the centres of trade
and population. And the whole force of all the arts goes to facilitate
the decoration of lands and dwellings. A garden has this advantage, that
it makes it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden makes the
face of the country of no account; let that be low or high, grand or
mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man. If the landscape is
pleasing, the garden shows it,--if tame, it excludes it. A little grove,
which any farmer can find, or cause to grow near his house, will, in a
few years, make cataracts and chains of mountains quite unnecessary to
his scenery; and he is so contented with his alleys, woodlands, orchards
and river, that Niagara, and the Notch of the White Hills, and Nantasket
Beach, are superfluities. And yet the selection of a fit houselot has
the same advantage over an indifferent one, as the selection to a given
employment of a man who has a genius for that work. In the last case,
the culture of years will never make the most painstaking apprentice his
equal: no more will gardening give the advantage of a happy site to a
house in a hole or on a pinnacle. In America, we have hitherto little to
boast in this kind. The cities drain the country of the best part of its
population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns,
and the country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The
land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the
buildings plain and poor. In Europe, where society has an aristocratic
structure, the land is full of men of the best stock, and the best
culture, whose interest and pride it is to remain half the year on their
estates, and to fill them with every convenience and ornament. Of
course, these make model farms, and model architecture, and are a
constant education to the eye of the surrounding population. Whatever
events in progress shall go to disgust men with cities, and infuse into
them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a
service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most
poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the
native but hidden graces of the landscape.
I look on such improvements, also, as directly tending to endear the
land to the inhabitant. Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling
it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of
patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a
support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.
The vast majority of the people of this country live by the land, and
carry its quality in their manners and opinions. We in the Atlantic
states, by position, have been commercial, and have, as I said, imbibed
easily an European culture. Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed
the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and
continental element into the national mind, and we shall yet have an
American genius. How much better when the whole land is a garden, and
the people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise. Without looking,
then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in
precisely this direction, but only at what is inevitably doing around
us, I think we must regard the _land_ as a commanding and increasing
power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which
promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.
2. In the second place, the uprise and culmination of the new and
anti-feudal power of Commerce, is the political fact of most
significance to the American at this hour.
We cannot look on the freedom of this country, in connexion with its
youth, without a presentiment that here shall laws and institutions
exist on some scale of proportion to the majesty of nature. To men
legislating for the area betwixt the two oceans, betwixt the snows and
the tropics, somewhat of the gravity of nature will infuse itself into
the code. A heterogeneous population crowding on all ships from all
corners of the world to the great gates of North America, namely,
Boston, New York, and New Orleans, and thence proceeding inward to the
prairie and the mountains, and quickly contributing their private
thought to the public opinion, their toll to the treasury, and their
vote to the election, it cannot be doubted that the legislation of this
country should become more catholic and cosmopolitan than that of any
other. It seems so easy for America to inspire and express the most
expansive and humane spirit; new-born, free, healthful, strong, the land
of the laborer, of the democrat, of the philanthropist, of the believer,
of the saint, she should speak for the human race. It is the country of
the Future. From Washington, proverbially ‘the city of magnificent
distances,’ through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a
country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, of expectations.
Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which the human
race is guided,--the race never dying, the individual never spared,--to
results affecting masses and ages. Men are narrow and selfish, but the
Genius or Destiny is not narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered in
their calculated and voluntary activity, but in what befalls, with or
without their design. Only what is inevitable interests us, and it turns
out that love and good are inevitable, and in the course of things. That
Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small
excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the
side of reason. All the facts in any part of nature shall be tabulated,
and the results shall indicate the same security and benefit; so slight
as to be hardly observable, and yet it is there. The sphere is flattened
at the poles, and swelled at the equator; a form flowing necessarily
from the fluid state, yet _the_ form, the mathematician assures us,
required to prevent the protuberances of the continent, or even of
lesser mountains cast up at any time by earthquakes, from continually
deranging the axis of the earth. The census of the population is found
to keep an invariable equality in the sexes, with a trifling
predominance in favor of the male, as if to counterbalance the
necessarily increased exposure of male life in war, navigation, and
other accidents. Remark the unceasing effort throughout nature at
somewhat better than the actual creatures: _amelioration in nature_,
which alone permits and authorizes amelioration in mankind. The
population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the
best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils,
gases, animals, and morals: the best that could _yet_ live; there shall
be a better, please God. This Genius, or Destiny, is of the sternest
administration, though rumors exist of its secret tenderness. It may be
styled a cruel kindness, serving the whole even to the ruin of the
member; a terrible communist, reserving all profits to the community,
without dividend to individuals. Its law is, you shall have everything
as a member, nothing to yourself. For Nature is the noblest engineer,
yet uses a grinding economy, working up all that is wasted to-day into
to-morrow’s creation;--not a superfluous grain of sand, for all the
ostentation she makes of expense and public works. It is because Nature
thus saves and uses, laboring for the general, that we poor particulars
are so crushed and straitened, and find it so hard to live. She flung us
out in her plenty, but we cannot shed a hair, or a paring of a nail, but
instantly she snatches at the shred, and appropriates it to the general
stock. Our condition is like that of the poor wolves: if one of the
flock wound himself, or so much as limp, the rest eat him up
incontinently.
