April 29, 2025 • 54 mins
https://www.solgoodmedia.com Listen to hundreds of audiobooks, thousands of short stories, and ambient sounds all ad free! "Daily Deep Thought" offers a moment of philosophical reflection each day, diving deep into a single thought or idea. It's a mental workout designed to stretch your cognitive abilities and provide a deeper understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of our world.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
History. There is no great and no small to the
soul that maketh all, and where it cometh all things are,
and it cometh everywhere. I am the owner of the
sphere of the seven stars, in the solar year, of
Caesar's hand, in Plato's brain, of Lord Christ's heart, and
(00:21):
Shakespeare's strain. There is one mind common to all individual men.
Every man is an inlets to the same and to
all of the same. He that is once admitted to
the right of reason is made a free man of
the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think,
what a saint has felt. He may feel what, at
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any time has befallen any man he can understand. Who
hath access to this universal mind is a party to
all that is or can be done. For this is
the only and sovereign agent of all The works of
this mindin history is the record. Its genius is illustrated
by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by
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nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest,
the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody,
every faculty, every thought, every emotion which belongs to it
in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to
the fact. All the facts of history pre exist in
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the mind as laws. Each law, in turn, is made
by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power
to but one at a time. A man is a
whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests
is in one acorn. And Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gall Britain,
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America lie folded already in the first Man. Epic by epic, camp, Kingdom, Empire, Republic,
Democracy are merely the application of his manifold spirit to
the manifold world. This human mind wrote history, and this
must read it. The sphinx must solve her own riddle.
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If the whole of history is in one man, it
is ought to be explained from individual experience. There is
a relation between the hours of our life and the
centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn
from the great repositories of nature, as the light on
my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions
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of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends
on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces. So the
hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages
explained by the hours of the universal mind. Each individual
man is one more incarnation, all its properties consist in him.
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Each new fact, in his private experience flashes a light
on what great bodies of men have done, and the
crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution
was first a thought in one man's mind, and when
the same thought occurs to another man, 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 problem of the age. The fact narrated
must correspond to something in me. To be credible or intelligible,
we as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest
and king, martyr and executioner. Must fasten these images to
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some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn
nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as
much an illustration of the mind's powers and deprivations as
what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement
as meaning. For you stand before each of its tablets
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and say, under this mask did my proteus nature hide itself?
This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves.
This throws our actions into perspective, and as crabs, goats, scorpions,
the balance and the water pot lose their meanness when
hung as signs in the zodiac. So I can see
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my own vices without heats in the distant persons of Solomon,
our sybiades and cataline. It is the universal nature which
gives worth to particular men and things. Human life as
containing this is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it
round with penalties and laws. All laws derive, hence their
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ultimate reason, all express more or less distinctly some command
of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also hoes of the soul,
covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold
to it with swords and laws and wide and complex combinations.
The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of
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our day, the claim of claims, the plea for education,
for justice, for charity, the foundation of friendship and love,
and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts
of self reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we always
read as superior beings universal history. The poets, the romancers
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do not in their stateliest pictures, in their sacerdotal, the
imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius,
anywhere lose our ear anywhere make us feel that we
intrude that this is for better 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 that reads in the corner, feels
to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great
moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances,
the great prosperities of men, because their law was enacted,
the sea was searched, the land was found, or the
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blow was struck for us, as we ourselves in that place,
would have done or applauded. We have the same interest
in condition and character. We honor the rich because they
have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel
to be proper to man, proper to us. So all
that is said of the wise men by Stoic or
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Oriental or modern essayist describes to each reader his own ideas,
describes his unattained but attainable self. All literature writes the
character of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation are
portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is forming.
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The silence and the eloquent praise him and accost him,
and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by personal illusions.
A true aspirant therefore never needs look for illusions, personal
and laudatory and discourse. He hears the commendation not of himself,
but more sweets of that character. He seeks in every
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word that is said concerning character. Yea further, in every
fact and circumstance, in the running river and the rustling corn,
praise is looked, homage tendered. Love flows from mute nature,
from the mountains and the lights of the firmament. These
hints dropped, as it were, from sleep and night. Let
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us use in broad day. The student is to read
history actively and not passively, to esteem his own life.
The text and books the commentary thus compelled. The muse
of history will utter oracles as never to those who
do not respipt affeck themselves. I have no expectation that
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any man will read history. Arte who thinks that what
was done in a remote age by men whose names
have resounded far has any deeper sense than what he
is doing today. The world exists for the education of
each man. There is no age or state of society,
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or mode of action in history to which there is
not something corresponding in his life. Everything tends in a
wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue
to him. He should see that he can live all
history in his own person. He must sit solidly at
home and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings
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or empires, but know that he is greater than all
the geography, in all the government of the world. He
must transfer the point of view from which history is
commonly read from Rome and Athens in London to himself,
and not deny his conviction that he is the court.
And if England or Egypt have anything to say to him,
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he will try the case. If not, let them forever
be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight
where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals
are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature,
betrays itself in the use we make of the signal
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narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether, the solid
angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail
to keep a fact of fact. Babylon, Troy, Tire, Palestine,
and even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The
Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon is poetry.
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Thenceforward to all nations who cares what the fact was,
when we have made a constellation of it to hang
in heaven an immortal sign. London and Paris and New
York must go the same way. What is history, said Napoleon,
But a fable agreed upon? This life of ours is
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stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, war, colonization, church, court,
and commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments,
Grave and gay. I will not make more account of them.
I believe in eternity I can find Greece, Asia, Italy,
Spain and the Islands the genius and creative principle of
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each and of all errors. In my own mind. We
are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history
in our private experience, and verifying them. Here all history
becomes subjective. In other words, there is properly no history,
only biography. Every mind must know the oh lesson for
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itself must go over the whole ground. What it does
not see, what it does not live, It will not
know what the former age has epitomized into a formula
or rule for manipular convenience. It will lose all the
good of verifying for itself by 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 in astronomy which had long been
known the better for him. History must be this, or
it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates
a fact in human nature. That is all. We must
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in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, see
how it could and must be so. Stand before every
public and private work, before an oration of Burke, before
a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrnum of Sir Thomas
Moore of Sydney, of Marmaduke Robinson, before a French reign
of terror and a Salem hanging of witches, before a
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fanatic revival, and the animal magnetism in Paris or in Providence.
We assume that we under the influence should be like
affected and achieve the like, and we aim to master
intellectually the steps and reach the same height or the
same degradation that our fellow, our proxy, has done. All
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inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge,
the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis, is the desire to do
away this wild, savage and preposterous there and then, and
introduced in its place the here and now. Belzoni digs
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and measures in the mummy pits and pyramids of Thebes
until he can see the end of the difference between
the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself
in general and in detail that it was made by
such a person as he, so armed and so motived,
and to ends to which he himself should also have worked,
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the problem is solved. His thought lives along the whole
line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them
all with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind
or are now a Gothic cathedral affirms that it was
done by us, and not done by us. Surely it
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was by man, but we find it not in our man.
But we apply ourselves to the history of its production.
We put ourselves into the place and state of the builder.
We remember the forest dwellers, the first temples, the adherence
to the first type, and the decoration of it. As
the wealth of the nation increased. The value which is
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given to wood by carving, led to the carving over
the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. We have
gone through this process and added there too the Catholic Church,
its cross, its music, its processions, its saints' days, and
image worship. We have, as it were, been the man
that made the minster. We have seen how it could
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and must be. We have the sufficient reason. The difference
between men is in their principle of association. Some men
classify objects by color and size and other accidents of appearance,
others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause
and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the
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clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poets,
to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly
and sacred, all things profitable, all days holy, all men divine.
For the eye is fastened on the life and slights
the circumstance every chemical substance, every plants, every animal in
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its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance,
upborne and surrounded as we are by all this, all
creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air.
