Essays — First Series
on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that,
though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these
debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate
himself to the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Does he
owe no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a
landlord’s or a banker’s?
There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of
society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery
that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed
such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices:—
“Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,
Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.”
It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our
contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by
day; but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost
time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what
remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a sort
of omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing of duration, but
sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to be
done, without time.
And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have
arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency of all
actions, and would fain teach us that _if we are true_, forsooth, our
crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall construct the temple
of the true God!
I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened by seeing the
predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature,
and not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of the
principle of good into every chink and hole that selfishness has left
open, yea into selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor
hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. But lest I should
mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind
the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value
on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I
pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things.
No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an
endless seeker with no Past at my back.
Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake
could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of
fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of
circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central life is
somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and
contains all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life and
thought as Large and excellent as itself, but in vain, for that which
is made instructs how to make a better.
Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things
renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into
the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only
disease; all others run into this one. We call it by many names,—fever,
intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime; they are all forms of old
age; they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness,
not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst
we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.
Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward,
counts itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction flowing
from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all,
they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the
actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them, then,
become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold
truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are
perfumed again with hope and power. This old age ought not to creep on
a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always
swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure
but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by
oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so
sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts.
People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there
any hope for them.
Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the
pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being. Of
lower states, of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat; but
the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements of
the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth is
divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for
_so to be_ is the sole inlet of _so to know_. The new position of the
advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new. It
carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is itself an
exhalation of the morning. I cast away in this new moment all my once
hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now, for the first time seem I
to know any thing rightly. The simplest words,—we do not know what they
mean except when we love and aspire.
The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the
old and trodden round, and power and courage to make a new road to new
and better goals. Character makes an overpowering present; a cheerful,
determined hour, which fortifies all the company by making them see
that much is possible and excellent that was not thought of. Character
dulls the impression of particular events. When we see the conqueror we
do not think much of any one battle or success. We see that we had
exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him. The great man is not
convulsible or tormentable; events pass over him without much
impression. People say sometimes, ‘See what I have overcome; see how
cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed over these black
events.’ Not if they still remind me of the black event. True conquest
is the causing the calamity to fade and disappear as an early cloud of
insignificant result in a history so large and advancing.
The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget
ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our
sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in
short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without
enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment. The
great moments of history are the facilities of performance through the
strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion. “A man,” said
Oliver Cromwell, “never rises so high as when he knows not whither he
is going.” Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol are the
semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their
dangerous attraction for men. For the like reason they ask the aid of
wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames
and generosities of the heart.
XI.
INTELLECT
Go, speed the stars of Thought
On to their shining goals;—
The sower scatters broad his seed,
The wheat thou strew’st be souls.
INTELLECT
Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands above it in
the chemical tables, positively to that which stands below it. Water
dissolves wood and iron and salt; air dissolves water; electric fire
dissolves air, but the intellect dissolves fire, gravity, laws, method,
and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature in its resistless
menstruum. Intellect lies behind genius, which is intellect
constructive. Intellect is the simple power anterior to all action or
construction. Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a natural history
of the intellect, but what man has yet been able to mark the steps and
boundaries of that transparent essence? The first questions are always
to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness
of a child. How can we speak of the action of the mind under any
divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so
forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each
becomes the other. Itself alone is. Its vision is not like the vision
of the eye, but is union with the things known.
Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear consideration of
abstract truth. The considerations of time and place, of you and me, of
profit and hurt tyrannize over most men’s minds. Intellect separates
the fact considered, from you, from all local and personal reference,
and discerns it as if it existed for its own sake. Heraclitus looked
upon the affections as dense and colored mists. In the fog of good and
evil affections it is hard for man to walk forward in a straight line.
Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the
light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the
individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact,
and not as _I_ and _mine_. He who is immersed in what concerns person
or place cannot see the problem of existence. This the intellect always
ponders. Nature shows all things formed and bound. The intellect
pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness
between remote things and reduces all things into a few principles.
The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. All that mass of
mental and moral phenomena which we do not make objects of voluntary
thought, come within the power of fortune; they constitute the
circumstance of daily life; they are subject to change, to fear, and
hope. Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of
melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man,
imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events. But
a truth, separated by the intellect, is no longer a subject of destiny.
We behold it as a god upraised above care and fear. And so any fact in
our life, or any record of our fancies or reflections, disentangled
from the web of our unconsciousness, becomes an object impersonal and
immortal. It is the past restored, but embalmed. A better art than that
of Egypt has taken fear and corruption out of it. It is eviscerated of
care. It is offered for science. What is addressed to us for
contemplation does not threaten us but makes us intellectual beings.
The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind
that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that
spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual. Long
prior to the age of reflection is the thinking of the mind. Out of
darkness it came insensibly into the marvellous light of to-day. In the
period of infancy it accepted and disposed of all impressions from the
surrounding creation after its own way. Whatever any mind doth or saith
is after a law; and this native law remains over it after it has come
to reflection or conscious thought. In the most worn, pedantic,
introverted self-tormenter’s life, the greatest part is incalculable by
him, unforeseen, unimaginable, and must be, until he can take himself
up by his own ears. What am I? What has my will done to make me that I
am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this
connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my
ingenuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an
appreciable degree.
Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot with your best
deliberation and heed come so close to any question as your spontaneous
glance shall bring you, whilst you rise from your bed, or walk abroad
in the morning after meditating the matter before sleep on the previous