That serene Power interposes the check upon the caprices and
officiousness of our wills. Its charity is not our charity. One of its
agents is our will, but that which expresses itself in our will, is
stronger than our will. We are very forward to help it, but it will not
be accelerated. It resists our meddling, eleemosynary contrivances. We
devise sumptuary and relief laws, but the principle of population is
always reducing wages to the lowest pittance on which human life can be
sustained. We legislate against forestalling and monopoly; we would have
a common granary for the poor; but the selfishness which hoards the corn
for high prices, is the preventive of famine; and the law of
self-preservation is surer policy than any legislation can be. We
concoct eleemosynary systems, and it turns out that our charity
increases pauperism. We inflate our paper currency, we repair commerce
with unlimited credit, and are presently visited with unlimited
bankruptcy.
It is easy to see that the existing generation are conspiring with a
beneficence, which, in its working for coming generations, sacrifices
the passing one, which infatuates the most selfish men to act against
their private interest for the public welfare. We build railroads, we
know not for what or for whom; but one thing is certain, that we who
build will receive the very smallest share of benefit. Benefit will
accrue; they are essential to the country, but that will be felt not
until we are no longer countrymen. We do the like in all matters:--
“Man’s heart the Almighty to the Future set
By secret and inviolable springs.”
We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make
prospective laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for remote
generations. We should be mortified to learn that the little benefit we
chanced in our own persons to receive was the utmost they would yield.
The history of commerce, is the record of this beneficent tendency. The
patriarchal form of government readily becomes despotic, as each person
may see in his own family. Fathers wish to be the fathers of the minds
of their children, and behold with impatience a new character and way of
thinking presuming to show itself in their own son or daughter. This
feeling, which all their love and pride in the powers of their children
cannot subdue, becomes petulance and tyranny when the head of the clan,
the emperor of an empire, deals with the same difference of opinion in
his subjects. Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings never
forgive. An empire is an immense egotism. “I am the State,” said the
French Louis. When a French ambassador mentioned to Paul of Russia, that
a man of consequence in St. Petersburg was interesting himself in some
matter, the Czar interrupted him,--“There is no man of consequence in
this empire, but he with whom I am actually speaking; and so long only
as I am speaking to him, is he of any consequence.” And Nicholas, the
present emperor, is reported to have said to his council, “The age is
embarrassed with new opinions; rely on me, gentlemen, I shall oppose an
iron will to the progress of liberal opinions.”
It is easy to see that this patriarchal or family management gets to be
rather troublesome to all but the papa; the sceptre comes to be a
crowbar. And this unpleasant egotism, Feudalism opposes, and finally
destroys. The king is compelled to call in the aid of his brothers and
cousins, and remote relations, to help him keep his overgrown house in
order; and this club of noblemen always come at last to have a will of
their own; they combine to brave the sovereign, and call in the aid of
the people. Each chief attaches as many followers as he can, by
kindness, maintenance, and gifts; and as long as war lasts, the nobles,
who must be soldiers, rule very well. But when peace comes, the nobles
prove very whimsical and uncomfortable masters; their frolics turn out
to be insulting and degrading to the commoner. Feudalism grew to be a
bandit and brigand.
