A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is
found,—a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape,—a cannibal, and
eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,—a certain degree of progress
from this extreme, is called Civilization. It is a vague, complex name, of
many degrees. Nobody has attempted a definition. M. Guizot, writing a book
on the subject, does not. It implies the evolution of a highly-organized
man, brought to supreme delicacy of sentiment, as in practical power,
religion, liberty, sense of honor, and taste. In the hesitation to define
what it is, we usually suggest it by negations. A nation that has no
clothing, no iron, no alphabet, no marriage, no arts of peace, no abstract
thought, we call barbarous. And after many arts are invented or imported,
as among the Turks and Moorish nations, it is often a little complaisant
to call them civilized.
Each nation grows after its own genius, and has a civilization of its own.
The Chinese and Japanese, though each complete in his way, is different
from the man of Madrid or the man of New York. The term imports a
mysterious progress. In the brutes is none; and in mankind to-day the
savage tribes are gradually extinguished rather than civilized. The
Indians of this country have not learned the white man’s work; and in
Africa, the negro of to-day is the negro of Herodotus. In other races the
growth is not arrested; but the like progress that is made by a boy “when
he cuts his eye-teeth,” as we say,—childish illusions passing daily
away, and he seeing things really and comprehensively,—is made by tribes.
It is the learning the secret of cumulative power, of advancing on one’s
self. It implies a facility of association, power to compare, the ceasing
from fixed ideas. The Indian is gloomy and distressed when urged to depart
from his habits and traditions. He is overpowered by the gaze of the
white, and his eye sinks. The occasion of one of these starts of growth is
always some novelty that astounds the mind, and provokes it to dare to
change. Thus there is a Cadmus, a Pytheas, a Manco Capac at the beginning
of each improvement—some superior foreigner importing new and wonderful
arts, and teaching them. Of course, he must not know too much, but must
have the sympathy, language, and gods of those he would inform. But
chiefly the sea-shore had been the point of departure to knowledge, as to
commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the
most. The power which the sea requires in a sailor makes a man of him very
fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much
nonsense of his wigwam.
Where shall we begin or end the list of those feats of liberty and wit,
each of which feats made an epoch of history? Thus, the effect of a framed
or stone house is immense on the tranquillity, power, and refinement of
the builder. A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more
estate than the wolf or the horse leaves. But so simple a labor as a house
being achieved, his chief enemies are kept at bay. He is safe from the
teeth of wild animals, from frost, sunstroke, and weather; and fine
faculties begin to yield their fine harvest. Invention and art are born,
manners and social beauty and delight. ’Tis wonderful how soon a piano
gets into a log-hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under
a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin Grammar—and one of those tow-head
boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates, take
heed! for here is one who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the
pioneer’s iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong
hands.
When the Indian trail gets widened, graded, and bridged to a good road,
there is a benefactor, there is a missionary, a pacificator, a
wealth-bringer, a maker of markets, a vent for industry. Another step in
civility is the change from war, hunting, and pasturage to agriculture.
Our Scandinavian forefathers have left us a significant legend to convey
their sense of the importance of this step. “There was once a giantess who
had a daughter, and the child saw a husbandman ploughing in the field.
Then she ran and picked him up with her finger and thumb, and put him and
his plough and his oxen into her apron, and carried them to her mother,
and said, ‘Mother, what sort of a beetle is this that I found wriggling in
the sand?’ But the mother said, ‘Put it away, my child; we must begone out
of this land, for these people will dwell in it.’” Another success is the
post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded
by a certain religious sentiment in mankind; so that the power of a wafer
or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea, over
land, and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it,
I look upon as a fine metre of civilization.
The division of labor, the multiplication of the arts of peace, which is
nothing but a large allowance to each man to choose his work according to
his faculty,—to live by his better hand,—fills the State with useful and
happy laborers; and they, creating demand by the very temptation of their
productions, are rapidly and surely rewarded by good sale: and what a
police and ten commandments their work thus becomes! So true is Dr.
Johnson’s remark that “men are seldom more innocently employed than when
they are making money.”
The skillful combinations of civil government, though they usually follow
natural leadings, as the lines of race, language, religion, and territory,
yet require wisdom and conduct in the rulers, and in their result delight
the imagination. “We see insurmountable multitudes obeying, in opposition
to their strongest passions, the restraints of a power which they scarcely
perceive, and the crimes of a single individual marked and punished at the
distance of half the earth.”
