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01 - History - Essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson · The Philosophy Insights Collection

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History. There is no great and no small to the soul that maketh all,
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and where it cometh all things are, and it cometh everywhere. I
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am the owner of the sphere of the seven stars, in the solar year,
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of Caesar's hand, in Plato's brain, of Lord Christ's heart, and
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Shakespeare's strain. There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man
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is an inlets to the same and to all of the same. He that
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is once admitted to the right of reason is made a free man of the
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whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think, what a saint
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has felt. He may feel what, at any time has befallen any man
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he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to
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all that is or can be done. For this is the only and sovereign
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agent of all The works of this mindin history is the record. Its genius
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is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less
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than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes
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forth from the beginning to embody, every faculty, every thought, every emotion
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which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to
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the fact. All the facts of history pre exist in the mind as laws.
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Each law, in turn, is made by circumstances predominant, and the
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limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is
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a whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one
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acorn. And Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gall Britain, America lie folded
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already in the first Man. Epic by epic, camp, Kingdom, Empire,
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Republic, Democracy are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold
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world. This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The
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sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one
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man, it is ought to be explained from individual experience. There is a
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relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the
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air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light
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on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant,
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as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces.
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So the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained
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by the hours of the universal mind. Each individual man is one more incarnation,
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all its properties consist in him. Each new fact, in his private
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experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the
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crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought
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in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man,
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it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion,
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and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the
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problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in me.
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To be credible or intelligible, we as we read must become Greeks, Romans,
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Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner. Must fasten these images
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to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.
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What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind's powers
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and deprivations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement as
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meaning. For you stand before each of its tablets and say, under this
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mask did my proteus nature hide itself? This remedies the defect of our too
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great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective, and as crabs,
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goats, scorpions, the balance and the water pot lose their meanness when
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hung as signs in the zodiac. So I can see my own vices without
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heats in the distant persons of Solomon, our sybiades and cataline. It is
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the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things. Human life as
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containing this is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and
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laws. All laws derive, hence their ultimate reason, all express more or
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less distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also hoes of
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the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to
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it with swords and laws and wide and complex combinations. The obscure consciousness of
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this fact is the light of our day, the claim of claims, the
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plea for education, for justice, for charity, the foundation of friendship and
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love, and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of self reliance.
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It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as superior beings universal history.
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The poets, the romancers do not in their stateliest pictures, in their sacerdotal,
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the imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius, anywhere
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lose our ear anywhere make us feel that we intrude that this is for better
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men. But rather is it true that in their grandest strokes we feel most
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at home. All that Shakespeare says of the king yonder slip of a boy
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that reads in the corner, feels to be true of himself. We sympathize
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in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances,
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the great prosperities of men, because their law was enacted, the sea
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was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for us,
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as we ourselves in that place, would have done or applauded. We
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have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich because they
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have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper
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to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise
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men by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist describes to each reader his own ideas,
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describes his unattained but attainable self. All literature writes the character of the
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wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation are portraits in which he
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finds the lineaments he is forming. The silence and the eloquent praise him and
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accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by personal illusions.
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A true aspirant therefore never needs look for illusions, personal and laudatory and discourse.
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He hears the commendation not of himself, but more sweets of that character.
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He seeks in every word that is said concerning character. Yea further,
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in every fact and circumstance, in the running river and the rustling corn,
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praise is looked, homage tendered. Love flows from mute nature, from the
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mountains and the lights of the firmament. These hints dropped, as it were,
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from sleep and night. Let us use in broad day. The student
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is to read history actively and not passively, to esteem his own life.
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The text and books the commentary thus compelled. The muse of history will utter
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oracles as never to those who do not respipt affeck themselves. I have no
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expectation that any man will read history. Arte who thinks that what was done
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in a remote age by men whose names have resounded far has any deeper sense
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than what he is doing today. The world exists for the education of each
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man. There is no age or state of society, or mode of action
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in history to which there is not something corresponding in his life. Everything tends
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in a wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him.