Why should we be such hard pedants and magnify a
few forms? Why should we make account of time, or
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of magnitude, or of figure. The soul knows them not,
and Genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them,
as a young child plays with gray beards and in churches.
Genius studies the causal thoughts, and far back in the
womb of things, sees the rays parting from one orb
that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters. Genius watches
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the monad through all his masks as he performs the
metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar,
through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual through
countless individuals, the fixed species through many species, the genus
through all genera, the steadfast type, through all the kingdoms
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of organized life. The eternal unity. Nature is a mutable
cloud which is always and never the same. She casts
the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet
makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and
toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to
its own will. The adamant streams into soft but precise
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form before it, and whilst I look at it, its
outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so fleeting
as form, yet never does it quite deny itself. In
Man we still trace the remains or hints of all
that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races,
Yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace. As
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low in Eschylus transforms to a cow offends the imagination,
But how changed when as isis in Egypt she meets
Osiris Jove, a beautiful woman with nothing of the metamorphosis left,
but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows.
The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious.
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There is at the surface infinite variety of things. At
the center there is simplicity of cause. How many are
the acts of one man in which we recognize the
same character, observe the sources of our information in respect
to the Greek genius. We have the civil history of
that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given
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it a very sufficient account of what manner of persons
they were and what they did. We had the same
national mind expressed for us again in their literature, in
epic and lyric poems, drama and philosophy a very form.
Then we have it once more in their architecture, a
beauty as of temperance, itself limited to the straight line
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and the square, a builded geometry. Then we have it
once again in sculpture, the tongue on the balance of expression,
a multitude of forms, in the utmost freedom of action,
at never transgressing the ideal serenity, like votaries performing some
religious dance before the gods, and though in convulsive pain
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or mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and
decorum of their dance. Thus, of the genius of one
remarkable people we have a fourfold representation. And to the senses,
what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur,
the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion.
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Everyone must have observed faces and forms, which, without any
resembling feature, made a like impression on the beholder. A
particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not
awaken the same train of images, will yet superinduce the
same sentiment as some wild mountain walk, although the resemblance
is nowise obvious to the senses, but is a cult
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and out of the reach of the understanding. Nature is
an endless combination and repetition of very few laws. She
hums the old, well known air through innumerable variations. Nature
is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works,
and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most
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unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of an old
sagam of the forest, which at once reminded the eye
of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the
brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are men
whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple
and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon and
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the remains of the earliest Greek art. And there are
compositions of the same strain to be found in the
books of all ages. What is Guido's Rospigliosi Aurora but
a mourning thought, as the horses in it are only
a mourning cloud. If any one will but take pains
to observe the variety of actions to which he is
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equally inclined in certain moods of mind, and those to
which he is a verse, he will see how deep
is the chain of affinity. A painter told me that
nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming
a tree, or draw a child by studying the outlines
of its form merely. But by watching for a time
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his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature
and can then draw him at will in every attitude.
So Russ entered into the inmost nature of a sheep.
I know a draftsman employed in a public survey, who
found that he could not sketch the rock until their
geological structure was first explained to him in a certain
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state of thought. Is the common origin of very diverse works.
It is the spirits and not the fact, that is identical.
By a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful
acquisition of many manual skills. The 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 which they are. And why because
a profound nature awakens in us by its actions and words,
by its very looks and manners, the same power and
beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures addresses
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civil and natural history. The history of art and of
literature must be explained from individual history, or must remain words.
There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that
does not interest us. Kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe.
The roots of all things are in man. Santa Croce
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and the Dome of Saint Peter's are lame copies after
a divine model. Strasburg Cathedral is a material counterpart of
the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is
the poet's mind. The true ship is the shipbuilder in
the man. Could we lay him open, we should see
the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work,
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As every spine and tint in the seashell pre exists
in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of
heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy a man of
fine manners, shall pronounce your name with all the ornament
that titles of nobility could ever add. The trivial experience
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of every day is always verifying some old prediction to us,
and converting into things the world herds and signs which
we had heard and seen without heed. A lady with
whom I was riding in the forest said to me
that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as
if the genie who inhabited them suspended their deeds until
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the wayfarer had passed onward, a thought which poetry has
celebrated in the Dance of the Fairies, which breaks off
on the approach of human feet. The man who has
seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at
midnight has been present, like an archangel, at the creation
of light and of the world. I remember one summer
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day in the fields, my companion pointed out to me
a broad cloud which might extend a quarter of a
mile parallel to the horizon, quite accurately in the form
of a cherub as painted over churches, a round block
in the center which she was easy to animate with
eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide stretched
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symmetrical wings. What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often,
and it was undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament.
I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning,
which at once showed to me that the Greeks drew
from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in the hand
of Jove. I have seen a snow drift along the
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sides of the stone wall, which obviously gave the idea
of the common architectural scroll to a but a tower.
By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances, we invent anew
the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see
how each people merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric
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temple preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which
the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly a tartar tent.
The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and
the subterranean houses of their forefathers. The custom of making
houses and tombs in the living rock, says Heeren, in
his researches on the Ethiopians, determined very natural the principal
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character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal form
which it assumed in these caverns. Already prepared by nature.
The eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes and masses,
so that when art came to the assistance of nature,
it could not move on a small scale without degrading itself.
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What would statues of the usual size or neat porches
and wings have been associated with these gigantic halls, before
which only colossae could sit as watchmen or lean on
the pillars of the interior. The Gothic church plainly originated
in a rude adaptation of the forest trees with all
their boughs, to a festal or solemn arcade, as the
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bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green wythes
that tied them. No one can walk in a road
cut through pine woods without being struck with the architectural
appearance of the grove, especially in winter, when the beariness
of all other trees shows the low arch of the
saxons in the woods. In a winter afternoon, one will
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see as readily the origin of the stained glass window
with which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned. In the colors
of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing
branches of the forest. Nor can any lover of nature
enter the old piles of Oxford 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, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm oak, pine,
fir and spruce. The Gothic cathedral is blossoming in stone,
subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony. In man, the
mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with a
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lightness and delicate finish, as well as the aerial proportions
and perspective of vegetable beauty. In like manner, all public
facts are to be individualized, or private facts are to
be generalized. Then at once history becomes fluid and true,
and biography deep and sublime, as the Persian imitated in
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the slender shafts and capitals of his architecture, the stem
and flower of the lotus and palm. So the Persian
court in its magnificent era never gave over the nomadism
of its barbarous tribes, but traveled from Ecbatana, where the
spring was spent to Susa in summer and to Babylon
for the winter. In the early history of Asia and Africa,
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nomadism and agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The geography
of Asia and Africa necessitated a nomadic life, but the
nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil
or the advantages of a market had induced to build towns.
Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction because of the perils
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of the state from nomadism, and in these lay and
civil countries of England and America, these propensities still fight
out the old battle in the nation and in the individual.
The nomads of Africa were constrained to wander by the
attacks of the gadfly, which drives the cattle mad, and
so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season
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and to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions.
The nomads of Asia follow the pasturage from months to month.
In America and Europe, the nomadism is of trade and curiosity,
a progress certainly from the gad fly of Astaboras to
the Anglo and Italomania of Boston Bay sacred cities, to
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which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined or stringent laws
and customs tending to invigorate the national bond were a
check on the old rovers and the cumulative values of
long residents are the restraints on the itineracy of the
present day. The antagonism of the two tendency is not
less active in individuals, as the love of adventure or
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the love of repose happens to predominate. A man of
rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid domestication,
lives in his wagon and roams through all latitudes as
easily as a kalmuc at sea or in the forest
or in the snow. He sleeps as warm, dines with
as good appetite, and associates as happily as beside his
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own chimney. Or perhaps his facility is deeper seated in
the increased range of his faculties of observation, which yield
him points of interest whenever fresh objects meet his eyes.