Meantime Trade had begun to appear: Trade, a plant which grows wherever
there is peace, as soon as there is peace, and as long as there is
peace. The luxury and necessity of the noble fostered it. And as quickly
as men go to foreign parts, in ships or caravans, a new order of things
springs up; new command takes place, new servants and new masters. Their
information, their wealth, their correspondence, have made them quite
other men than left their native shore. _They_ are nobles now, and by
another patent than the king’s. Feudalism had been good, had broken the
power of the kings, and had some good traits of its own; but it had
grown mischievous, it was time for it to die, and, as they say of dying
people, all its faults came out. Trade was the strong man that broke it
down, and raised a new and unknown power in its place. It is a new
agent in the world, and one of great function; it is a very intellectual
force. This displaces physical strength, and instals computation,
combination, information, science, in its room. It calls out all force
of a certain kind that slumbered in the former dynasties. It is now in
the midst of its career. Feudalism is not ended yet. Our governments
still partake largely of that element. Trade goes to make the
governments insignificant, and to bring every kind of faculty of every
individual that can in any manner serve any person, _on sale_. Instead
of a huge Army and Navy, and Executive Departments, it converts
Government into an Intelligence-Office, where every man may find what he
wishes to buy, and expose what he has to sell, not only produce and
manufactures, but art, skill, and intellectual and moral values. This is
the good and this the evil of trade, that it would put everything into
market, talent, beauty, virtue, and man himself.
By this means, however, it has done its work. It has its faults, and
will come to an end, as the others do. The philosopher and lover of man
have much harm to say of trade; but the historian will see that trade
was the principle of Liberty; that trade planted America and destroyed
Feudalism; that it makes peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish
slavery. We complain of its oppression of the poor, and of its building
up a new aristocracy on the ruins of the aristocracy it destroyed. But
the aristocracy of trade has no permanence, is not entailed, was the
result of toil and talent, the result of merit of some kind, and is
continually falling, like the waves of the sea, before new claims of the
same sort. Trade is an instrument in the hands of that friendly Power
which works for us in our own despite. We design it thus and thus; it
turns out otherwise and far better. This beneficent tendency, omnipotent
without violence, exists and works. Every line of history inspires a
confidence that we shall not go far wrong; that things mend. That is the
moral of all we learn, that it warrants Hope, the prolific mother of
reforms. Our part is plainly not to throw ourselves across the track, to
block improvement, and sit till we are stone, but to watch the uprise of
successive mornings, and to conspire with the new works of new days.
Government has been a fossil; it should be a plant. I conceive that the
office of statute law should be to express, and not to impede the mind
of mankind. New thoughts, new things. Trade was one instrument, but
Trade is also but for a time, and must give way to somewhat broader and
better, whose signs are already dawning in the sky.
3. I pass to speak of the signs of that which is the sequel of trade.
In consequence of the revolution in the state of society wrought by
trade, Government in our times is beginning to wear a clumsy and
cumbrous appearance. We have already seen our way to shorter methods.
The time is full of good signs. Some of them shall ripen to fruit. All
this beneficent socialism is a friendly omen, and the swelling cry of
voices for the education of the people, indicates that Government has
other offices than those of banker and executioner. Witness the new
movements in the civilized world, the Communism of France, Germany, and
Switzerland; the Trades’ Unions; the English League against the Corn
Laws; and the whole _Industrial Statistics_, so called. In Paris, the
blouse, the badge of the operative, has begun to make its appearance in
the saloons. Witness, too, the spectacle of three Communities which have
within a very short time sprung up within this Commonwealth, besides
several others undertaken by citizens of Massachusetts within the
territory of other States. These proceeded from a variety of motives,
from an impatience of many usages in common life, from a wish for
greater freedom than the manners and opinions of society permitted, but
in great part from a feeling that the true offices of the State, the
State had let fall to the ground; that in the scramble of parties for
the public purse, the main duties of government were omitted,--the duty
to instruct the ignorant, to supply the poor with work and with good
guidance. These communists preferred the agricultural life as the most
favorable condition for human culture; but they thought that the farm,
as we manage it, did not satisfy the right ambition of man. The farmer,
after sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, thought, love, to his work,
turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant. This result might well
seem astounding. All this drudgery, from cockcrowing to starlight, for
all these years, to end in mortgages and the auctioneer’s flag, and
removing from bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked into,
and with a sifting criticism ascertained who is the fool. It seemed a
great deal worse, because the farmer is living in the same town with men
who pretend to know exactly what he wants. On one side, is agricultural
chemistry, coolly exposing the nonsense of our spendthrift agriculture
and ruinous expense of manures, and offering, by means of a teaspoonful
of artificial guano, to turn a sandbank into corn; and, on the other,
the farmer, not only eager for the information, but with bad crops and
in debt and bankruptcy, for want of it. Here are Etzlers and mechanical
projectors, who, with the Fourierists, undoubtingly affirm that the
smallest union would make every man rich;--and, on the other side, a
multitude of poor men and women seeking work, and who cannot find enough
to pay their board. The science is confident, and surely the poverty is
real. If any means could be found to bring these two together!