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He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He
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must sit solidly at home and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or
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empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography, in all
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the government of the world. He must transfer the point of view from which
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history is commonly read from Rome and Athens in London to himself, and not
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deny his conviction that he is the court. And if England or Egypt have
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anything to say to him, he will try the case. If not,
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let them forever be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where
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facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct
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of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we
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make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether, the
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solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to
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keep a fact of fact. Babylon, Troy, Tire, Palestine, and
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even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the
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sun standing still in Gibeon is poetry. Thenceforward to all nations who cares what
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the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in
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heaven an immortal sign. London and Paris and New York must go the same
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way. What is history, said Napoleon, But a fable agreed upon?
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This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England,
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war, colonization, church, court, and commerce, as with so
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many flowers and wild ornaments, Grave and gay. I will not make more
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account of them. I believe in eternity I can find Greece, Asia,
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Italy, Spain and the Islands the genius and creative principle of each and of
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all errors. In my own mind. We are always coming up with the
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emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them. Here all
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history becomes subjective. In other words, there is properly no history, only
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biography. Every mind must know the oh lesson for itself must go over the
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whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live,
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It will not know what the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule
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for manipular convenience. It will lose all the good of verifying for itself by
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means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere some time it will demand and
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find compensation for that loss by doing the work itself. Ferguson discovered many things
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in astronomy which had long been known the better for him. History must be
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this, or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a
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fact in human nature. That is all. We must in ourselves see the
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necessary reason of every fact, see how it could and must be so.
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Stand before every public and private work, before an oration of Burke, before
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a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrnum of Sir Thomas Moore of Sydney,
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of Marmaduke Robinson, before a French reign of terror and a Salem hanging of
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witches, before a fanatic revival, and the animal magnetism in Paris or in
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Providence. We assume that we under the influence should be like affected and achieve
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the like, and we aim to master intellectually the steps and reach the same
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height or the same degradation that our fellow, our proxy, has done.
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All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the pyramids, the excavated cities,
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Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis, is the desire to do
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away this wild, savage and preposterous there and then, and introduced in its
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place the here and now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy pits and
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pyramids of Thebes until he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous
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work and himself. When he has satisfied himself in general and in detail that
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it was made by such a person as he, so armed and so motived,
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and to ends to which he himself should also have worked, the problem
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is solved. His thought lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and
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catacombs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the
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mind or are now a Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us,
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and not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we find
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it not in our man. But we apply ourselves to the history of its
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production. We put ourselves into the place and state of the builder. We
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remember the forest dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the first type,
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and the decoration of it. As the wealth of the nation increased.
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The value which is given to wood by carving, led to the carving over
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the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. We have gone through this process
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and added there too the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its
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processions, its saints' days, and image worship. We have, as it
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were, been the man that made the minster. We have seen how it
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could and must be. We have the sufficient reason. The difference between men
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is in their principle of association. Some men classify objects by color and size
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and other accidents of appearance, others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation
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of cause and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision
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of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poets, to the philosopher,
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to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all things profitable,
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all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on
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the life and slights the circumstance every chemical substance, every plants, every animal
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in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance,
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upborne and surrounded as we are by all this, all creating nature, soft
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and fluid as a cloud or the air. Why should we be such hard
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pedants and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time,
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or of magnitude, or of figure. The soul knows them not, and
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Genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them, as a
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young child plays with gray beards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thoughts,
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and far back in the womb of things, sees the rays parting from
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one orb that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad
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through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through
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the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg,
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the constant individual through countless individuals, the fixed species through many species, the
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genus through all genera, the steadfast type, through all the kingdoms of organized
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life. The eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and
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never the same. She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as
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a poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and toughness of
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matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The adamant
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streams into soft but precise form before it, and whilst I look at it,
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its outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as form,
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yet never does it quite deny itself. In Man we still trace the
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remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races,
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Yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace. As low in Eschylus
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transforms to a cow offends the imagination, But how changed when as isis in
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Egypt she meets Osiris Jove, a beautiful woman with nothing of the metamorphosis left,
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but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows. The identity
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of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious. There is at the
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surface infinite variety of things. At the center there is simplicity of cause.