The pastoral nations would needy and hungry to desperation, and
this intellectual nomadism in its excess bankrupts the mind through
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the dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects. The
home keeping wits, on the other hand, is that continence
or content, which finds all the elements of life in
its own soil, and which has its own perils of
monotony and deterioration if not stimulated by foreign infusions. Everything
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the individual sees without him corresponds to his states of mind,
and everything is in turn intelligible to him, as his
onward thinking leads him into the truth to which that
fact or series belongs, the prime evil world, the foreworld,
as the Germans say, I can dive to it in myself,
as well as grope for it with researching fingers in catacombs, libraries,
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and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined villas. What
is the foundation of that interest or men feel in
Greek history, letters, art, and poetry in all its periods,
from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic
life of the Athenians and Spartans four or five centuries later.
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What but this that every man passes personally through a
Grecian period. The Grecian state is the error of the
bodily nature, the perfection of the senses of the spiritual nature,
unfolded in strict unity with the body in it existed
those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models
of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove, not like the forms abounding
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in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face is
a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defied,
and symmetrical features, whose eye sockets are so formed that
it would be impossible for such eyes to squint and
take furtive glances on this side and on that, but
they must turn the whole head. The manners of that
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period are plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for
personal qualities, courage, address, self command, justice, strength, swiftness, a
loud voice, a broad chest, luxury and elegance are not known.
A sparse population and wants make every man his own valet, cook, butcher,
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and soldier. And the habit of supplying his own needs
educates the body to wonderful performances such are the Agamemnon
and Diomede of Homer. And not far different is the
picture Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the
retreat of the ten thousand, after the army had crossed
the river, tailor boas in Armenia, there fell much snow,
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and the troops lay miserably on the ground covered with it.
But Xenophon arose, naked, and taking an axe, began to
split wood, whereupon others rose and did the like. Throughout
his army exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel
for plunder. They wrangled with the generals on each new order.
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And Xenophon is as sharp tongued as any, and sharper
tongue than most, and so gives as good as it gets.
Who does not see that this is a gang of
great boys, with such a code of honor, and such
slacks discipline as great boys have. The costly charm of
the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the old literature,
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is that the persons speak, simply speak, as persons who
have great good sense without knowing it before. Yet the
reflective habit has become the predominant habit of the mind.
Our admiration of the Antique is not admiration of the old,
but of the natural. The Greeks are not reflective, but
perfect in their senses and in their health, with the
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finest physical organization in the world. Adults acted with the
simplicity and grace of children. They made vases, tragedies, and
statues such as healthy senses should that is in good taste.
Such things have continued to be made in all ages,
and are now wherever a healthy physique exists. But as
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a class from their superior organization, they have surpassed all.
They combine the energy of manhood with the engageishing unconsciousness
of childhood. The attraction of these manners is that they
belong to man and are known to every man in
virtue of his being once a child. Besides that, there
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are always individuals who retain these characteristics. A person of
childlike genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and
revives our love of the muse of Hellas I admire
the love of nature in the Feloctetes. In reading these
fine apostrophes to sleep to the stars, rocks, mountains and waves,
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I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I
feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought.
The Greek had, it seems the same fellow beings as I.
The sun and moon, water and fire met his heart
precisely as they meet mine. Then The vaunted distinction between
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Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic schools, seems superficial
and pedantic. When a thought of Plato becomes a thought
to me, When a truth that fire the soul of Pindar,
fire's mine, time is no more. When I feel that
we too meet in a perception, that our two souls
are tinged with the same hue, and do, as it were,
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run into one. Why should I measure degrees of latitude?
Why should I count Egyptian years? The student interprets the
age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry, and
the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by quite parallel
miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred history of
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the world, he has the same key when the voice
of a prophet, out of the deeps of antiquity, merely
echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer
of his youth. He then pierces to the truth. Through
all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions.
Rare extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose
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to us new facts nature. I see that men of
God have from time to time walked among men and
made their commission felt in the heart and soul of
the commonest hearer. Hence, evidently the tripod, the priest, the priestess,
inspired by the divine afflatus Jesus, astonishes and overpowers sensual people.
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They cannot unite him to history or reconcile him with themselves.
As they come to revere their intuitions and to aspire
to live holy, their own piety explains every fact, every word.
How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of
Menu of Socrates domesticate themselves in the mind, I cannot
(36:45):
find any antiquity in them. They are mine as much
as theirs. I have seen the first monks and anchoretes,
without crossing seas or centuries. More than once some individual
has appeared to me with such negligence of lifelabor and
such commanding contemplation, a haughty beneficiary, begging in the name
(37:05):
of God as made good to the nineteenth century Simi.
In the Stylite the Thebais and the first Kapushins, the
priest craft of the East and West of the Magian, Brahmin,
Druid and Inca is expounded in the individual's private life.
The cramping influence of a hard formalist on the young child,
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in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and
that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and
even much sympathy with the tyranny is a familiar fact
explained to the child when he becomes a man, only
by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself
a child, tyrannized over by those names and words and
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forms of whose influence he was merely the organ to
the youth. The fact teaches him how Balor's was worshiped,
and how the pyramids were built. Better than the discovery
by Champoleon of the names of all the workmen and
the cost of every tile, he finds Assyria and the
mounds of Chulola at his door, and himself has laid
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the courses again in that protest which each considerate person
makes against the superstition of his times, he repeats step
by step the part of old reformers, and in the
search after truth, finds, like them new perils to virtue.
He learns again what moral vigor is needed to supply
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the girdle of a superstition, a great licentiousness treads on
the heels of a reformation. How many times in the
history of the world has the Luther of the day
had to lament the decay of piety in his own household?
Doctor said his wife to Martin Luther one day, how
is it that, whilst subject to papacy we prayed so
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often with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the
utmost coldness, and very seldom. The advancing man discovers how
deep a property he has in literature, in all fable
as well as in all history. He finds that the
poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations,
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but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession
true for one and true for all. His own secret
biography he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted
down before he was born. One after another, he comes up,
in his private adventures with every fable of Esop, of Homer,
of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer of Scott, and verifies
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them with his own head and hands, the beautiful fables
of the Greeks being proper creations of the imagination, and
not of the fancy, are universal verities, what a range
of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has The story of Prometheus,
besides its primary value as the first chapter of the
history of Europe, the mythology thin the veiling authentic facts,
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the invention of the mechanic arts, and the migration of colonies,
it gives the history of religion with some closeness to
the faith of later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of
the old mythology. He is the friend of man, stands
between the unjust justice of the eternal Father and the
race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on their account.
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But where it departs from Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him
as the defire of Jove, it represents a state of
mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine of theism is
taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems the
self defense of man against his untruth, namely, a discontent
with the believed fact that a God exists, and a
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feeling that the obligation of reverence is onerous. It would steal,
if it could, the fire of the Creator and live
apart from him, an independent of him. The prometheus Vintus
is the romance of skepticism. Not less true to all
time are the details of that stately apologue. Apollo kept
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the flocks of Admitus, said the poets. When the gods
come among men, they are not known. Jesus was not,
Socrates and Shakespeare were not. Antius was suffocated by the
grip of Hercules, but every time he touched his mother Earth,
his strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and
in all his weakness, both his body and his mind
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are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature, the power
of music, the power of poetry to unfix, and as
it were, clap wings to solid Nature interprets the riddle
of Orpheus. The philosophical perception of identity through endless mutations
of form makes him know the proteus. What else am I?
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Who laughed or wept yesterday, who slept last night like
a corpse, and this morning stood and ran? And what
see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus.
I can symbolize my thought by using the name of
any creature, of any fat because every creature is man,
agent or patient. Tantalus is but a name for you
(42:16):
and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the waters
of thought, which are always gleaming and waving within the
sight of the soul. The transmigration of souls is no fable.
