Walking
like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their
tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as
well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas!
a sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them
from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the
locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried “Whoa!” to mankind?
Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of
locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery,
is meeting the horse and the ox half way. Whatever part the whip has
touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a side of any of
the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?
I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be
made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats
still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.
Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization;
and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited
disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures
broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main
alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various.
If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as
another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man
can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so
rare a use as the author of this illustration did. Confucius says,—“The
skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the
skins of the dog and the sheep tanned.” But it is not the part of a true
culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and
tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be
put.
When looking over a list of men’s names in a foreign language, as
of military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular
subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The
name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human
than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles
and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been
named by the child’s rigmarole—Iery-wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan. I
see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to
each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect.
The names of men are, of course, as cheap and meaningless as Bose and
Tray, the names of dogs.
Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named
merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to
know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual.
We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman
army had a name of his own—because we have not supposed that he had a
character of his own. At present our only true names are nicknames. I
knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called “Buster” by
his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some
travellers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but
earned it, and his name was his fame; and among some tribes he acquired
a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name
for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.
I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still
see men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less
strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his
own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and
a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my
neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William or Edwin, takes it off
with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or
aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some
of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or
else melodious tongue.
Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all
around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the
leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to
that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort
of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility,
a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.
In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a
certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are
already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the
meadows, and deepens the soil—not that which trusts to heating manures,
and improved implements and modes of culture only!
Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster,
both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very
late, he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.
There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce, a Frenchman,
discovered “actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a
chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues
of metal “are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of
sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would
soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtle of the agencies
of the universe.” But he observed that “those bodies which underwent
this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring
themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night,
when this excitement was no longer influencing them.” Hence it has been
inferred that “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic
creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Not
even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness.
I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more
than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage,
but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an
immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the
annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.
There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus
invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky
knowledge—Gramatica parda—tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived
from that same leopard to which I have referred.
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is
said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need
of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call
Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what
is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know
something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?
What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our
negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of
the newspapers—for what are the libraries of science but files of
newspapers—a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory,
and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the
Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and
leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society
for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes,—Go to grass. You have
eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop. The very
cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though
I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and
fed her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.
A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his
knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being
ugly. Which is the best man to deal with—he who knows nothing about a
subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he
who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?
My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head
in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest
that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.
I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more
definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the
insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before—a discovery that
there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our
philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot
know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely
and with impunity in the face of the sun: ?? t? ????, ?? ?e????
???se??,—“You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing,”
say the Chaldean Oracles.
There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we
may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience,
but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery
certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before
that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist—and with respect to
knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty
to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the
law-maker. “That is active duty,” says the Vishnu Purana, “which is
not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation: all
other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the
cleverness of an artist.”
It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories,
how little exercised we have been in our minds, how few experiences we
have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly,
though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity—though it be with
struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would
be well if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this
trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others appear to have been
exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a kind of
culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate.
Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more
to live for, aye, and to die for, than they have commonly.
When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is
walking on a railroad, then, indeed, the cars go by without his hearing
them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars
return.
“Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveler of the windy glens,
Why hast thou left my ear so soon?”
While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are
attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation to Nature men appear
to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the
animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the
animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there
is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Κόσμος
Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we
esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.
For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border
life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and
transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state
into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper.
Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a