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How many are the acts of one man in which we recognize the same character,
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observe the sources of our information in respect to the Greek genius. We
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have the civil history of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon,
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and Plutarch have given it a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they
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were and what they did. We had the same national mind expressed for us
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again in their literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama and philosophy a
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very form. Then we have it once more in their architecture, a beauty
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as of temperance, itself limited to the straight line and the square, a
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builded geometry. Then we have it once again in sculpture, the tongue on
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the balance of expression, a multitude of forms, in the utmost freedom of
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action, at never transgressing the ideal serenity, like votaries performing some religious dance
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before the gods, and though in convulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring
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to break the figure and decorum of their dance. Thus, of the genius
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of one remarkable people we have a fourfold representation. And to the senses,
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what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the peristyle
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of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion. Everyone must have observed
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faces and forms, which, without any resembling feature, made a like impression
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on the beholder. A particular picture or copy of verses, if it do
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not awaken the same train of images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as
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some wild mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise obvious to the senses,
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but is a cult and out of the reach of the understanding. Nature is
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an endless combination and repetition of very few laws. She hums the old,
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well known air through innumerable variations. Nature is full of a sublime family likeness
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throughout her works, and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected
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quarters. I have seen the head of an old sagam of the forest,
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which at once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows
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of the brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are men whose manners
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have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of
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the Parthenon and the remains of the earliest Greek art. And there are compositions
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of the same strain to be found in the books of all ages. What
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is Guido's Rospigliosi Aurora but a mourning thought, as the horses in it are
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only a mourning cloud. If any one will but take pains to observe the
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variety of actions to which he is equally inclined in certain moods of mind,
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and those to which he is a verse, he will see how deep is
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the chain of affinity. A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree
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without in some sort becoming a tree, or draw a child by studying the
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outlines of its form merely. But by watching for a time his motions and
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plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at will
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in every attitude. So Russ entered into the inmost nature of a sheep.
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I know a draftsman employed in a public survey, who found that he could
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not sketch the rock until their geological structure was first explained to him in a
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certain state of thought. Is the common origin of very diverse works. It
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is the spirits and not the fact, that is identical. By a deeper
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apprehension, and not primarily by a painful acquisition of many manual skills. The
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artist attains the power of awakening other souls to a given activity. It has
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been said that common souls pay with what they do, nobler souls with that
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which they are. And why because a profound nature awakens in us by its
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actions and words, by its very looks and manners, the same power and
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beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures addresses civil and natural history.
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The history of art and of literature must be explained from individual history, or
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must remain words. There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that
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does not interest us. Kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron
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shoe. The roots of all things are in man. Santa Croce and the
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Dome of Saint Peter's are lame copies after a divine model. Strasburg Cathedral is
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a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is
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the poet's mind. The true ship is the shipbuilder in the man. Could
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we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and
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tendril of his work, As every spine and tint in the seashell pre exists
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in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of chivalry
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is in courtesy a man of fine manners, shall pronounce your name with all
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the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add. The trivial experience of every
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day is always verifying some old prediction to us, and converting into things the
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world herds and signs which we had heard and seen without heed. A lady
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with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always
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seemed to her to wait, as if the genie who inhabited them suspended their
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deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward, a thought which poetry has celebrated in
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the Dance of the Fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet.
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The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at
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midnight has been present, like an archangel, at the creation of light and
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of the world. I remember one summer day in the fields, my companion
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pointed out to me a broad cloud which might extend a quarter of a mile
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parallel to the horizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted
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over churches, a round block in the center which she was easy to animate
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with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide stretched symmetrical wings.
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What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often, and it was undoubtedly the
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archetype of that familiar ornament. I have seen in the sky a chain of
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summer lightning, which at once showed to me that the Greeks drew from nature
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when they painted the thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a
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snow drift along the sides of the stone wall, which obviously gave the idea
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of the common architectural scroll to a but a tower. By surrounding ourselves with
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the original circumstances, we invent anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture,
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as we see how each people merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple
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preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese
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pagoda is plainly a tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the
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mounds and the subterranean houses of their forefathers. The custom of making houses and
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tombs in the living rock, says Heeren, in his researches on the Ethiopians,
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determined very natural the principal character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal
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form which it assumed in these caverns. Already prepared by nature. The eye
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was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that when art came
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to the assistance of nature, it could not move on a small scale without
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degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size or neat porches and wings
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have been associated with these gigantic halls, before which only colossae could sit as
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watchmen or lean on the pillars of the interior. The Gothic church plainly originated
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in a rude adaptation of the forest trees with all their boughs, to a
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festal or solemn arcade, as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the
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green wythes that tied them. No one can walk in a road cut through
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pine woods without being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove, especially in
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winter, when the beariness of all other trees shows the low arch of the
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saxons in the woods. In a winter afternoon, one will see as readily
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the origin of the stained glass window with which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned.
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In the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of
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the forest. Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford
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and the English Cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder,
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and that his chisel, his saw, and plane still reproduced its ferns,
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its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm oak, pine, fir
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and spruce. The Gothic cathedral is blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable
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demand of harmony. In man, the mountain of granite blooms into an eternal
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flower, with a lightness and delicate finish, as well as the aerial proportions
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and perspective of vegetable beauty. In like manner, all public facts are to
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be individualized, or private facts are to be generalized. Then at once history
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becomes fluid and true, and biography deep and sublime, as the Persian imitated
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in the slender shafts and capitals of his architecture, the stem and flower of
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the lotus and palm. So the Persian court in its magnificent era never gave
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over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes, but traveled from Ecbatana, where the
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spring was spent to Susa in summer and to Babylon for the winter. In
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the early history of Asia and Africa, nomadism and agriculture are the two antagonist
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facts. The geography of Asia and Africa necessitated a nomadic life, but the
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nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of a
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market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction because of
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the perils of the state from nomadism, and in these lay and civil countries
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of England and America, these propensities still fight out the old battle in the
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nation and in the individual. The nomads of Africa were constrained to wander by
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the attacks of the gadfly, which drives the cattle mad, and so compels
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the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season and to drive off the cattle to
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the higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia follow the pasturage from months to
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month. In America and Europe, the nomadism is of trade and curiosity,
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a progress certainly from the gad fly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italomania of
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Boston Bay sacred cities, to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined or stringent
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laws and customs tending to invigorate the national bond were a check on the old
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rovers and the cumulative values of long residents are the restraints on the itineracy of
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the present day. The antagonism of the two tendency is not less active in
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individuals, as the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to predominate.
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A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid domestication,
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lives in his wagon and roams through all latitudes as easily as a kalmuc
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at sea or in the forest or in the snow. He sleeps as warm,
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dines with as good appetite, and associates as happily as beside his own
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chimney. Or perhaps his facility is deeper seated in the increased range of his
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faculties of observation, which yield him points of interest whenever fresh objects meet his
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eyes. The pastoral nations would needy and hungry to desperation, and this intellectual
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nomadism in its excess bankrupts the mind through the dissipation of power on a miscellany
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of objects. The home keeping wits, on the other hand, is that
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continence or content, which finds all the elements of life in its own soil,
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and which has its own perils of monotony and deterioration if not stimulated by
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foreign infusions. Everything the individual sees without him corresponds to his states of mind,
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and everything is in turn intelligible to him, as his onward thinking leads
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him into the truth to which that fact or series belongs, the prime evil
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world, the foreworld, as the Germans say, I can dive to it
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in myself, as well as grope for it with researching fingers in catacombs,
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libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined villas. What is the
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foundation of that interest or men feel in Greek history, letters, art,
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and poetry in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to
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the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans four or five centuries later. What
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but this that every man passes personally through a Grecian period. The Grecian state
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is the error of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses of the
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spiritual nature, unfolded in strict unity with the body in it existed those human
31:11
forms which supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove,
31:17
not like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the
31:21
face is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defied,
31:26
and symmetrical features, whose eye sockets are so formed that it would be
31:30
impossible for such eyes to squint and take furtive glances on this side and on
31:36
that, but they must turn the whole head. The manners of that period
31:41
are plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for personal qualities, courage,
31:47
address, self command, justice, strength, swiftness, a loud voice,
31:52
a broad chest, luxury and elegance are not known. A sparse population and
31:57
wants make every man his own valet, cook, butcher, and soldier.