I would it were, But men and women are only
half human. Every animal of the barn yard, the field,
and the forests, of the earth, and of the waters
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that are under the earth, has contrived to get a
footing and to leave the print of its features and
form in some one or other of these upright heaven
facing speakers. Ah, brother, stop the ebb of the soul
ebbing downward into the forms in whose habits thou hast
now for many years slid as near and proper to us.
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Is also that old fable of the Sphinx who was
said to sit at the roadside and put briddles to
every passenger. If the man could not answer, she swallowed
him alive. If he could solve the reddle, the sphinx
was slain. What is our life but an endless flight
of winged facts or events in splendid variety. These changes
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come all putting questions to the human spirit. These men
who cannot answer by a superior wisdom. These facts or
questions of time served them, Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them,
and make the men of routine the men of sense,
in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every
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spark of that light by which man is truly man.
But if the man is true to his better instincts
or sentiments, and refuses the dominion of facts as one
that comes of a higher race, remains fast by the soul,
and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and
supple into their places. They know their master, and the
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meanest of them glorifies them. See in good as Helena
the same desire that every word should be a thing.
These figures, he would say, these Charuns, Griffins, Fokias, Helen,
and Leda are something, and do exert a specific influence
on the mind. So far, then are they eternal entities,
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as real to day as in the First Olympiad. Much
revolving them, he writes out freely his humor and gives
them body to his own imagination. And although that poem
be as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is
it much more attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces
of the same author, for the reason that it operates
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a wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of
customary images, awakens the reader's invention and fancy by the
wild freedom of the design, and by the unceasing succession
of brisk shocks of surprise. The universal nature, too strong
for the petty nature of the bard, sits on his
(45:09):
neck and writes through his head, so that when he
seems to vent a mere caprice in wild romance, the
issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato said that poets
are a great and wise things, which they do not
themselves understand. All the fictions of the Middle Age explain
themselves as a masked or a frolic expression of that
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which in grave earnest the mind of that period toil
to achieve magic. And all that is ascribed to it
is a deep presentiment of the powers of science, the
shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing,
the elements of using, the secret virtues of minerals of understanding.
The voices of birds are the obscure efforts of the
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mind in a right direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero,
the gift of prepared ractual youth, and the like are
alike the endeavor of the human spirit to bend the
shows of things to the desires of the mind. In
Perceforest and Ahmedie de Gaulle, a garland and a rose
bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and
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fade on the brow of the inconstant, and the Story
of the Boy and the Mantle. Even a mature reader
may be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at
the triumph of the general Venilas. And indeed all the
postulates of the elfin annals that the fairies do not
like to be named, that their gifts are capricious and
not to be trusted, that who seeks a treasure must
(46:37):
not speak, And the like I find true in Concord,
however they might be in Cornwall and Briton. Is it otherwise?
In the newest Romance I read the Bride of Lammermoor.
Sir William Ashton is a mask for vulgar temptation, Ravenswood
Castle a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign
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mission of states only a Bunyan disguise for honest industry.
We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss
the good and beautiful by fighting down the unjust and sensual.
Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity, which is always
beautiful and always liable to calamity in this world. But
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along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another
history goes daily forward, that of the external world, in
which he is not less strictly implicated. He is the
compend of time. He is also the correlative of nature.
His power consists in the multitude of his affinities, in
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the fact that his life is intertwined with the whole
chain of organic and inorganic being. In Old Rome, the
public roads, beginning at the Forum, proceeded north southeast west
to the center of every province of the Empire, making
each market town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to
the soldiers of the capital. So out of the human
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hearts go, as it were, highways to the heart of
every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion
of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a
knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.
His faculties refer to natures out of himp and predict
the worlds he is to inhabit as the fins of
(48:25):
a fish, foreshow that water exists, or the wings of
an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live
without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison. Let
his faculties find no men to act on, no alps
to climb, no stake to play for than he would
beat the air and appear stupid. Transport him to large countries,
(48:47):
dense population, complex interests, and antagonist power. And you shall
see that the man Napoleon bounded, that is by such
a profile and outline, is not the virtual Napoleon. This
is but Talbot's shadow. His substance is not here, For
what you see is but the smallest part and least
(49:09):
proportion of humanity. But where the whole frame here, It
is of such a spacious, lofty pitch your roof were
not sufficient to contain it. Henry the sixth Columbus needs
a planet to shape his course upon Newton and the
place need myriads of age and thick strewn celestial areas.
(49:29):
One may say a gravitating solar system is already prophesied
in the nature of Newton's mind. Not less does the
brain of Davy or gay Lusac from childhood exploring the
affinities and repulsons of particles anticipate the laws of organization.
Does not the eye of the human embryo predict the light?
The air of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound.
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Do not the constructive fingers of Watts, Fulton, Whitmore, Arkwright
predict the fusible, hard, and temporar textures of metals, the
properties of stone, water, and wood. Do not the lovely
attributes of the maiden child predict the refinements and decorations
of civil society. Here also we are reminded of the
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action of man or man. A man might ponder its
thought for ages, and not gain so much self knowledge
as the passion of love shall teach in a day.
Who knows himself before he has been thrilled with indignation
at an outrage, or has hurt an eloquent tongue, or
has shared the throb of thousands in a natural exaltation
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or alarm. No man can antedate his experience or guess
what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock, any
more than he can draw to day the face of
a person whom he shall see tomorrow for the first time.
I will not go behind the general statement to explore
the reason of this correspondency. Let it suffice that in
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the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind
is one and that nature is its correlative, history is
to be read and written. Thus, in all ways does
the soul concentrate and reproduce its treasures. For each pupil,
he too, shall past through the whole cycle of experience.
He shall collect into a focus the rays of nature.
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History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall
walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall
not tell me by languages and titles a catalog of
the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel
what periods you have lived. A man shall be the
temple of fame. He shall walk as the poets have
described that goddess in a robe painted all over with
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wonderful events and experiences. His own form and features, by
their exalted intelligence, shall be that variegated vest I shall
find in him the full world in his childhood, the
age of Gold, the apples of knowledge, the Argonautic expedition,
the calling of Abraham, the building of the Temple, the
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advent of Christ, dark ages, the revival of letters, the Reformation,
the discovery of new lands, the opening of new sciences
and new regions in Man, he shall be the priest
of Pan and bring with him into humble cottages, the
blessing of the morning stars, and all the recorded benefits
of heaven and earth. Is there something overweening in this claim?
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Then I reject all I have written, for what is
the use of pretending to know what we know not?
But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we
cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
I hold our actual knowledge very cheap. 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 morally, of either of these worlds of life? As
old as the Caucasian man, perhaps older, these creatures have
kept their council beside him, and there is no record
of any word or sign that has passed from one
to the other. What connection do the books show between
(53:12):
the fifty or sixty chemical elements and the historical errors? Nay,
what does history yet record of the metaphysical annals of man?
What light does it shed on these mysteries which we
hide under the names death and immortality. Yet every history
should be written in a wisdom which divined the range
of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I
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am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our
so called history is. How many times we must say
Rome and Paris and Constantinople. What does Rome know of
rat and lizard? What are olympiads and consulates to these
neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or
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succor have they for the Eskimo seal hunter, for the
kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevadore, the
porter Broader and deeper. We must write our annals if
from an ethical reformation, from an influx of ever new,
ever sanitive conscience, if we would trulier express our central
(54:17):
and wide related nature, instead of this old chronology of
selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent
our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in
on us at unawares. But the path of science and
of letters is not the way of nature. The idiot,
the Indian, the child, an unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer
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to the light by which nature is to be read
than the dissector or the antiquary end of history.
History. There is no great and no small to the
soul that maketh all, and where it cometh all things are,
and it cometh everywhere. I am the owner of the
sphere of the seven stars, in the solar year, of
Caesar's hand, in Plato's brain, of Lord Christ's heart, and
(00:21):
Shakespeare's strain. There is one mind common to all individual men.
