Essays — First Series
wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will
not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a
weed by the wall.
The continual effort to raise himself above himself, to work a pitch
above his last height, betrays itself in a man’s relations. We thirst
for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of nature
is love; yet, if I have a friend I am tormented by my imperfections.
The love of me accuses the other party. If he were high enough to
slight me, then could I love him, and rise by my affection to new
heights. A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his
friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better. I
thought as I walked in the woods and mused on my friends, why should I
play with them this game of idolatry? I know and see too well, when not
voluntarily blind, the speedy limits of persons called high and worthy.
Rich, noble and great they are by the liberality of our speech, but
truth is sad. O blessed Spirit, whom I forsake for these, they are not
thou! Every personal consideration that we allow costs us heavenly
state. We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent
pleasure.
How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to interest us when we
find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once
come up with a man’s limitations, it is all over with him. Has he
talents? has he enterprise? has he knowledge? It boots not. Infinitely
alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to
swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care
not if you never see it again.
Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly discordant
facts, as expressions of one law. Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the
respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle
platonizes. By going one step farther back in thought, discordant
opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of one
principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still
higher vision.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all
things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a
great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There
is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there
is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of
fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the
thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals
of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization. Generalization
is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill
that attends it.
Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have
his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will,
he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past
apprehension of truth, and his alert acceptance of it from whatever
quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to
society, his Christianity, his world, may at any time be superseded and
decease.
There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it
academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday
of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and
fragments. Then its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that
it must be true. It now shows itself ethical and practical. We learn
that God is; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows of him.
The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of
Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact that all nature
is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself. Much
more obviously is history and the state of the world at any one time
directly dependent on the intellectual classification then existing in
the minds of men. The things which are dear to men at this hour are so
on account of the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and
which cause the present order of things, as a tree bears its apples. A
new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system
of human pursuits.
Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the
_termini_ which bound the common of silence on every side. The parties
are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express under
this Pentecost. To-morrow they will have receded from this high-water
mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping under the old
pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on our
walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from
the oppression of the last speaker, to oppress us with the greatness
and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another
redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men. O, what truths
profound and executable only in ages and orbs, are supposed in the
announcement of every truth! In common hours, society sits cold and
statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty,—knowing, possibly, that we can
be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but
prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god and converts the statues
into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which
shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and
saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which
loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday,—property, climate, breeding,
personal beauty and the like, have strangely changed their proportions.
All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literatures,
cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations and dance before
our eyes. And yet here again see the swift circumspection! Good as is
discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the
discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the
hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words
would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be
suffered.
Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle through which a
new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a
platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase
by which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient learning,
install ourselves the best we can in Greek, in Punic, in Roman houses,
only that we may wiselier see French, English and American houses and
modes of living. In like manner we see literature best from the midst
of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion.
The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer
must have his diameter of the earth’s orbit as a base to find the
parallax of any star.
Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not
in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of
Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline to
repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the power
of change and reform. But some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new
wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full of
daring thought and action. He smites and arouses me with his shrill
tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits, and I open my eye on my own
possibilities. He claps wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber
of the world, and I am capable once more of choosing a straight path in
theory and practice.
We have the same need to command a view of the religion of the world.
We can never see Christianity from the catechism:—from the pastures,
from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we
possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the
sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may chance to cast
a right glance back upon biography. Christianity is rightly dear to the
best of mankind; yet was there never a young philosopher whose breeding
had fallen into the Christian church by whom that brave text of Paul’s
was not specially prized:—“Then shall also the Son be subject unto Him
who put all things under him, that God may be all in all.” Let the
claims and virtues of persons be never so great and welcome, the
instinct of man presses eagerly onward to the impersonal and
illimitable, and gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of bigots
with this generous word out of the book itself.
The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric
circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations which
apprise us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but
sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities, this chemistry and
vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to stand there for
their own sake, are means and methods only,—are words of God, and as
fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned his
craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective
affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is
only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to
like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need
not be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate
also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not through subtle
subterranean channels need friend and fact be drawn to their
counterpart, but, rightly considered, these things proceed from the
eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one
fact.
The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues,
and extinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man will not
be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much
deduction from his grandeur. But it behooves each to see, when he
sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and
pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can
well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead.
Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may
be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril.
In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me
that with every precaution you take against such an evil you put
yourself into the power of the evil. I suppose that the highest
prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a rushing from the
centre to the verge of our orbit? Think how many times we shall fall
back into pitiful calculations before we take up our rest in the great
sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides, your
bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and the low
have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as
you. “Blessed be nothing” and “The worse things are, the better they
are” are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.
One man’s justice is another’s injustice; one man’s beauty another’s
ugliness; one man’s wisdom another’s folly; as one beholds the same
objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying
debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very
remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that
second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which
debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor?
the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to
nature? For you, O broker, there is no other principle but arithmetic.
For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character,
the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty,
like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically