Essays — Second Series
now drilled in Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, it had quite left these
shells high and dry on the beach, and was now creating and feeding other
matters at other ends of the world. But in a hundred high schools and
colleges this warfare against common sense still goes on. Four, or six,
or ten years, the pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he
leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those books
for the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at our
colleges in this country every year, and the persons who, at forty
years, still read Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never met
with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato.
But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country
should be directed in its best years on studies which lead to nothing?
What was the consequence? Some intelligent persons said or thought,
'Is that Greek and Latin some spell to conjure with, and not words of
reason? If the physician, the lawyer, the divine, never use it to come
at their ends, I need never learn it to come at mine. Conjuring is gone
out of fashion, and I will omit this conjugating, and go straight to
affairs.' So they jumped the Greek and Latin, and read law, medicine, or
sermons, without it. To the astonishment of all, the self-made men took
even ground at once with the oldest of the regular graduates, and in
a few months the most conservative circles of Boston and New York had
quite forgotten who of their gownsmen was college-bred, and who was not.
One tendency appears alike in the philosophical speculation and in the
rudest democratical movements, through all the petulance and all the
puerility, the wish, namely, to cast aside the superfluous and arrive
at short methods; urged, as I suppose, by an intuition that the human
spirit is equal to all emergencies, alone, and that man is more often
injured than helped by the means he uses.
I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and the indication
of growing trust in the private self-supplied powers of the individual,
to be the affirmative principle of the recent philosophy, and that it is
feeling its own profound truth and is reaching forward at this very hour
to the happiest conclusions. I readily concede that in this, as in every
period of intellectual activity, there has been a noise of denial and
protest; much was to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by those
who were reared in the old, before they could begin to affirm and to
construct. Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish; and that
makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not
equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on
the kingdom of darkness they expend all their energy on some accidental
evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit. It is of little moment
that one or two or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but
of much that the man be in his senses.
The criticism and attack on institutions, which we have witnessed,
has made one thing plain, that society gains nothing whilst a man, not
himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him: he has become
tediously good in some particular but negligent or narrow in the rest;
and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.
It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the
establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a sally
against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a
total regeneration. Do not be so vain of your one objection. Do you
think there is only one? Alas! my good friend, there is no part of
society or of life better than any other part. All our things are right
and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.
Do you complain of our Marriage? Our marriage is no worse than our
education, our diet, our trade, our social customs. Do you complain of
the laws of Property? It is a pedantry to give such importance to them.
Can we not play the game of life with these counters, as well as with
those? in the institution of property, as well as out of it? Let into
it the new and renewing principle of love, and property will be
universality. No one gives the impression of superiority to the
institution, which he must give who will reform it. It makes no
difference what you say, you must make me feel that you are aloof from
it; by your natural and supernatural advantages do easily see to the end
of it,--do see how man can do without it. Now all men are on one side.
No man deserves to be heard against property. Only Love, only an Idea,
is against property as we hold it.
I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor to waste all my
time in attacks. If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false
sentiment I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? the
street is as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my
manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie. When we see
an eager assailant of one of these wrongs, a special reformer, we feel
like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue
piecemeal? This is a jewel amidst the rags of a beggar.
In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst of abuses, in
the heart of cities, in the aisles of false churches, alike in one place
and in another,--wherever, namely, a just and heroic soul finds itself,
there it will do what is next at hand, and by the new quality of
character it shall put forth it shall abrogate that old condition, law
or school in which it stands, before the law of its own mind.
If partiality was one fault of the movement party, the other defect was
their reliance on Association. Doubts such as those I have intimated
drove many good persons to agitate the questions of social reform. But
the revolt against the spirit of commerce, the spirit of aristocracy,
and the inveterate abuses of cities, did not appear possible to
individuals; and to do battle against numbers they armed themselves with
numbers, and against concert they relied on new concert.
Following or advancing beyond the ideas of St. Simon, of Fourier, and
of Owen, three communities have already been formed in Massachusetts on
kindred plans, and many more in the country at large. They aim to give
every member a share in the manual labor, to give an equal reward to
labor and to talent, and to unite a liberal culture with an education
to labor. The scheme offers, by the economies of associated labor and
expense, to make every member rich, on the same amount of property,
that, in separate families, would leave every member poor. These new
associations are composed of men and women of superior talents and
sentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such a community
will draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good; whether
those who have energy will not prefer their chance of superiority
and power in the world, to the humble certainties of the association;
whether such a retreat does not promise to become an asylum to those who
have tried and failed, rather than a field to the strong; and whether
the members will not necessarily be fractions of men, because each
finds that he cannot enter it, without some compromise. Friendship and
association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the best of
the human race, banded for some catholic object; yes, excellent; but
remember that no society can ever be so large as one man. He, in his
friendship, in his natural and momentary associations, doubles or
multiplies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two
or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one.
But the men of less faith could not thus believe, and to such, concert
appears the sole specific of strength. I have failed, and you have
failed, but perhaps together we shall not fail. Our housekeeping is not
satisfactory to us, but perhaps a phalanx, a community, might be. Many
of us have differed in opinion, and we could find no man who could make
the truth plain, but possibly a college, or an ecclesiastical council
might. I have not been able either to persuade my brother or to prevail
on myself, to disuse the traffic or the potation of brandy, but
perhaps a pledge of total abstinence might effectually restrain us. The
candidate my party votes for is not to be trusted with a dollar, but he
will be honest in the Senate, for we can bring public opinion to bear on
him. Thus concert was the specific in all cases. But concert is neither
better nor worse, neither more nor less potent than individual force.
All the men in the world cannot make a statue walk and speak, cannot
make a drop of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than one man can.
But let there be one man, let there be truth in two men, in ten men,
then is concert for the first time possible; because the force which
moves the world is a new quality, and can never be furnished by adding
whatever quantities of a different kind. What is the use of the concert
of the false and the disunited? There can be no concert in two, where
there is no concert in one. When the individual is not individual, but
is dual; when his thoughts look one way and his actions another; when
his faith is traversed by his habits; when his will, enlightened by
reason, is warped by his sense; when with one hand he rows and with the
other backs water, what concert can be?
I do not wonder at the interest these projects inspire. The world is
awaking to the idea of union, and these experiments show what it is
thinking of. It is and will be magic. Men will live and communicate, and
plough, and reap, and govern, as by added ethereal power, when once they
are united; as in a celebrated experiment, by expiration and respiration
exactly together, four persons lift a heavy man from the ground by the
little finger only, and without sense of weight. But this union must be
inward, and not one of covenants, and is to be reached by a reverse of
the methods they use. The union is only perfect when all the uniters are
isolated. It is the union of friends who live in different streets or
towns. Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all
sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter the
union the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to
recognize in every hour and place the secret soul; he will go up and
down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all,
the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke. Government will
be adamantine without any governor. The union must be ideal in actual
individualism.
I pass to the indication in some particulars of that faith in man, which
the heart is preaching to us in these days, and which engages the more
regard, from the consideration that the speculations of one generation
are the history of the next following.
In alluding just now to our system of education, I spoke of the deadness
of its details. But it is open to graver criticism than the palsy of
its members: it is a system of despair. The disease with which the
human mind now labors is want of faith. Men do not believe in a power of
education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and
we do not try. We renounce all high aims. We believe that the defects of
so many perverse and so many frivolous people who make up society, are
organic, and society is a hospital of incurables. A man of good sense
but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as
often as he went there, said to me that "he liked to have concerts, and
fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on." I am afraid the
remark is too honest, and comes from the same origin as the maxim of the