Every man is an inlets to the same and to
all of the same. He that is once admitted to
the right of reason is made a free man of
the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think,
what a saint has felt. He may feel what, at
(00:44):
any time has befallen any man he can understand. Who
hath access to this universal mind is a party to
all that is or can be done. For this is
the only and sovereign agent of all The works of
this mindin history is the record. Its genius is illustrated
by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by
(01:08):
nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest,
the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody,
every faculty, every thought, every emotion which belongs to it
in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to
the fact. All the facts of history pre exist in
(01:28):
the mind as laws. Each law, in turn, is made
by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power
to but one at a time. A man is a
whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests
is in one acorn. And Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gall Britain,
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America lie folded already in the first Man. Epic by epic, camp, Kingdom, Empire, Republic,
Democracy are merely the application of his manifold spirit to
the manifold world. This human mind wrote history, and this
must read it. The sphinx must solve her own riddle.
(02:12):
If the whole of history is in one man, it
is ought to be explained from individual experience. There is
a relation between the hours of our life and the
centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn
from the great repositories of nature, as the light on
my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions
(02:32):
of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends
on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces. So the
hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages
explained by the hours of the universal mind. Each individual
man is one more incarnation, all its properties consist in him.
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Each new fact, in his private experience flashes a light
on what great bodies of men have done, and the
crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution
was first a thought in one man's mind, and when
the same thought occurs to another man, 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 problem of the age. The fact narrated
must correspond to something in me. To be credible or intelligible,
we as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest
and king, martyr and executioner. Must fasten these images to
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some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn
nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as
much an illustration of the mind's powers and deprivations as
what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement
as meaning. For you stand before each of its tablets
(04:01):
and say, under this mask did my proteus nature hide itself?
This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves.
This throws our actions into perspective, and as crabs, goats, scorpions,
the balance and the water pot lose their meanness when
hung as signs in the zodiac. So I can see
(04:22):
my own vices without heats in the distant persons of Solomon,
our sybiades and cataline. It is the universal nature which
gives worth to particular men and things. Human life as
containing this is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it
round with penalties and laws. All laws derive, hence their
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ultimate reason, all express more or less distinctly some command
of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also hoes of the soul,
covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold
to it with swords and laws and wide and complex combinations.
The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of
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our day, the claim of claims, the plea for education,
for justice, for charity, the foundation of friendship and love,
and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts
of self reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we always
read as superior beings universal history. The poets, the romancers
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do not in their stateliest pictures, in their sacerdotal, the
imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius,
anywhere lose our ear anywhere make us feel that we
intrude that this is for better 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 that reads in the corner, feels
to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great
moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances,
the great prosperities of men, because their law was enacted,
the sea was searched, the land was found, or the
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blow was struck for us, as we ourselves in that place,
would have done or applauded. We have the same interest
in condition and character. We honor the rich because they
have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel
to be proper to man, proper to us. So all
that is said of the wise men by Stoic or
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Oriental or modern essayist describes to each reader his own ideas,
describes his unattained but attainable self. All literature writes the
character of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation are
portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is forming.
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The silence and the eloquent praise him and accost him,
and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by personal illusions.
A true aspirant therefore never needs look for illusions, personal
and laudatory and discourse. He hears the commendation not of himself,
but more sweets of that character. He seeks in every
(07:20):
word that is said concerning character. Yea further, in every
fact and circumstance, in the running river and the rustling corn,
praise is looked, homage tendered. Love flows from mute nature,
from the mountains and the lights of the firmament. These
hints dropped, as it were, from sleep and night. Let
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us use in broad day. The student is to read
history actively and not passively, to esteem his own life.
The text and books the commentary thus compelled. The muse
of history will utter oracles as never to those who
do not respipt affeck themselves. I have no expectation that
(08:03):
any man will read history. Arte who thinks that what
was done in a remote age by men whose names
have resounded far has any deeper sense than what he
is doing today. The world exists for the education of
each man. There is no age or state of society,
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or mode of action in history to which there is
not something corresponding in his life. Everything tends in a
wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue
to him. He should see that he can live all
history in his own person. He must sit solidly at
home and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings
(08:46):
or empires, but know that he is greater than all
the geography, in all the government of the world. He
must transfer the point of view from which history is
commonly read from Rome and Athens in London to himself,
and not deny his conviction that he is the court.
And if England or Egypt have anything to say to him,
(09:08):
he will try the case. If not, let them forever
be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight
where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals
are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature,
betrays itself in the use we make of the signal
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narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether, the solid
angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail
to keep a fact of fact. Babylon, Troy, Tire, Palestine,
and even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The
Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon is poetry.
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Thenceforward to all nations who cares what the fact was,
when we have made a constellation of it to hang
in heaven an immortal sign. London and Paris and New
York must go the same way. What is history, said Napoleon,
But a fable agreed upon? This life of ours is
(10:14):
stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, war, colonization, church, court,
and commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments,
Grave and gay. I will not make more account of them.
I believe in eternity I can find Greece, Asia, Italy,
Spain and the Islands the genius and creative principle of
(10:37):
each and of all errors. In my own mind. We
are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history
in our private experience, and verifying them. Here all history
becomes subjective. In other words, there is properly no history,
only biography. Every mind must know the oh lesson for
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itself must go over the whole ground. What it does
not see, what it does not live, It will not
know what the former age has epitomized into a formula
or rule for manipular convenience. It will lose all the
good of verifying for itself by means of the wall
of that rule. Somewhere some time it will demand and
(11:23):
find compensation for that loss by doing the work itself.
Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had long been
known the better for him. History must be this, or
it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates
a fact in human nature. That is all. We must
(11:44):
in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, see
how it could and must be so. Stand before every
public and private work, before an oration of Burke, before
a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrnum of Sir Thomas
Moore of Sydney, of Marmaduke Robinson, before a French reign
of terror and a Salem hanging of witches, before a
(12:07):
fanatic revival, and the animal magnetism in Paris or in Providence.
We assume that we under the influence should be like
affected and achieve the like, and we aim to master
intellectually the steps and reach the same height or the
same degradation that our fellow, our proxy, has done. All
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inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge,
the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis, is the desire to do
away this wild, savage and preposterous there and then, and
introduced in its place the here and now. Belzoni digs
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and measures in the mummy pits and pyramids of Thebes
until he can see the end of the difference between
the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself
in general and in detail that it was made by
such a person as he, so armed and so motived,
and to ends to which he himself should also have worked,
(13:12):
the problem is solved. His thought lives along the whole
line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them
all with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind
or are now a Gothic cathedral affirms that it was
done by us, and not done by us. Surely it
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was by man, but we find it not in our man.
But we apply ourselves to the history of its production.
We put ourselves into the place and state of the builder.
We remember the forest dwellers, the first temples, the adherence
to the first type, and the decoration of it. As
the wealth of the nation increased. The value which is
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given to wood by carving, led to the carving over
the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. We have
gone through this process and added there too the Catholic Church,
its cross, its music, its processions, its saints' days, and
image worship. We have, as it were, been the man
that made the minster. We have seen how it could
(14:15):
and must be. We have the sufficient reason. The difference
between men is in their principle of association. Some men
classify objects by color and size and other accidents of appearance,
others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause
and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the
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clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poets,
to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly
and sacred, all things profitable, all days holy, all men divine.
For the eye is fastened on the life and slights
the circumstance every chemical substance, every plants, every animal in
(15:02):
its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance,
upborne and surrounded as we are by all this, all
creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air.
Why should we be such hard pedants and magnify a
few forms? Why should we make account of time, or
(15:22):
of magnitude, or of figure. The soul knows them not,
and Genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them,
as a young child plays with gray beards and in churches.
