Essays — First Series
of men. With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the
visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and
expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken
in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and
Arrian than with persons in the house.
This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple rise as by
specific levity not into a particular virtue, but into the region of
all the virtues. They are in the spirit which contains them all. The
soul requires purity, but purity is not it; requires justice, but
justice is not that; requires beneficence, but is somewhat better; so
that there is a kind of descent and accommodation felt when we leave
speaking of moral nature to urge a virtue which it enjoins. To the
well-born child all the virtues are natural, and not painfully
acquired. Speak to his heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous.
Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual growth, which
obeys the same law. Those who are capable of humility, of justice, of
love, of aspiration, stand already on a platform that commands the
sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action and grace. For whoso
dwells in this moral beatitude already anticipates those special powers
which men prize so highly. The lover has no talent, no skill, which
passes for quite nothing with his enamoured maiden, however little she
may possess of related faculty; and the heart which abandons itself to
the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will travel
a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. In ascending to this
primary and aboriginal sentiment we have come from our remote station
on the circumference instantaneously to the centre of the world, where,
as in the closet of God, we see causes, and anticipate the universe,
which is but a slow effect.
One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the spirit in a
form,—in forms, like my own. I live in society, with persons who answer
to thoughts in my own mind, or express a certain obedience to the great
instincts to which I live. I see its presence to them. I am certified
of a common nature; and these other souls, these separated selves, draw
me as nothing else can. They stir in me the new emotions we call
passion; of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence come
conversation, competition, persuasion, cities and war. Persons are
supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. In youth we are mad
for persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. But the
larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing
through them all. Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal.
In all conversation between two persons tacit reference is made, as to
a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is
not social; it is impersonal; is God. And so in groups where debate is
earnest, and especially on high questions, the company become aware
that the thought rises to an equal level in all bosoms, that all have a
spiritual property in what was said, as well as the sayer. They all
become wiser than they were. It arches over them like a temple, this
unity of thought in which every heart beats with nobler sense of power
and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious
of attaining to a higher self-possession. It shines for all. There is a
certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the
lowest, and which our ordinary education often labors to silence and
obstruct. The mind is one, and the best minds, who love truth for its
own sake, think much less of property in truth. They accept it
thankfully everywhere, and do not label or stamp it with any man’s
name, for it is theirs long beforehand, and from eternity. The learned
and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence
of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly. We owe
many valuable observations to people who are not very acute or
profound, and who say the thing without effort which we want and have
long been hunting in vain. The action of the soul is oftener in that
which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any
conversation. It broods over every society, and they unconsciously seek
for it in each other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess
ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more. I feel
the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbors,
that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove
nods to Jove from behind each of us.
Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service to the world,
for which they forsake their native nobleness, they resemble those
Arabian sheiks who dwell in mean houses and affect an external poverty,
to escape the rapacity of the Pacha, and reserve all their display of
wealth for their interior and guarded retirements.
As it is present in all persons, so it is in every period of life. It
is adult already in the infant man. In my dealing with my child, my
Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but
as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against
mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of
beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will
and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of
his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me.
The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we
see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people
ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, ‘How do
you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?’ We know truth when
we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are
awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, which would alone
indicate the greatness of that man’s perception,—“It is no proof of a
man’s understanding to be able to confirm whatever he pleases; but to
be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is
false,—this is the mark and character of intelligence.” In the book I
read, the good thought returns to me, as every truth will, the image of
the whole soul. To the bad thought which I find in it, the same soul
becomes a discerning, separating sword, and lops it away. We are wiser
than we know. If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act
entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular
thing, and every thing, and every man. For the Maker of all things and
all persons stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience through us
over things.
But beyond this recognition of its own in particular passages of the
individual’s experience, it also reveals truth. And here we should seek
to reinforce ourselves by its very presence, and to speak with a
worthier, loftier strain of that advent. For the soul’s communication
of truth is the highest event in nature, since it then does not give
somewhat from itself, but it gives itself, or passes into and becomes
that man whom it enlightens; or, in proportion to that truth he
receives, it takes him to itself.
We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its
own nature, by the term _Revelation_. These are always attended by the
emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the
Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet
before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct
apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and
delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception of new truth,
or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the heart
of nature. In these communications the power to see is not separated
from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the
obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. Every moment when the
individual feels himself invaded by it is memorable. By the necessity
of our constitution a certain enthusiasm attends the individual’s
consciousness of that divine presence. The character and duration of
this enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual, from an
ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration,—which is its rarer
appearance,—to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it
warms, like our household fires, all the families and associations of
men, and makes society possible. A certain tendency to insanity has
always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they
had been “blasted with excess of light.” The trances of Socrates, the
“union” of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul,
the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers,
the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case
of these remarkable persons a ravishment, has, in innumerable instances
in common life, been exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere the
history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of
the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the
Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church; the _revival_ of the
Calvinistic churches; the _experiences_ of the Methodists, are varying
forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul
always mingles with the universal soul.
The nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of
the absolute law. They are solutions of the soul’s own questions. They
do not answer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul
answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after.
Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a
revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes. In past oracles of the
soul the understanding seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and
undertakes to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their hands
shall do and who shall be their company, adding names and dates and
places. But we must pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity. An
answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions
you ask. Do not require a description of the countries towards which
you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to-morrow
you arrive there and know them by inhabiting them. Men ask concerning
the immortality of the soul, the employments of heaven, the state of
the sinner, and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has left replies
to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime
spirit speak in their _patois_. To truth, justice, love, the attributes
of the soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated.
Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes,
heeding only the manifestations of these, never made the separation of
the idea of duration from the essence of these attributes, nor uttered
a syllable concerning the duration of the soul. It was left to his
disciples to sever duration from the moral elements, and to teach the
immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences.
The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is
already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility,
there is no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this
question or condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to
itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the
present, which is infinite, to a future which would be finite.
These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a confession
of sin. God has no answer for them. No answer in words can reply to a
question of things. It is not in an arbitrary “decree of God,” but in