Right position of woman in the State is another index. Poverty and
industry with a healthy mind read very easily the laws of humanity, and
love them; place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a
severe morality gives that essential charm to woman which educates all
that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing, breeds courtesy and
learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate; so that I have thought
a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
Another measure of culture is the diffusion of knowledge, overrunning all
the old barriers of caste, and, by the cheap press, bringing the
university to every poor man’s door in the newsboy’s basket. Scraps of
science, of thought, of poetry, are in the coarsest sheet, so that in
every house we hesitate to burn a newspaper until we have looked it
through.
The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and compend
of a nation’s arts: the ship steered by compass and chart,—longitude
reckoned by lunar observation and by chronometer,—driven by steam; and
in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from home,—
The pulses of her iron heart
Go beating through the storm.
No use can lessen the wonder of this control, by so weak a creature, of
forces so prodigious. I remember I watched, in crossing the sea, the
beautiful skill whereby the engine in its constant working was made to
produce two hundred gallons of fresh water out of salt water every
hour—thereby supplying all the ship’s wants.
The skill that pervades complex details; the man that maintains himself;
the chimney taught to burn its own smoke; the farm made to produce all
that is consumed on it; the very prison compelled to maintain itself and
yield a revenue, and, better still, made a reform school, and a
manufactory of honest men out of rogues, as the steamer made fresh water
out of salt—all these are examples of that tendency to combine
antagonisms, and utilize evil, which is the index of high civilization.
Civilization is the result of highly complex organization. In the snake,
all the organs are sheathed: no hands, no feet, no fins, no wings. In bird
and beast, the organs are released, and begin to play. In man, they are
all unbound, and full of joyful action. With this unswaddling he receives
the absolute illumination we call Reason, and thereby true liberty.
Climate has much to do with this melioration. The highest civility has
never loved the hot zones. Wherever snows falls, there is usually civil
freedom. Where the banana grows, the animal system is indolent and
pampered at the cost of higher qualities; the man is sensual and cruel.
But this scale is not invariable. High degrees of moral sentiment control
the unfavorable influences of climate; and some of our grandest examples
of men and of races come from the equatorial regions—as the genius of
Egypt, of India, and of Arabia.
These feats are measures or traits of civility; and temperate climate is
an important influence, though not quite indispensable; for there have
been learning, philosophy, and art in Iceland, and in the tropics. But one
condition is essential to the social education of man, namely, morality.
There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not
always call itself by that name, but sometimes the point of honor, as in
the institution of chivalry; or patriotism, as in the Spartan and Roman
republics; or the enthusiasm of some religious act which imputes its
virtue to its dogma; or the cabalism, or esprit de corps, of a masonic
or other association of friends.
The evolution of a highly-destined society must be moral; it must run in
the grooves of the celestial wheels. It must be catholic in aims. What is
moral? It is the respecting in action catholic or universal ends. Hear
the definition which Kant gives of moral conduct: “Act always so that the
immediate motive of thy will may become a universal rule for all
intelligent beings.”
Civilization depends on morality. Everything good in man leans on what is
higher. This rule holds in small as in great. Thus, all our strength and
success in the work of our hands depend on our borrowing the aid of the
elements. You have seen a carpenter on a ladder with a broad axe chopping
upward chips from a beam. How awkward! at what disadvantage he works! But
see him on the ground, dressing his timber under him. Now, not his feeble
muscles, but the force of gravity brings down the axe; that is to say, the
planet itself splits his stick. The farmer had much ill-temper, laziness,
and shirking to endure from his hand-sawyers, until one day he bethought
him to put his saw-mill on the edge of a waterfall; and the river never
tires of turning his wheel: the river is good-natured, and never hints an
objection.
We had letters to send: couriers could not go fast enough, nor far enough;
broke their wagons, foundered their horses; bad roads in spring,
snow-drifts in winter, heats in summer; could not get the horses out of a
walk. But we found out that the air and earth were full of electricity,
and always going our way—just the way we wanted to send. Would he take a
message? Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do; would carry it in
no time. Only one doubt occurred, one staggering objection—he had no
carpetbag, no visible pockets, no hands, not so much as a mouth, to carry
a letter. But, after much thought and many experiments, we managed to meet
the conditions, and to fold up the letter in such invisible compact form
as he could carry in those invisible pockets of his, never wrought by
needle and thread—and it went like a charm.
I admire still more than the saw-mill the skill which, on the sea-shore,
makes the tides drive the wheels and grind corn, and which thus engages
the assistance of the moon, like a hired hand, to grind, and wind, and
pump, and saw, and split stone, and roll iron.
Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch
his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That
is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The
forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us
day by day, and cost us nothing.