Genius studies the causal thoughts, and far back in the
womb of things, sees the rays parting from one orb
that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters. Genius watches
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the monad through all his masks as he performs the
metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar,
through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual through
countless individuals, the fixed species through many species, the genus
through all genera, the steadfast type, through all the kingdoms
(16:10):
of organized life. The eternal unity. Nature is a mutable
cloud which is always and never the same. She casts
the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet
makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and
toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to
its own will. The adamant streams into soft but precise
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form before it, and whilst I look at it, its
outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so fleeting
as form, yet never does it quite deny itself. In
Man we still trace the remains or hints of all
that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races,
Yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace. As
(16:57):
low in Eschylus transforms to a cow offends the imagination,
But how changed when as isis in Egypt she meets
Osiris Jove, a beautiful woman with nothing of the metamorphosis left,
but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows.
The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious.
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There is at the surface infinite variety of things. At
the center there is simplicity of cause. How many are
the acts of one man in which we recognize the
same character, observe the sources of our information in respect
to the Greek genius. We have the civil history of
that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given
(17:45):
it a very sufficient account of what manner of persons
they were and what they did. We had the same
national mind expressed for us again in their literature, in
epic and lyric poems, drama and philosophy a very form.
Then we have it once more in their architecture, a
beauty as of temperance, itself limited to the straight line
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and the square, a builded geometry. Then we have it
once again in sculpture, the tongue on the balance of expression,
a multitude of forms, in the utmost freedom of action,
at never transgressing the ideal serenity, like votaries performing some
religious dance before the gods, and though in convulsive pain
(18:31):
or mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and
decorum of their dance. Thus, of the genius of one
remarkable people we have a fourfold representation. And to the senses,
what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur,
the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion.
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Everyone must have observed faces and forms, which, without any
resembling feature, made a like impression on the beholder. A
particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not
awaken the same train of images, will yet superinduce the
same sentiment as some wild mountain walk, although the resemblance
is nowise obvious to the senses, but is a cult
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and out of the reach of the understanding. Nature is
an endless combination and repetition of very few laws. She
hums the old, well known air through innumerable variations. Nature
is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works,
and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most
(19:40):
unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of an old
sagam of the forest, which at once reminded the eye
of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the
brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are men
whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple
and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon and
(20:01):
the remains of the earliest Greek art. And there are
compositions of the same strain to be found in the
books of all ages. What is Guido's Rospigliosi Aurora but
a mourning thought, as the horses in it are only
a mourning cloud. If any one will but take pains
to observe the variety of actions to which he is
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equally inclined in certain moods of mind, and those to
which he is a verse, he will see how deep
is the chain of affinity. A painter told me that
nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming
a tree, or draw a child by studying the outlines
of its form merely. But by watching for a time
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his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature
and can then draw him at will in every attitude.
So Russ entered into the inmost nature of a sheep.
I know a draftsman employed in a public survey, who
found that he could not sketch the rock until their
geological structure was first explained to him in a certain
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state of thought. Is the common origin of very diverse works.
It is the spirits and not the fact, that is identical.
By a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful
acquisition of many manual skills. The artist attains the power
of awakening other souls to a given activity. It has
(21:26):
been said that common souls pay with what they do,
nobler souls with that which they are. And why because
a profound nature awakens in us by its actions and words,
by its very looks and manners, the same power and
beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures addresses
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civil and natural history. The history of art and of
literature must be explained from individual history, or must remain words.
There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that
does not interest us. Kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe.
The roots of all things are in man. Santa Croce
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and the Dome of Saint Peter's are lame copies after
a divine model. Strasburg Cathedral is a material counterpart of
the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is
the poet's mind. The true ship is the shipbuilder in
the man. Could we lay him open, we should see
the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work,
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As every spine and tint in the seashell pre exists
in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of
heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy a man of
fine manners, shall pronounce your name with all the ornament
that titles of nobility could ever add. The trivial experience
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of every day is always verifying some old prediction to us,
and converting into things the world herds and signs which
we had heard and seen without heed. A lady with
whom I was riding in the forest said to me
that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as
if the genie who inhabited them suspended their deeds until
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the wayfarer had passed onward, a thought which poetry has
celebrated in the Dance of the Fairies, which breaks off
on the approach of human feet. The man who has
seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at
midnight has been present, like an archangel, at the creation
of light and of the world. I remember one summer
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day in the fields, my companion pointed out to me
a broad cloud which might extend a quarter of a
mile parallel to the horizon, quite accurately in the form
of a cherub as painted over churches, a round block
in the center which she was easy to animate with
eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide stretched
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symmetrical wings. What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often,
and it was undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament.
I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning,
which at once showed to me that the Greeks drew
from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in the hand
of Jove. I have seen a snow drift along the
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sides of the stone wall, which obviously gave the idea
of the common architectural scroll to a but a tower.
By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances, we invent anew
the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see
how each people merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric
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temple preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which
the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly a tartar tent.
The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and
the subterranean houses of their forefathers. The custom of making
houses and tombs in the living rock, says Heeren, in
his researches on the Ethiopians, determined very natural the principal
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character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal form
which it assumed in these caverns. Already prepared by nature.
The eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes and masses,
so that when art came to the assistance of nature,
it could not move on a small scale without degrading itself.
(25:21):
What would statues of the usual size or neat porches
and wings have been associated with these gigantic halls, before
which only colossae could sit as watchmen or lean on
the pillars of the interior. The Gothic church plainly originated
in a rude adaptation of the forest trees with all
their boughs, to a festal or solemn arcade, as the
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bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green wythes
that tied them. No one can walk in a road
cut through pine woods without being struck with the architectural
appearance of the grove, especially in winter, when the beariness
of all other trees shows the low arch of the
saxons in the woods. In a winter afternoon, one will
(26:07):
see as readily the origin of the stained glass window
with which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned. In the colors
of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing
branches of the forest. Nor can any lover of nature
enter the old piles of Oxford 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, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm oak, pine,
fir and spruce. The Gothic cathedral is blossoming in stone,
subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony. In man, the
mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with a
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lightness and delicate finish, as well as the aerial proportions
and perspective of vegetable beauty. In like manner, all public
facts are to be individualized, or private facts are to
be generalized. Then at once history becomes fluid and true,
and biography deep and sublime, as the Persian imitated in
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the slender shafts and capitals of his architecture, the stem
and flower of the lotus and palm. So the Persian
court in its magnificent era never gave over the nomadism
of its barbarous tribes, but traveled from Ecbatana, where the
spring was spent to Susa in summer and to Babylon
for the winter. In the early history of Asia and Africa,
(27:36):
nomadism and agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The geography
of Asia and Africa necessitated a nomadic life, but the
nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil
or the advantages of a market had induced to build towns.
Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction because of the perils
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of the state from nomadism, and in these lay and
civil countries of England and America, these propensities still fight
out the old battle in the nation and in the individual.
The nomads of Africa were constrained to wander by the
attacks of the gadfly, which drives the cattle mad, and
so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season
(28:19):
and to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions.
The nomads of Asia follow the pasturage from months to month.
In America and Europe, the nomadism is of trade and curiosity,
a progress certainly from the gad fly of Astaboras to
the Anglo and Italomania of Boston Bay sacred cities, to
(28:41):
which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined or stringent laws
and customs tending to invigorate the national bond were a
check on the old rovers and the cumulative values of
long residents are the restraints on the itineracy of the
present day. The antagonism of the two tendency is not
less active in individuals, as the love of adventure or
(29:04):
the love of repose happens to predominate. A man of
rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid domestication,
lives in his wagon and roams through all latitudes as
easily as a kalmuc at sea or in the forest
or in the snow. He sleeps as warm, dines with
as good appetite, and associates as happily as beside his
(29:28):
own chimney. Or perhaps his facility is deeper seated in
the increased range of his faculties of observation, which yield
him points of interest whenever fresh objects meet his eyes.