32:02
And the habit of supplying his own needs educates the body to wonderful performances such
32:07
are the Agamemnon and Diomede of Homer. And not far different is the picture
32:13
Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the retreat of the ten thousand,
32:19
after the army had crossed the river, tailor boas in Armenia, there fell
32:22
much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground covered with it.
32:28
But Xenophon arose, naked, and taking an axe, began to split wood,
32:32
whereupon others rose and did the like. Throughout his army exists a boundless
32:38
liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder. They wrangled with the generals on
32:44
each new order. And Xenophon is as sharp tongued as any, and sharper
32:49
tongue than most, and so gives as good as it gets. Who does
32:53
not see that this is a gang of great boys, with such a code
32:58
of honor, and such slacks discipline as great boys have. The costly charm
33:04
of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the old literature, is that
33:07
the persons speak, simply speak, as persons who have great good sense without
33:13
knowing it before. Yet the reflective habit has become the predominant habit of the
33:17
mind. Our admiration of the Antique is not admiration of the old, but
33:23
of the natural. The Greeks are not reflective, but perfect in their senses
33:29
and in their health, with the finest physical organization in the world. Adults
33:35
acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They made vases, tragedies,
33:38
and statues such as healthy senses should that is in good taste. Such things
33:45
have continued to be made in all ages, and are now wherever a healthy
33:50
physique exists. But as a class from their superior organization, they have surpassed
33:54
all. They combine the energy of manhood with the engageishing unconsciousness of childhood.
34:01
The attraction of these manners is that they belong to man and are known to
34:07
every man in virtue of his being once a child. Besides that, there
34:12
are always individuals who retain these characteristics. A person of childlike genius and inborn
34:17
energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the muse of Hellas
34:23
I admire the love of nature in the Feloctetes. In reading these fine apostrophes
34:30
to sleep to the stars, rocks, mountains and waves, I feel time
34:35
passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the eternity of man, the
34:39
identity of his thought. The Greek had, it seems the same fellow beings
34:45
as I. The sun and moon, water and fire met his heart precisely
34:50
as they meet mine. Then The vaunted distinction between Greek and English, between
34:54
Classic and Romantic schools, seems superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Plato
35:00
becomes a thought to me, When a truth that fire the soul of Pindar,
35:06
fire's mine, time is no more. When I feel that we too
35:10
meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue,
35:15
and do, as it were, run into one. Why should I
35:19
measure degrees of latitude? Why should I count Egyptian years? The student interprets
35:25
the age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry, and the days of
35:30
maritime adventure and circumnavigation by quite parallel miniature experiences of his own. To the
35:36
sacred history of the world, he has the same key when the voice of
35:39
a prophet, out of the deeps of antiquity, merely echoes to him a
35:44
sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth. He then pierces to
35:47
the truth. Through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions.
35:53
Rare extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts
36:00
nature. I see that men of God have from time to time walked among
36:05
men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.
36:09
Hence, evidently the tripod, the priest, the priestess, inspired by
36:14
the divine afflatus Jesus, astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite him
36:22
to history or reconcile him with themselves. As they come to revere their intuitions
36:28
and to aspire to live holy, their own piety explains every fact, every
36:34
word. How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu
36:39
of Socrates domesticate themselves in the mind, I cannot find any antiquity in them.