This was one design of the projectors of the Associations which are now
making their first feeble experiments. They were founded in love, and in
labor. They proposed, as you know, that all men should take a part in
the manual toil, and proposed to amend the condition of men, by
substituting harmonious for hostile industry. It was a noble thought of
Fourier, which gives a favorable idea of his system, to distinguish in
his Phalanx a class as the Sacred Band, by whom whatever duties were
disagreeable, and likely to be omitted, were to be assumed.
At least, an economical success seemed certain for the enterprise, and
that agricultural association must, sooner or later, fix the price of
bread, and drive single farmers into association, in selfdefence; as
the great commercial and manufacturing companies had already done. The
Community is only the continuation of the same movement which made the
joint-stock companies for manufactures, mining, insurance, banking, and
so forth. It has turned out cheaper to make calico by companies; and it
is proposed to plant corn, and to bake bread by companies.
Undoubtedly, abundant mistakes will be made by these first adventurers,
which will draw ridicule on their schemes. I think, for example, that
they exaggerate the importance of a favorite project of theirs, that of
paying talent and labor at one rate, paying all sorts of service at one
rate, say ten cents the hour. They have paid it so; but not an instant
would a dime remain a dime. In one hand it became an eagle as it fell,
and in another hand a copper cent. For the whole value of the dime is in
knowing what to do with it. One man buys with it a land-title of an
Indian, and makes his posterity princes; or buys corn enough to feed the
world; or pen, ink, and paper, or a painter’s brush, by which he can
communicate himself to the human race as if he were fire; and the other
buys barley candy. Money is of no value; it cannot spend itself. All
depends on the skill of the spender. Whether, too, the objection almost
universally felt by such women in the community as were mothers, to an
associate life, to a common table, and a common nursery, &c., setting a
higher value on the private family with poverty, than on an association
with wealth, will not prove insuperable, remains to be determined.
But the Communities aimed at a higher success in securing to all their
members an equal and thorough education. And on the whole, one may say,
that aims so generous, and so forced on them by the times, will not be
relinquished, even if these attempts fail, but will be prosecuted until
they succeed.
This is the value of the Communities; not what they have done, but the
revolution which they indicate as on the way. Yes, Government must
educate the poor man. Look across the country from any hill-side around
us, and the landscape seems to crave Government. The actual differences
of men must be acknowledged, and met with love and wisdom. These rising
grounds which command the champaign below, seem to ask for lords, true
lords, _land_-lords, who understand the land and its uses, and the
applicabilities of men, and whose government would be what it should,
namely, mediation between want and supply. How gladly would each
citizen pay a commission for the support and continuation of good
guidance. None should be a governor who has not a talent for governing.
Now many people have a native skill for carving out business for many
hands; a genius for the disposition of affairs; and are never happier
than when difficult practical questions, which embarrass other men, are
to be solved. All lies in light before them; they are in their element.
Could any means be contrived to appoint only these! There really seems a
progress towards such a state of things, in which this work shall be
done by these natural workmen; and this, not certainly through any
increased discretion shown by the citizens at elections, but by the
gradual contempt into which official government falls, and the
increasing disposition of private adventurers to assume its fallen
functions. Thus the costly Post Office is likely to go into disuse
before the private transportation-shop of Harnden and his competitors.
The currency threatens to fall entirely into private hands. Justice is
continually administered more and more by private reference, and not by
litigation. We have feudal governments in a commercial age. It would be
but an easy extension of our commercial system, to pay a private
emperor a fee for services, as we pay an architect, an engineer, or a
lawyer. If any man has a talent for righting wrong, for administering
difficult affairs, for counselling poor farmers how to turn their
estates to good husbandry, for combining a hundred private enterprises
to a general benefit, let him in the county-town, or in Court-street,
put up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, _Governor_, Mr. Johnson, _Working
king_.
How can our young men complain of the poverty of things in New England,
and not feel that poverty as a demand on their charity to make New
England rich? Where is he who seeing a thousand men useless and unhappy,
and making the whole region forlorn by their inaction, and conscious
himself of possessing the faculty they want, does not hear his call to
go and be their king?