The pastoral nations would needy and hungry to desperation, and
this intellectual nomadism in its excess bankrupts the mind through
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the dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects. The
home keeping wits, on the other hand, is that continence
or content, which finds all the elements of life in
its own soil, and which has its own perils of
monotony and deterioration if not stimulated by foreign infusions. Everything
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the individual sees without him corresponds to his states of mind,
and everything is in turn intelligible to him, as his
onward thinking leads him into the truth to which that
fact or series belongs, the prime evil world, the foreworld,
as the Germans say, I can dive to it in myself,
as well as grope for it with researching fingers in catacombs, libraries,
(30:34):
and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined villas. What
is the foundation of that interest or men feel in
Greek history, letters, art, and poetry in all its periods,
from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic
life of the Athenians and Spartans four or five centuries later.
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What but this that every man passes personally through a
Grecian period. The Grecian state is the error of the
bodily nature, the perfection of the senses of the spiritual nature,
unfolded in strict unity with the body in it existed
those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models
of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove, not like the forms abounding
(31:19):
in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face is
a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defied,
and symmetrical features, whose eye sockets are so formed that
it would be impossible for such eyes to squint and
take furtive glances on this side and on that, but
they must turn the whole head. The manners of that
(31:40):
period are plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for
personal qualities, courage, address, self command, justice, strength, swiftness, a
loud voice, a broad chest, luxury and elegance are not known.
A sparse population and wants make every man his own valet, cook, butcher,
(32:02):
and soldier. And the habit of supplying his own needs
educates the body to wonderful performances such are the Agamemnon
and Diomede of Homer. And not far different is the
picture Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the
retreat of the ten thousand, after the army had crossed
the river, tailor boas in Armenia, there fell much snow,
(32:24):
and the troops lay miserably on the ground covered with it.
But Xenophon arose, naked, and taking an axe, began to
split wood, whereupon others rose and did the like. Throughout
his army exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel
for plunder. They wrangled with the generals on each new order.
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And Xenophon is as sharp tongued as any, and sharper
tongue than most, and so gives as good as it gets.
Who does not see that this is a gang of
great boys, with such a code of honor, and such
slacks discipline as great boys have. The costly charm of
the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the old literature,
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is that the persons speak, simply speak, as persons who
have great good sense without knowing it before. Yet the
reflective habit has become the predominant habit of the mind.
Our admiration of the Antique is not admiration of the old,
but of the natural. The Greeks are not reflective, but
perfect in their senses and in their health, with the
(33:31):
finest physical organization in the world. Adults acted with the
simplicity and grace of children. They made vases, tragedies, and
statues such as healthy senses should that is in good taste.
Such things have continued to be made in all ages,
and are now wherever a healthy physique exists. But as
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a class from their superior organization, they have surpassed all.
They combine the energy of manhood with the engageishing unconsciousness
of childhood. The attraction of these manners is that they
belong to man and are known to every man in
virtue of his being once a child. Besides that, there
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are always individuals who retain these characteristics. A person of
childlike genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and
revives our love of the muse of Hellas I admire
the love of nature in the Feloctetes. In reading these
fine apostrophes to sleep to the stars, rocks, mountains and waves,
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I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I
feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought.
The Greek had, it seems the same fellow beings as I.
The sun and moon, water and fire met his heart
precisely as they meet mine. Then The vaunted distinction between
(34:54):
Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic schools, seems superficial
and pedantic. When a thought of Plato becomes a thought
to me, When a truth that fire the soul of Pindar,
fire's mine, time is no more. When I feel that
we too meet in a perception, that our two souls
are tinged with the same hue, and do, as it were,
(35:16):
run into one. Why should I measure degrees of latitude?
Why should I count Egyptian years? The student interprets the
age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry, and
the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by quite parallel
miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred history of
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the world, he has the same key when the voice
of a prophet, out of the deeps of antiquity, merely
echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer
of his youth. He then pierces to the truth. Through
all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions.
Rare extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose
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to us new facts nature. I see that men of
God have from time to time walked among men and
made their commission felt in the heart and soul of
the commonest hearer. Hence, evidently the tripod, the priest, the priestess,
inspired by the divine afflatus Jesus, astonishes and overpowers sensual people.
(36:21):
They cannot unite him to history or reconcile him with themselves.
As they come to revere their intuitions and to aspire
to live holy, their own piety explains every fact, every word.
How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of
Menu of Socrates domesticate themselves in the mind, I cannot
(36:45):
find any antiquity in them. They are mine as much
as theirs. I have seen the first monks and anchoretes,
without crossing seas or centuries. More than once some individual
has appeared to me with such negligence of lifelabor and
such commanding contemplation, a haughty beneficiary, begging in the name
(37:05):
of God as made good to the nineteenth century Simi.
In the Stylite the Thebais and the first Kapushins, the
priest craft of the East and West of the Magian, Brahmin,
Druid and Inca is expounded in the individual's private life.
The cramping influence of a hard formalist on the young child,
(37:26):
in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and
that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and
even much sympathy with the tyranny is a familiar fact
explained to the child when he becomes a man, only
by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself
a child, tyrannized over by those names and words and
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forms of whose influence he was merely the organ to
the youth. The fact teaches him how Balor's was worshiped,
and how the pyramids were built. Better than the discovery
by Champoleon of the names of all the workmen and
the cost of every tile, he finds Assyria and the
mounds of Chulola at his door, and himself has laid
(38:10):
the courses again in that protest which each considerate person
makes against the superstition of his times, he repeats step
by step the part of old reformers, and in the
search after truth, finds, like them new perils to virtue.
He learns again what moral vigor is needed to supply
(38:31):
the girdle of a superstition, a great licentiousness treads on
the heels of a reformation. How many times in the
history of the world has the Luther of the day
had to lament the decay of piety in his own household?
Doctor said his wife to Martin Luther one day, how
is it that, whilst subject to papacy we prayed so
(38:54):
often with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the
utmost coldness, and very seldom. The advancing man discovers how
deep a property he has in literature, in all fable
as well as in all history. He finds that the
poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations,
(39:14):
but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession
true for one and true for all. His own secret
biography he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted
down before he was born. One after another, he comes up,
in his private adventures with every fable of Esop, of Homer,
of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer of Scott, and verifies
(39:38):
them with his own head and hands, the beautiful fables
of the Greeks being proper creations of the imagination, and
not of the fancy, are universal verities, what a range
of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has The story of Prometheus,
besides its primary value as the first chapter of the
history of Europe, the mythology thin the veiling authentic facts,
(40:02):
the invention of the mechanic arts, and the migration of colonies,
it gives the history of religion with some closeness to
the faith of later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of
the old mythology. He is the friend of man, stands
between the unjust justice of the eternal Father and the
race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on their account.
(40:26):
But where it departs from Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him
as the defire of Jove, it represents a state of
mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine of theism is
taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems the
self defense of man against his untruth, namely, a discontent
with the believed fact that a God exists, and a
(40:48):
feeling that the obligation of reverence is onerous. It would steal,
if it could, the fire of the Creator and live
apart from him, an independent of him. The prometheus Vintus
is the romance of skepticism. Not less true to all
time are the details of that stately apologue. Apollo kept
(41:09):
the flocks of Admitus, said the poets. When the gods
come among men, they are not known. Jesus was not,
Socrates and Shakespeare were not. Antius was suffocated by the
grip of Hercules, but every time he touched his mother Earth,
his strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and
in all his weakness, both his body and his mind
(41:31):
are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature, the power
of music, the power of poetry to unfix, and as
it were, clap wings to solid Nature interprets the riddle
of Orpheus. The philosophical perception of identity through endless mutations
of form makes him know the proteus. What else am I?
(41:52):
Who laughed or wept yesterday, who slept last night like
a corpse, and this morning stood and ran? And what
see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus.
I can symbolize my thought by using the name of
any creature, of any fat because every creature is man,
agent or patient. Tantalus is but a name for you
(42:16):
and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the waters
of thought, which are always gleaming and waving within the
sight of the soul. The transmigration of souls is no fable.