Our astronomy is full of examples of calling in the aid of these
magnificent helpers. Thus, on a planet so small as ours, the want of an
adequate base for astronomical measurements is early felt; as, for
example, in detecting the parallax of a star. But the astronomer, having
by an observation fixed the place of a star, by so simple an expedient as
waiting six months, and then repeating his observation, contrived to put
the diameter of the earth’s orbit, say two hundred millions of miles,
between his first observation and his second, and this line afforded him a
respectable base for his triangle.
All our arts aim to win this vantage. We cannot bring the heavenly powers
to us; but, if we will only choose our jobs in directions in which they
travel, they will undertake them with the greatest pleasure. It is a
peremptory rule with them, that they never go out of their road. We are
dapper little busybodies, and run this way and that way superserviceably;
but they swerve never from their fore-ordained paths—neither the sun, nor
the moon, nor a bubble of air, nor a mote of dust.
And as our handiworks borrow the elements, so all our social and political
action leans on principles. To accomplish anything excellent, the will
must work for catholic and universal ends. A puny creature, walled in on
every side, as Daniel wrote,—
Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!
But when his will leans on a principle, when he is the vehicle of ideas,
he borrows their omnipotence. Gibraltar may be strong, but ideas are
impregnable, and bestow on the hero their invincibility. “It was a great
instruction,” said a saint in Cromwell’s war, “that the best courages are
but beams of the Almighty.” Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in
paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal.
No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other
way—Charles’s Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will
leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and
promote—justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility.
If we can thus ride in Olympian chariots by putting our works in the path
of the celestial circuits, we can harness also evil agents, the powers of
darkness, and force them to serve against their will the ends of wisdom
and virtue. Thus, a wise government puts fines and penalties on pleasant
vices. What a benefit would the American government, not yet relieved of
its extreme need, render to itself, and to every city, village, and hamlet
in the States, if it would tax whiskey and rum almost to the point of
prohibition! Was it Bonaparte who said that he found vices very good
patriots? “He got five millions from the love of brandy, and he should be
glad to know which of the virtues would pay him as much.” Tobacco and
opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if
you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm
as they do.
These are traits, and measures, and modes; and the true test of
civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the
crops—no, but the kind of man the country turns out. I see the vast
advantages of this country, spanning the breadth of the temperate zone. I
see the immense material prosperity—towns on towns, states on states, and
wealth piled in the massive architecture of cities; California quartz
mountains dumped down in New York to be repiled architecturally
along-shore from Canada to Cuba, and thence westward to California again.
But it is not New York streets, built by the confluence of workmen and
wealth of all nations, though stretching out toward Philadelphia until
they touch it, and northward until they touch New Haven, Hartford,
Springfield, Worcester, and Boston—not these that make the real
estimation. But, when I look over this constellation of cities which
animate and illustrate the land, and see how little the government has to
do with their daily life, how self-helped and self-directed all families
are,—knots of men in purely natural societies,—societies of trade, of
kindred blood, of habitual hospitality, house and house, man acting on man
by weight of opinion of longer or better-directed industry, the refining
influence of women, the invitation which experience and permanent causes
open to youth and labor,—when I see how much each virtuous and gifted
person, whom all men consider, lives affectionately with scores of
excellent people who are not known far from home, and perhaps with great
reason reckons these people his superiors in virtue, and in the symmetry
and force of their qualities, I see what cubic values America has, and in
these a better certificate of civilization than great cities or enormous
wealth.
In strictness, the vital refinements are the moral and intellectual steps.
The appearance of the Hebrew Moses, of the Indian Buddh,—in Greece, of
the Seven Wise Masters, of the acute and upright Socrates, and of the
Stoic Zeno,—in Judæa, the advent of Jesus,—and in modern Christendom, of
the realists Huss, Savonarola, and Luther,—are casual facts which carry
forward races to new convictions, and elevate the rule of life. In the
presence of these agencies, it is frivolous to insist on the invention of
printing or gunpowder, of steam-power or gas-light, percussion-caps and
rubber-shoes, which are toys thrown off from that security, freedom, and
exhilaration which a healthy morality creates in society. These arts add a
comfort and smoothness to house and street life; but a purer morality,
which kindles genius, civilizes civilization, casts backward all that we
held sacred into the profane, as the flame of oil throws a shadow when
shined upon by the flame of the Bude-light. Not the less the popular
measures of progress will ever be the arts and the laws.