36:46
They are mine as much as theirs. I have seen the first monks
36:52
and anchoretes, without crossing seas or centuries. More than once some individual has
36:57
appeared to me with such negligence of lifelabor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty
37:02
beneficiary, begging in the name of God as made good to the nineteenth century
37:07
Simi. In the Stylite the Thebais and the first Kapushins, the priest craft
37:14
of the East and West of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid and Inca is
37:19
expounded in the individual's private life. The cramping influence of a hard formalist on
37:24
the young child, in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding,
37:30
and that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much
37:35
sympathy with the tyranny is a familiar fact explained to the child when he becomes
37:40
a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself a
37:45
child, tyrannized over by those names and words and forms of whose influence he
37:51
was merely the organ to the youth. The fact teaches him how Balor's was
37:57
worshiped, and how the pyramids were built. Better than the discovery by Champoleon
38:00
of the names of all the workmen and the cost of every tile, he
38:05
finds Assyria and the mounds of Chulola at his door, and himself has laid
38:09
the courses again in that protest which each considerate person makes against the superstition of
38:16
his times, he repeats step by step the part of old reformers, and
38:22
in the search after truth, finds, like them new perils to virtue.
38:28
He learns again what moral vigor is needed to supply the girdle of a superstition,
38:34
a great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation. How many times
38:38
in the history of the world has the Luther of the day had to lament
38:43
the decay of piety in his own household? Doctor said his wife to Martin
38:49
Luther one day, how is it that, whilst subject to papacy we prayed
38:52
so often with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness,
38:58
and very seldom. The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in
39:04
literature, in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that
39:08
the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations, but that
39:14
universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true for all.
39:20
His own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted
39:24
down before he was born. One after another, he comes up, in
39:30
his private adventures with every fable of Esop, of Homer, of Hafiz,
39:34
of Ariosto, of Chaucer of Scott, and verifies them with his own head
39:38
and hands, the beautiful fables of the Greeks being proper creations of the imagination,
39:45
and not of the fancy, are universal verities, what a range of
39:51
meanings and what perpetual pertinence has The story of Prometheus, besides its primary value
39:57
as the first chapter of the history of Europe, the mythology thin the veiling
40:00
authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts, and the migration of colonies,
40:06
it gives the history of religion with some closeness to the faith of later
40:09
ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the friend
40:16
of man, stands between the unjust justice of the eternal Father and the race
40:22
of mortals, and readily suffers all things on their account. But where it
40:27
departs from Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him as the defire of Jove, it represents
40:32
a state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine of theism is taught in
40:37
a crude, objective form, and which seems the self defense of man against
40:43
his untruth, namely, a discontent with the believed fact that a God exists,
40:47
and a feeling that the obligation of reverence is onerous. It would steal,
40:53
if it could, the fire of the Creator and live apart from him,
40:57
an independent of him. The prometheus Vintus is the romance of skepticism.
41:02
Not less true to all time are the details of that stately apologue. Apollo
41:07
kept the flocks of Admitus, said the poets. When the gods come among
41:12
men, they are not known. Jesus was not, Socrates and Shakespeare were
41:16
not. Antius was suffocated by the grip of Hercules, but every time he
41:22
touched his mother Earth, his strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant,
41:28
and in all his weakness, both his body and his mind are invigorated
41:31
by habits of conversation with nature, the power of music, the power of
41:37
poetry to unfix, and as it were, clap wings to solid Nature interprets
41:42
the riddle of Orpheus. The philosophical perception of identity through endless mutations of form
41:49
makes him know the proteus. What else am I? Who laughed or wept
41:53
yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and
41:58
ran? And what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus.
42:06
I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any
42:08
fat because every creature is man, agent or patient. Tantalus is but a
42:15
name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the waters of
42:20
thought, which are always gleaming and waving within the sight of the soul.
42:24
The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were, But men
42:30
and women are only half human. Every animal of the barn yard, the
42:35
field, and the forests, of the earth, and of the waters that
42:37
are under the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave the
42:42
print of its features and form in some one or other of these upright heaven
42:46
facing speakers. Ah, brother, stop the ebb of the soul ebbing downward
42:53
into the forms in whose habits thou hast now for many years slid as near
43:00
and proper to us. Is also that old fable of the Sphinx who was
43:04
said to sit at the roadside and put briddles to every passenger. If the
43:08
man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the
43:14
reddle, the sphinx was slain. What is our life but an endless flight
43:19
of winged facts or events in splendid variety. These changes come all putting questions
43:25
to the human spirit. These men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom.
