Essays — Second Series
law. Bear with these distractions, with this coetaneous growth of the
parts; they will one day be members, and obey one will. On that one
will, on that secret cause, they nail our attention and hope. Life
is hereby melted into an expectation or a religion. Underneath the
inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection; the
Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam. Do but
observe the mode of our illumination. When I converse with a profound
mind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at
once arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I drink water;
or go to the fire, being cold; no! but I am at first apprised of my
vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read
or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in
flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and
repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals and showed
the approaching traveller the inland mountains, with the tranquil
eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze and shepherds
pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as
initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there,
and behold what was there already. I make! O no! I clap my hands in
infantine joy and amazement before the first opening to me of this
august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages,
young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what
a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new
beauty. I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new
yet unapproachable America I have found in the West:--
"Since neither now nor yesterday began
These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can
A man be found who their first entrance knew."
If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must now add that there
is that in us which changes not and which ranks all sensations and
states of mind. The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which
identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his
body; life above life, in infinite degrees. The sentiment from which it
sprung determines the dignity of any deed, and the question ever is, not
what you have done or forborne, but at whose command you have done or
forborne it.
Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost,--these are quaint names, too narrow
to cover this unbounded substance. The baffled intellect must still
kneel before this cause, which refuses to be named,--ineffable cause,
which every fine genius has essayed to represent by some emphatic
symbol, as, Thales by water, Anaximenes by air, Anaxagoras by (Nous)
thought, Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the moderns by love; and the
metaphor of each has become a national religion. The Chinese Mencius has
not been the least successful in his generalization. "I fully understand
language," he said, "and nourish well my vast-flowing vigor."--"I beg
to ask what you call vast-flowing vigor?"--said his companion. "The
explanation," replied Mencius, "is difficult. This vigor is supremely
great, and in the highest degree unbending. Nourish it correctly and do
it no injury, and it will fill up the vacancy between heaven and earth.
This vigor accords with and assists justice and reason, and leaves no
hunger."--In our more correct writing we give to this generalization the
name of Being, and thereby confess that we have arrived as far as we can
go. Suffice it for the joy of the universe that we have not arrived at a
wall, but at interminable oceans. Our life seems not present so much as
prospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of
this vast-flowing vigor. Most of life seems to be mere advertisement of
faculty; information is given us not to sell ourselves cheap; that
we are very great. So, in particulars, our greatness is always in a
tendency or direction, not in an action. It is for us to believe in the
rule, not in the exception. The noble are thus known from the ignoble.
So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe
concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal
impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance and is the
principal fact in the history of the globe. Shall we describe this cause
as that which works directly? The spirit is not helpless or needful
of mediate organs. It has plentiful powers and direct effects. I am
explained without explaining, I am felt without acting, and where I am
not. Therefore all just persons are satisfied with their own praise.
They refuse to explain themselves, and are content that new actions
should do them that office. They believe that we communicate without
speech and above speech, and that no right action of ours is quite
unaffecting to our friends, at whatever distance; for the influence of
action is not to be measured by miles. Why should I fret myself because
a circumstance has occurred which hinders my presence where I was
expected? If I am not at the meeting, my presence where I am should be
as useful to the commonwealth of friendship and wisdom, as would be my
presence in that place. I exert the same quality of power in all places.
Thus journeys the mighty Ideal before us; it never was known to fall
into the rear. No man ever came to an experience which was satiating,
but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward! In liberated
moments we know that a new picture of life and duty is already possible;
the elements already exist in many minds around you of a doctrine of
life which shall transcend any written record we have. The new statement
will comprise the skepticisms as well as the faiths of society, and out
of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For skepticisms are not gratuitous
or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the
new philosophy must take them in and make affirmations outside of them,
just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs.
It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have
made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever
afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not
see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting
these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the
amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative
power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw;
now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all
things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, objects,
successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and
literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is
a shadow which we cast. The street is full of humiliations to the proud.
As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in his livery and make them
wait on his guests at table, so the chagrins which the bad heart gives
off as bubbles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the street,
shopmen or bar-keepers in hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is
threatenable and insultable in us. 'Tis the same with our idolatries.
People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and
the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or
representative of humanity, with the name of hero or saint. Jesus, the
"providential man," is a good man on whom many people are agreed
that these optical laws shall take effect. By love on one part and
by forbearance to press objection on the other part, it is for a time
settled, that we will look at him in the centre of the horizon, and
ascribe to him the properties that will attach to any man so seen. But
the longest love or aversion has a speedy term. The great and crescive
self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence and
ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love. Marriage (in what is
called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality
between every subject and every object. The subject is the receiver of
Godhead, and at every comparison must feel his being enhanced by that
cryptic might. Though not in energy, yet by presence, this magazine of
substance cannot be otherwise than felt; nor can any force of intellect
attribute to the object the proper deity which sleeps or wakes forever
in every subject. Never can love make consciousness and ascription
equal in force. There will be the same gulf between every me and thee as
between the original and the picture. The universe is the bride of the
soul. All private sympathy is partial. Two human beings are like globes,
which can touch only in a point, and whilst they remain in contact,
all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must
also come, and the longer a particular union lasts the more energy of
appetency the parts not in union acquire.
Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion
of its unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin-born but the only
begotten, and though revealing itself as child in time, child in
appearance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no co-life.
Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe in
ourselves as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to
ourselves, and that which we call sin in others is experiment for us. It
is an instance of our faith in ourselves that men never speak of crime
as lightly as they think; or every man thinks a latitude safe for
himself which is nowise to be indulged to another. The act looks very
differently on the inside and on the outside; in its quality and in its
consequences. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets
and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him or fright him
from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be
contemplated; but in its sequel it turns out to be a horrible jangle
and confounding of all relations. Especially the crimes that spring from
love seem right and fair from the actor's point of view, but when acted
are found destructive of society. No man at last believes that he can be
lost, nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon. Because the
intellect qualifies in our own case the moral judgments. For there is
no crime to the intellect. That is antinomian or hypernomian, and judges
law as well as fact. "It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder," said
Napoleon, speaking the language of the intellect. To it, the world is
a problem in mathematics or the science of quantity, and it leaves out
praise and blame and all weak emotions. All stealing is comparative. If
you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal? Saints are sad, because
they behold sin (even when they speculate), from the point of view of
the conscience, and not of the intellect; a confusion of thought.
Sin, seen from the thought, is a diminution, or less: seen from the
conscience or will, it is pravity or bad. The intellect names it
shade, absence of light, and no essence. The conscience must feel it as
essence, essential evil. This it is not; it has an objective existence,
but no subjective.
Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall
successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject
enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see;
use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are;
Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Bonaparte, are the mind's ministers.
Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat
the new comer like a travelling geologist who passes through our estate
and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush
pasture. The partial action of each strong mind in one direction is a