But if there be a country which cannot stand any one of these tests—a
country where knowledge cannot be diffused without perils of mob-law and
statute-law,—where speech is not free,—where the post-office is
violated, mailbags opened, and letters tampered with,—where public debts
and private debts outside of the State are repudiated,—where liberty is
attacked in the primary institution of social life,—where the position of
the white woman is injuriously affected by the outlawry of the black
woman,—where the arts, such as they have, are all imported, having no
indigenous life,—where the laborer is not secured in the earnings of his
own hands,—where suffrage is not free or equal,—that country is, in all
these respects, not civil, but barbarous; and no advantages of soil,
climate, or coast can resist these suicidal mischiefs.
Morality and all the incidents of morality are essential: as, justice to
the citizen and personal liberty. Montesquieu says: “Countries are well
cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free”; and the remark
holds not less, but more true, of the culture of men, than of the tillage
of land. And the highest proof of civility is, that the whole public
action of the State is directed on securing the greatest good of the
greatest number.
Flow, flow the waves hated,
Accursed, adored,
The waves of mutation:
No anchorage is.
Sleep is not, death is not;
Who seem to die, live.
House you were born in,
Friends of your spring-time,
Old man and young maid,
Day’s toil and its guerdon—
They are all vanishing,
Fleeing to fables,
Cannot be moored.
See the stars through them,
Through treacherous marbles.
Know, the stars yonder,
The stars everlasting
Are fugitive also,
And emulate, vaulted,
The lambent heat-lightning,
And fire-fly’s flight.
When thou dost return
On the wave’s circulation,
Beholding the shimmer,
The will’s dissipation,
And, out of endeavor
To change and to flow,
The gas become solid,
And phantoms and nothings
Return to be things,
And endless imbroglio
Is law and the world,—
Then first shalt thou know,
That in the wild turmoil,
Horsed on the Proteus,
Thou ridest to power,
And to endurance. |
Some years ago, in company with an agreeable party, I spent a long summer
day in exploring the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. We traversed, through
spacious galleries affording a solid masonry foundation for the town and
county overhead, the six or eight black miles from the mouth of the cavern
to the innermost recess which tourists visit—a niche or grotto made of
one seamless stalactite and called, I believe, Serena’s Bower. I lost the
light of one day. I saw high domes, and bottomless pits; heard the voice
of unseen waterfalls; paddled three quarters of a mile in the deep Echo
River, whose waters are peopled with the blind fish; crossed the streams
“Lethe” and “Styx”; plied with music and guns the echoes in these alarming
galleries; saw every form of stalagmite and stalactite in the sculptured
and fretted chambers—icicle, orange-flower, acanthus, grapes, and
snowball. We shot Bengal lights into the vaults and groins of the sparry
cathedrals, and examined all the masterpieces which the four combined
engineers, water, limestone, gravitation, and time, could make in the
dark.
The mysteries and scenery of the cave had the same dignity that belongs to
all natural objects, and shames the fine things to which we foppishly
compare them. I remarked, especially, the mimetic habit, with which
Nature, on new instruments, hums her old tunes, making night to mimic day,
and chemistry to ape vegetation. But I then took notice, and still chiefly
remember, that the best thing which the cave had to offer was an illusion.
On arriving at what is called the “Star Chamber,” our lamps were taken
from us by the guide, and extinguished or put aside, and, on looking
upwards, I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars
glimmering more or less brightly over our heads, and even what seemed a
comet flaming among them. All the party were touched with astonishment
and pleasure. Our musical friends sung with much feeling a pretty song,
“The stars are in the quiet sky,” etc., and I sat down on the rocky floor
to enjoy the serene picture. Some crystal specks in the black ceiling high
overhead, reflecting the light of a half-hid lamp, yielded this
magnificent effect.
I own, I did not like the cave so well for eking out its sublimities with
this theatrical trick. But I have had many experiences like it, before and
since; and we must be content to be pleased without too curiously
analyzing the occasions. Our conversation with Nature is not just what it
seems. The cloud-rack, the sunrise and sunset glories, rainbows, and
northern lights, are not quite so spheral as our childhood thought them;
and the part our organization plays in them is too large. The senses
interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of.
Once, we fancied the earth a plane, and stationary. In admiring the
sunset, we do not yet deduct the rounding, coördinating, pictorial powers
of the eye.
The same interference from our organization creates the most of our
pleasure and pain. Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance
gives the joy which we give to the circumstance. Life is an ecstasy. Life
is sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman dripping all day over a cold
pond, the switchman at the railway intersection, the farmer in the field,
the negro in the rice-swamp, the fop in the street, the hunter in the
woods, the barrister with the jury, the belle at the ball, all ascribe a
certain pleasure to their employment, which they themselves give it.
Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat. We
fancy that our civilization has got on far, but we still come back to our
primers.