43:30
These facts or questions of time served them, Facts encumber them, tyrannize over
43:37
them, and make the men of routine the men of sense, in whom
43:40
a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man
43:45
is truly man. But if the man is true to his better instincts or
43:51
sentiments, and refuses the dominion of facts as one that comes of a higher
43:55
race, remains fast by the soul, and sees the principle, then the
44:00
facts fall aptly and supple into their places. They know their master, and
44:06
the meanest of them glorifies them. See in good as Helena the same desire
44:12
that every word should be a thing. These figures, he would say,
44:15
these Charuns, Griffins, Fokias, Helen, and Leda are something, and
44:22
do exert a specific influence on the mind. So far, then are they
44:27
eternal entities, as real to day as in the First Olympiad. Much revolving
44:31
them, he writes out freely his humor and gives them body to his own
44:37
imagination. And although that poem be as vague and fantastic as a dream,
44:42
yet is it much more attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of the same
44:45
author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful relief to the mind from
44:51
the routine of customary images, awakens the reader's invention and fancy by the wild
44:57
freedom of the design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise.
45:04
The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard,
45:08
sits on his neck and writes through his head, so that when he seems
45:13
to vent a mere caprice in wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory.
45:19
Hence Plato said that poets are a great and wise things, which they
45:22
do not themselves understand. All the fictions of the Middle Age explain themselves as
45:29
a masked or a frolic expression of that which in grave earnest the mind of
45:32
that period toil to achieve magic. And all that is ascribed to it is
45:38
a deep presentiment of the powers of science, the shoes of swiftness, the
45:44
sword of sharpness, the power of subduing, the elements of using, the
45:47
secret virtues of minerals of understanding. The voices of birds are the obscure efforts
45:53
of the mind in a right direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero,
45:59
the gift of prepared ractual youth, and the like are alike the endeavor of
46:02
the human spirit to bend the shows of things to the desires of the mind.
46:09
In Perceforest and Ahmedie de Gaulle, a garland and a rose bloom on
46:14
the head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the
46:16
inconstant, and the Story of the Boy and the Mantle. Even a mature
46:22
reader may be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the triumph of the
46:25
general Venilas. And indeed all the postulates of the elfin annals that the fairies
46:30
do not like to be named, that their gifts are capricious and not to
46:34
be trusted, that who seeks a treasure must not speak, And the like
46:38
I find true in Concord, however they might be in Cornwall and Briton.
46:45
Is it otherwise? In the newest Romance I read the Bride of Lammermoor.
46:51
Sir William Ashton is a mask for vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle a fine name
46:55
for proud poverty, and the foreign mission of states only a Bunyan disguise for
47:00
honest industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good
47:06
and beautiful by fighting down the unjust and sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name
47:13
for fidelity, which is always beautiful and always liable to calamity in this world.
47:20
But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another history goes
47:24
daily forward, that of the external world, in which he is not less
47:29
strictly implicated. He is the compend of time. He is also the correlative
47:35
of nature. His power consists in the multitude of his affinities, in the
47:40
fact that his life is intertwined with the whole chain of organic and inorganic being.