I would it were, But men and women are only
half human. Every animal of the barn yard, the field,
and the forests, of the earth, and of the waters
(42:38):
that are under the earth, has contrived to get a
footing and to leave the print of its features and
form in some one or other of these upright heaven
facing speakers. Ah, brother, stop the ebb of the soul
ebbing downward into the forms in whose habits thou hast
now for many years slid as near and proper to us.
(43:01):
Is also that old fable of the Sphinx who was
said to sit at the roadside and put briddles to
every passenger. If the man could not answer, she swallowed
him alive. If he could solve the reddle, the sphinx
was slain. What is our life but an endless flight
of winged facts or events in splendid variety. These changes
(43:24):
come all putting questions to the human spirit. These men
who cannot answer by a superior wisdom. These facts or
questions of time served them, Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them,
and make the men of routine the men of sense,
in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every
(43:44):
spark of that light by which man is truly man.
But if the man is true to his better instincts
or sentiments, and refuses the dominion of facts as one
that comes of a higher race, remains fast by the soul,
and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and
supple into their places. They know their master, and the
(44:06):
meanest of them glorifies them. See in good as Helena
the same desire that every word should be a thing.
These figures, he would say, these Charuns, Griffins, Fokias, Helen,
and Leda are something, and do exert a specific influence
on the mind. So far, then are they eternal entities,
(44:28):
as real to day as in the First Olympiad. Much
revolving them, he writes out freely his humor and gives
them body to his own imagination. And although that poem
be as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is
it much more attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces
of the same author, for the reason that it operates
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a wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of
customary images, awakens the reader's invention and fancy by the
wild freedom of the design, and by the unceasing succession
of brisk shocks of surprise. The universal nature, too strong
for the petty nature of the bard, sits on his
(45:09):
neck and writes through his head, so that when he
seems to vent a mere caprice in wild romance, the
issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato said that poets
are a great and wise things, which they do not
themselves understand. All the fictions of the Middle Age explain
themselves as a masked or a frolic expression of that
(45:31):
which in grave earnest the mind of that period toil
to achieve magic. And all that is ascribed to it
is a deep presentiment of the powers of science, the
shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing,
the elements of using, the secret virtues of minerals of understanding.
The voices of birds are the obscure efforts of the
(45:54):
mind in a right direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero,
the gift of prepared ractual youth, and the like are
alike the endeavor of the human spirit to bend the
shows of things to the desires of the mind. In
Perceforest and Ahmedie de Gaulle, a garland and a rose
bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and
(46:16):
fade on the brow of the inconstant, and the Story
of the Boy and the Mantle. Even a mature reader
may be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at
the triumph of the general Venilas. And indeed all the
postulates of the elfin annals that the fairies do not
like to be named, that their gifts are capricious and
not to be trusted, that who seeks a treasure must
(46:37):
not speak, And the like I find true in Concord,
however they might be in Cornwall and Briton. Is it otherwise?
In the newest Romance I read the Bride of Lammermoor.
Sir William Ashton is a mask for vulgar temptation, Ravenswood
Castle a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign
(46:58):
mission of states only a Bunyan disguise for honest industry.
We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss
the good and beautiful by fighting down the unjust and sensual.
Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity, which is always
beautiful and always liable to calamity in this world. But
(47:20):
along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another
history goes daily forward, that of the external world, in
which he is not less strictly implicated. He is the
compend of time. He is also the correlative of nature.
His power consists in the multitude of his affinities, in
(47:41):
the fact that his life is intertwined with the whole
chain of organic and inorganic being. In Old Rome, the
public roads, beginning at the Forum, proceeded north southeast west
to the center of every province of the Empire, making
each market town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to
the soldiers of the capital. So out of the human
(48:04):
hearts go, as it were, highways to the heart of
every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion
of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a
knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.
His faculties refer to natures out of himp and predict
the worlds he is to inhabit as the fins of
(48:25):
a fish, foreshow that water exists, or the wings of
an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live
without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison. Let
his faculties find no men to act on, no alps
to climb, no stake to play for than he would
beat the air and appear stupid. Transport him to large countries,
(48:47):
dense population, complex interests, and antagonist power. And you shall
see that the man Napoleon bounded, that is by such
a profile and outline, is not the virtual Napoleon. This
is but Talbot's shadow. His substance is not here, For
what you see is but the smallest part and least
(49:09):
proportion of humanity. But where the whole frame here, It
is of such a spacious, lofty pitch your roof were
not sufficient to contain it. Henry the sixth Columbus needs
a planet to shape his course upon Newton and the
place need myriads of age and thick strewn celestial areas.
(49:29):
One may say a gravitating solar system is already prophesied
in the nature of Newton's mind. Not less does the
brain of Davy or gay Lusac from childhood exploring the
affinities and repulsons of particles anticipate the laws of organization.
Does not the eye of the human embryo predict the light?
The air of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound.
(49:52):
Do not the constructive fingers of Watts, Fulton, Whitmore, Arkwright
predict the fusible, hard, and temporar textures of metals, the
properties of stone, water, and wood. Do not the lovely
attributes of the maiden child predict the refinements and decorations
of civil society. Here also we are reminded of the
(50:14):
action of man or man. A man might ponder its
thought for ages, and not gain so much self knowledge
as the passion of love shall teach in a day.
Who knows himself before he has been thrilled with indignation
at an outrage, or has hurt an eloquent tongue, or
has shared the throb of thousands in a natural exaltation
(50:34):
or alarm. No man can antedate his experience or guess
what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock, any
more than he can draw to day the face of
a person whom he shall see tomorrow for the first time.
I will not go behind the general statement to explore
the reason of this correspondency. Let it suffice that in
(50:57):
the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind
is one and that nature is its correlative, history is
to be read and written. Thus, in all ways does
the soul concentrate and reproduce its treasures. For each pupil,
he too, shall past through the whole cycle of experience.
He shall collect into a focus the rays of nature.
(51:20):
History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall
walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall
not tell me by languages and titles a catalog of
the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel
what periods you have lived. A man shall be the
temple of fame. He shall walk as the poets have
described that goddess in a robe painted all over with
(51:44):
wonderful events and experiences. His own form and features, by
their exalted intelligence, shall be that variegated vest I shall
find in him the full world in his childhood, the
age of Gold, the apples of knowledge, the Argonautic expedition,
the calling of Abraham, the building of the Temple, the
(52:05):
advent of Christ, dark ages, the revival of letters, the Reformation,
the discovery of new lands, the opening of new sciences
and new regions in Man, he shall be the priest
of Pan and bring with him into humble cottages, the
blessing of the morning stars, and all the recorded benefits
of heaven and earth. Is there something overweening in this claim?
(52:30):
Then I reject all I have written, for what is
the use of pretending to know what we know not?
But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we
cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
I hold our actual knowledge very cheap. 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 morally, of either of these worlds of life? As
old as the Caucasian man, perhaps older, these creatures have
kept their council beside him, and there is no record
of any word or sign that has passed from one
to the other. What connection do the books show between
(53:12):
the fifty or sixty chemical elements and the historical errors? Nay,
what does history yet record of the metaphysical annals of man?
What light does it shed on these mysteries which we
hide under the names death and immortality. Yet every history
should be written in a wisdom which divined the range
of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I
(53:36):
am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our
so called history is. How many times we must say
Rome and Paris and Constantinople. What does Rome know of
rat and lizard? What are olympiads and consulates to these
neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or
(53:57):
succor have they for the Eskimo seal hunter, for the
kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevadore, the
porter Broader and deeper. We must write our annals if
from an ethical reformation, from an influx of ever new,
ever sanitive conscience, if we would trulier express our central
(54:17):
and wide related nature, instead of this old chronology of
selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent
our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in
on us at unawares. But the path of science and
of letters is not the way of nature. The idiot,
the Indian, the child, an unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer
(54:41):
to the light by which nature is to be read
than the dissector or the antiquary end of history.
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