We must have kings, and we must have nobles. Nature provides such in
every society,--only let us have the real instead of the titular. Let us
have our leading and our inspiration from the best. In every society
some men are born to rule, and some to advise. Let the powers be well
directed, directed by love, and they would everywhere be greeted with
joy and honor. The chief is the chief all the world over, only not his
cap and his plume. It is only their dislike of the pretender, which
makes men sometimes unjust to the accomplished man. If society were
transparent, the noble would everywhere be gladly received and
accredited, and would not be asked for his day’s work, but would be felt
as benefit, inasmuch as he was noble. That were his duty and stint,--to
keep himself pure and purifying, the leaven of his nation. I think I see
place and duties for a nobleman in every society; but it is not to drink
wine and ride in a fine coach, but to guide and adorn life for the
multitude by forethought, by elegant studies, by perseverance,
self-devotion, and the remembrance of the humble old friend, by making
his life secretly beautiful.
I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart, and be the nobility of
this land. In every age of the world, there has been a leading nation,
one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to
stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of
being called, by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantastic. Which
should be that nation but these States? Which should lead that movement,
if not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American?
The people, and the world, is now suffering from the want of religion
and honor in its public mind. In America, out of doors all seems a
market; in doors, an air-tight stove of conventionalism. Every body who
comes into our houses savors of these habits; the men, of the market;
the women, of the custom. I find no expression in our state papers or
legislative debate, in our lyceums or churches, specially in our
newspapers, of a high national feeling, no lofty counsels, that
rightfully stir the blood. I speak of those organs which can be presumed
to speak a popular sense. They recommend conventional virtues, whatever
will earn and preserve property; always the capitalist; the college, the
church, the hospital, the theatre, the hotel, the road, the ship, of the
capitalist,--whatever goes to secure, adorn, enlarge these, is good;
what jeopardizes any of these, is damnable. The ‘opposition’ papers, so
called, are on the same side. They attack the great capitalist, but with
the aim to make a capitalist of the poor man. The opposition is against
those who have money, from those who wish to have money. But who
announces to us in journal, or in pulpit, or in the street, the secret
of heroism,
“Man alone
Can perform the impossible?”
I shall not need to go into an enumeration of our national defects and
vices which require this Order of Censors in the state. I might not set
down our most proclaimed offences as the worst. It is not often the
worst trait that occasions the loudest outcry. Men complain of their
suffering, and not of the crime. I fear little from the bad effect of
Repudiation; I do not fear that it will spread. Stealing is a suicidal
business; you cannot repudiate but once. But the bold face and tardy
repentance permitted to this local mischief, reveal a public mind so
preoccupied with the love of gain, that the common sentiment of
indignation at fraud does not act with its natural force. The more need
of a withdrawal from the crowd, and a resort to the fountain of right,
by the brave. The timidity of our public opinion, is our disease, or,
shall I say, the publicness of opinion, the absence of private opinion.
Good-nature is plentiful, but we want justice, with heart of steel, to
fight down the proud. The private mind has the access to the totality of
goodness and truth, that it may be a balance to a corrupt society; and
to stand for the private verdict against popular clamor, is the office
of the noble. If a humane measure is propounded in behalf of the slave,
or of the Irishman, or the Catholic, or for the succor of the poor, that
sentiment, that project, will have the homage of the hero. That is his
nobility, his oath of knighthood, to succor the helpless and oppressed;
always to throw himself on the side of weakness, of youth, of hope, on
the liberal, on the expansive side, never on the defensive, the
conserving, the timorous, the lock and bolt system. More than our
good-will we may not be able to give. We have our own affairs, our own
genius, which chains us to our proper work. We cannot give our life to
the cause of the debtor, of the slave, or the pauper, as another is
doing; but to one thing we are bound, not to blaspheme the sentiment and
the work of that man, not to throw stumbling-blocks in the way of the
abolitionist, the philanthropist, as the organs of influence and opinion
are swift to do. It is for us to confide in the beneficent Supreme
Power, and not to rely on our money, and on the state because it is the
guard of money. At this moment, the terror of old people and of vicious
people, is lest the Union of these States be destroyed: as if the Union
had any other real basis than the good pleasure of a majority of the
citizens to be united. But the wise and just man will always feel that
he stands on his own feet; that he imparts strength to the state, not
receives security from it; and that if all went down, he and such as he
would quite easily combine in a new and better constitution. Every
great and memorable community has consisted of formidable individuals,
who, like the Roman or the Spartan, lent his own spirit to the state and
made it great. Yet only by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing is
so weak as an egotist. Nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles
of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike
ephemeral.