47:46
In Old Rome, the public roads, beginning at the Forum, proceeded
47:51
north southeast west to the center of every province of the Empire, making each
47:57
market town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the
48:00
capital. So out of the human hearts go, as it were, highways
48:06
to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion
48:09
of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots,
48:15
whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out
48:21
of himp and predict the worlds he is to inhabit as the fins of a
48:24
fish, foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the
48:29
egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world. Put Napoleon in an
48:35
island prison. Let his faculties find no men to act on, no alps
48:38
to climb, no stake to play for than he would beat the air and
48:44
appear stupid. Transport him to large countries, dense population, complex interests,
48:50
and antagonist power. And you shall see that the man Napoleon bounded, that
48:54
is by such a profile and outline, is not the virtual Napoleon. This
49:00
is but Talbot's shadow. His substance is not here, For what you see
49:07
is but the smallest part and least proportion of humanity. But where the whole
49:10
frame here, It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch your roof were
49:15
not sufficient to contain it. Henry the sixth Columbus needs a planet to shape
49:22
his course upon Newton and the place need myriads of age and thick strewn celestial
49:28
areas. One may say a gravitating solar system is already prophesied in the nature
49:32
of Newton's mind. Not less does the brain of Davy or gay Lusac from
49:38
childhood exploring the affinities and repulsons of particles anticipate the laws of organization. Does
49:45
not the eye of the human embryo predict the light? The air of Handel
49:50
predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound. Do not the constructive fingers of Watts,
49:54
Fulton, Whitmore, Arkwright predict the fusible, hard, and temporar textures of
50:00
metals, the properties of stone, water, and wood. Do not the
50:05
lovely attributes of the maiden child predict the refinements and decorations of civil society.
50:12
Here also we are reminded of the action of man or man. A man
50:15
might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self knowledge as
50:21
the passion of love shall teach in a day. Who knows himself before he
50:25
has been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has hurt an eloquent tongue,
50:30
or has shared the throb of thousands in a natural exaltation or alarm.
50:37
No man can antedate his experience or guess what faculty or feeling a new object
50:42
shall unlock, any more than he can draw to day the face of a
50:45
person whom he shall see tomorrow for the first time. I will not go
50:50
behind the general statement to explore the reason of this correspondency. Let it suffice
50:55
that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is
51:00
one and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.
51:07
Thus, in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce its treasures.
51:12
For each pupil, he too, shall past through the whole cycle of experience.
51:16
He shall collect into a focus the rays of nature. History no longer
51:21
shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise
51:25
man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalog of the
51:30
volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.
51:36
A man shall be the temple of fame. He shall walk as the
51:38
poets have described that goddess in a robe painted all over with wonderful events and
51:45
experiences. His own form and features, by their exalted intelligence, shall be
51:51
that variegated vest I shall find in him the full world in his childhood,
51:57
the age of Gold, the apples of knowledge, the Argonautic expedition, the
52:01
calling of Abraham, the building of the Temple, the advent of Christ,
52:06
dark ages, the revival of letters, the Reformation, the discovery of new
52:10
lands, the opening of new sciences and new regions in Man, he shall
52:16
be the priest of Pan and bring with him into humble cottages, the blessing
52:22
of the morning stars, and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth.
52:25
Is there something overweening in this claim? Then I reject all I have written,
52:31
for what is the use of pretending to know what we know not?
52:36
But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact
52:40
without seeming to belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge very cheap.
52:46
Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the
52:50
fungus underfoot, the lichen on the log. What do I know, sympathetically
52:54
morally, of either of these worlds of life? As old as the Caucasian
53:00
man, perhaps older, these creatures have kept their council beside him, and
53:05
there is no record of any word or sign that has passed from one to
53:08
the other. What connection do the books show between the fifty or sixty chemical
53:14
elements and the historical errors? Nay, what does history yet record of the
53:19
metaphysical annals of man? What light does it shed on these mysteries which we
53:24
hide under the names death and immortality. Yet every history should be written in
53:30
a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols.
53:36
I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so called history
53:39
is. How many times we must say Rome and Paris and Constantinople. What
53:45
does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are olympiads and consulates to these
53:52
neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they
53:58
for the Eskimo seal hunter, for the kanaka in his canoe, for the
54:01
fisherman, the stevadore, the porter Broader and deeper. We must write our
54:07
annals if from an ethical reformation, from an influx of ever new, ever
54:13
sanitive conscience, if we would trulier express our central and wide related nature,
54:19
instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long
54:23
lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us
54:30
at unawares. But the path of science and of letters is not the way
54:35
of nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, an unschooled farmer's
54:39
boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read than
54:45
the dissector or the antiquary end of history.