Essays — First Series
The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful;
that justice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted
in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a
manly success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from the
truth; announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of the
will; and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and
falsehood.
I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the day
and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men when occasionally
they treat the related topics. I think that our popular theology has
gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has
displaced. But men are better than their theology. Their daily life
gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine
behind him in his own experience, and all men feel sometimes the
falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. For men are wiser than they
know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without afterthought,
if said in conversation would probably be questioned in silence. If a
man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, he
is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer the
dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own
statement.
I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record some facts
that indicate the path of the law of Compensation; happy beyond my
expectation if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle.
Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in
darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in
male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and
animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the
animal body; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the
undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal
gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce
magnetism at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes place at
the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here,
you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that
each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as,
spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out;
upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.
Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The entire
system of things gets represented in every particle. There is somewhat
that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night, man and
woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in each
individual of every animal tribe. The reaction, so grand in the
elements, is repeated within these small boundaries. For example, in
the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed that no creatures are
favorites, but a certain compensation balances every gift and every
defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction from
another part of the same creature. If the head and neck are enlarged,
the trunk and extremities are cut short.
The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in
power is lost in time, and the converse. The periodic or compensating
errors of the planets is another instance. The influences of climate
and soil in political history are another. The cold climate
invigorates. The barren soil does not breed fevers, crocodiles, tigers
or scorpions.
The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every
excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its
sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of
pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its
moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of
folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else;
and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches increase,
they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much,
Nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the
estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.
The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from their
loftiest tossing than the varieties of condition tend to equalize
themselves. There is always some levelling circumstance that puts down
the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on
the same ground with all others. Is a man too strong and fierce for
society and by temper and position a bad citizen,—a morose ruffian,
with a dash of the pirate in him?—Nature sends him a troop of pretty
sons and daughters who are getting along in the dame’s classes at the
village school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to
courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar,
takes the boar out and puts the lamb in and keeps her balance true.
The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President
has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his
peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short
time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to
eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne. Or,
do men desire the more substantial and permanent grandeur of genius?
Neither has this an immunity. He who by force of will or of thought is
great and overlooks thousands, has the charges of that eminence. With
every influx of light comes new danger. Has he light? he must bear
witness to the light, and always outrun that sympathy which gives him
such keen satisfaction, by his fidelity to new revelations of the
incessant soul. He must hate father and mother, wife and child. Has he
all that the world loves and admires and covets?—he must cast behind
him their admiration, and afflict them by faithfulness to his truth,
and become a byword and a hissing.
This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build
or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.
_Res nolunt diu male administrari_. Though no checks to a new evil
appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel,
the governor’s life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will
yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will
not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in. If the
government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is resisted by an
over-charge of energy in the citizen, and life glows with a fiercer
flame. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost
rigors or felicities of condition and to establish themselves with
great indifferency under all varieties of circumstances. Under all
governments the influence of character remains the same,—in Turkey and
in New England about alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt,
history honestly confesses that man must have been as free as culture
could make him.
These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in
every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the
powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the
naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse
as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a
tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character
of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims,
furtherances, hindrances, energies and whole system of every other.
Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world
and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human
life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its
end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man and recite all
his destiny.
The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find
the animalcule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears,
taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction
that take hold on eternity,—all find room to consist in the small
creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true doctrine of
omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and
cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every
point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the
repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.
Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which
within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its
inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. “It is
in the world, and the world was made by it.” Justice is not postponed.
A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. Ἀεὶ γὰρ εὖ
πίπτουσιν οἱ Διὸς κύβοι,—The dice of God are always loaded. The world
looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which,
turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its
exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is
told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong
redressed, in silence and certainty. What we call retribution is the
universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears.
If you see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or a limb, you
know that the trunk to which it belongs is there behind.
Every act rewards itself, or, in other words integrates itself, in a
twofold manner; first in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly in
the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the
retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing and is seen by the
soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding;
it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time
and so does not become distinct until after many years. The specific
stripes may follow late after the offence, but they follow because they
accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is
a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which
concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot
be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end
preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to be disparted, we
seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example,—to
gratify the senses we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs
of the character. The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the
solution of one problem,—how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual
strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral deep,
the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper
surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a _one end_, without
an _other end_. The soul says, ‘Eat;’ the body would feast. The soul
says, ‘The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul;’ the body
would join the flesh only. The soul says, ‘Have dominion over all
things to the ends of virtue;’ the body would have the power over
things to its own ends.
The soul strives amain to live and work through all things. It would be
the only fact. All things shall be added unto it,—power, pleasure,
knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims to be somebody; to set up
for himself; to truck and higgle for a private good; and, in
particulars, to ride that he may ride; to dress that he may be dressed;
to eat that he may eat; and to govern, that he may be seen. Men seek to
be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think
that to be great is to possess one side of nature,—the sweet, without
the other side, the bitter.