Gentlemen, the development of our American internal resources, the
extension to the utmost of the commercial system, and the appearance of
new moral causes which are to modify the state, are giving an aspect of
greatness to the Future, which the imagination fears to open. One thing
is plain for all men of common sense and common conscience, that here,
here in America, is the home of man. After all the deductions which are
to be made for our pitiful politics, which stake every gravest national
question on the silly die, whether James or whether Jonathan shall sit
in the chair and hold the purse; after all the deduction is made for our
frivolities and insanities, there still remains an organic simplicity
and liberty, which, when it loses its balance, redresses itself
presently, which offers opportunity to the human mind not known in any
other region.
It is true, the public mind wants self-respect. We are full of vanity,
of which the most signal proof is our sensitiveness to foreign and
especially English censure. One cause of this is our immense reading,
and that reading chiefly confined to the productions of the English
press. It is also true, that, to imaginative persons in this country,
there is somewhat bare and bald in our short history, and unsettled
wilderness. They ask, who would live in a new country, that can live in
an old? and it is not strange that our youths and maidens should burn to
see the picturesque extremes of an antiquated country. But it is one
thing to visit the pyramids, and another to wish to live there. Would
they like tithes to the clergy, and sevenths to the government, and
horse-guards, and licensed press, and grief when a child is born, and
threatening, starved weavers, and a pauperism now constituting
one-thirteenth of the population? Instead of the open future expanding
here before the eye of every boy to vastness, would they like the
closing in of the future to a narrow slit of sky, and that fast
contracting to be no future? One thing, for instance, the beauties of
aristocracy, we commend to the study of the travelling American. The
English, the most conservative people this side of India, are not
sensible of the restraint, but an American would seriously resent it.
The aristocracy, incorporated by law and education, degrades life for
the unprivileged classes. It is a questionable compensation to the
embittered feeling of a proud commoner, the reflection that a fop, who,
by the magic of title, paralyzes his arm, and plucks from him half the
graces and rights of a man, is himself also an aspirant excluded with
the same ruthlessness from higher circles, since there is no end to the
wheels within wheels of this spiral heaven. Something may be pardoned to
the spirit of loyalty when it becomes fantastic; and something to the
imagination, for the baldest life is symbolic. Philip II. of Spain rated
his ambassador for neglecting serious affairs in Italy, whilst he
debated some point of honor with the French ambassador; “You have left a
business of importance for a ceremony.” The ambassador replied, “Your
majesty’s self is but a ceremony.” In the East, where the religious
sentiment comes in to the support of the aristocracy, and in the Romish
church also, there is a grain of sweetness in the tyranny; but in
England, the fact seems to me intolerable, what is commonly affirmed,
that such is the transcendent honor accorded to wealth and birth, that
no man of letters, be his eminence what it may, is received into the
best society, except as a lion and a show. The English have many
virtues, many advantages, and the proudest history of the world; but
they need all, and more than all the resources of the past to indemnify
a heroic gentleman in that country for the mortifications prepared for
him by the system of society, and which seem to impose the alternative
to resist or to avoid it. That there are mitigations and practical
alleviations to this rigor, is not an excuse for the rule. Commanding
worth, and personal power, must sit crowned in all companies, nor will
extraordinary persons be slighted or affronted in any company of
civilized men. But the system is an invasion of the sentiment of justice
and the native rights of men, which, however decorated, must lessen the
value of English citizenship. It is for Englishmen to consider, not for
us; we only say, let us live in America, too thankful for our want of
feudal institutions. Our houses and towns are like mosses and lichens,
so slight and new; but youth is a fault of which we shall daily mend.
This land, too, is as old as the Flood, and wants no ornament or
privilege which nature could bestow. Here stars, here woods, here hills,
here animals, here men abound, and the vast tendencies concur of a new
order. If only the men are employed in conspiring with the designs of
the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we shall quickly
enough advance out of all hearing of other’s censures, out of all
regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social state than
history has recorded.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
the most trival=> the most trivial {pg 26}
actions externized=> actions externalized {pg 69}
Suscess treads=> Success treads {pg 98}
below not in unsion=> below not in unison {pg 110}
may rightlfully hold=> may rightfully hold {pg 152}
its sparking January heaven=> its sparkling January heaven {pg 153}
and exponent of the world=> an exponent of the world {pg 193}
tools runs away=> tools run away {pg 200}
Whosover hereafter=> Whosoever hereafter {pg 313}
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MISCELLANIES EMBRACING NATURE, ADDRESSES, AND LECTURES ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