We live by our imaginations, by our admirations, by our sentiments. The
child walks amid heaps of illusions, which he does not like to have
disturbed. The boy, how sweet to him is his fancy! how dear the story of
barons and battles! What a hero he is, whilst he feeds on his heroes! What
a debt is his to imaginative books! He has no better friend or influence
than Scott, Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Homer. The man lives to other
objects, but who dares affirm that they are more real? Even the prose of
the streets is full of refractions. In the life of the dreariest alderman,
fancy enters into all details, and colors them with rosy hue. He imitates
the air and actions of people whom he admires, and is raised in his own
eyes. He pays a debt quicker to a rich man than to a poor man. He wishes
the bow and compliment of some leader in the state, or in society; weighs
what he says; perhaps he never comes nearer to him for that, but dies at
last better contented for this amusement of his eyes and his fancy.
The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed. In London, in Paris, in
Boston, in San Francisco, the carnival, the masquerade is at its height.
Nobody drops his domino. The unities, the fictions of the piece, it would
be an impertinence to break. The chapter of fascinations is very long.
Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic
who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers. It
was wittily, if somewhat bitterly, said by D’Alembert, “qu’un état de
vapeur était un état très fâcheux, parcequ’il nous faisait voir les choses
comme elles sont.” I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life.
Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bauble or
another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi’s
Mocking,—for the Power has many names,—is stronger than the Titans,
stronger than Apollo. Few have overheard the gods, or surprised their
secret. Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be
understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.
There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snowstorm. We wake
from one dream into another dream. The toys, to be sure, are various, and
are graduated in refinement to the quality of the dupe. The intellectual
man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is
drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with
music and banner and badge.
Amid the joyous troop who give in to the charivari, comes now and then a
sad-eyed boy, whose eyes lack the requisite refractions to clothe the show
in due glory, and who is afflicted with a tendency to trace home the
glittering miscellany of fruits and flowers to one root. Science is a
search after identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in all corners.
At the State Fair, a friend of mine complained that all the varieties of
fancy pears in our orchards seem to have been selected by somebody who had
a whim for a particular kind of pear, and only cultivated such as had that
perfume; they were all alike. And I remember the quarrel of another youth
with the confectioners, that, when he racked his wit to choose the best
comfits in the shops, in all the endless varieties of sweetmeat he could
only find three flavors, or two. What then? Pears and cakes are good for
something; and because you, unluckily, have an eye or nose too keen, why
need you spoil the comfort which the rest of us find in them?
I knew a humorist who, in a good deal of rattle, had a grain or two of
sense. He shocked the company by maintaining that the attributes of God
were two—power and risibility; and that it was the duty of every pious
man to keep up the comedy. And I have known gentlemen of great stake in
the community, but whose sympathies were cold,—presidents of colleges,
and governors, and senators,—who held themselves bound to sign every
temperance pledge, and act with Bible societies, and missions, and
peacemakers, and cry, Hist-a-boy! to every good dog. We must not carry
comity too far, but we all have kind impulses in this direction. When the
boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter
into Nature’s game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly,
fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy
chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid
on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to
tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the
less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the
happiest fortune, and talked of “the dear cottage where so many joyful
hours had flown.” Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the
country. Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion.
Being fascinated, they fascinate. They see through Claude-Lorraines. And
how dare anyone, if he could, pluck away the coulisses, stage-effects,
and ceremonies, by which they live? Too pathetic, too pitiable, is the
region of affection, and its atmosphere always liable to mirage.
We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid
hallucinations; and this especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with,
and all are tripped up first or last. But the mighty Mother who had been
so sly with us, as if she felt that she owed us some indemnity, insinuates
into the Pandora-box of marriage some deep and serious benefits, and some
great joys. We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children that
makes the heart too big for the body. In the worst-assorted connections
there is ever some mixture of true marriage. Teague and his jade get some
just relations of mutual respect, kindly observation, and fostering of
each other, learn something, and would carry themselves wiselier, if they
were now to begin.
’Tis fine for us to point at one or another fine madman, as if there were
any exempts. The scholar in his library is none. I, who have all my life
heard any number of orations and debates, read poems and miscellaneous
books, conversed with many geniuses, am still the victim of any new page;
and, if Marmaduke, or Hugh, or Moosehead, or any other, invent a new style
or mythology, I fancy that the world will be all brave and right if
dressed in these colors, which I had not thought of. Then at once I will
daub with this new paint: but it will not stick. ’Tis like the cement
which the peddler sells at the door; he makes broken crockery hold with
it, but you can never buy of him a bit of the cement which will make it
hold when he is gone.
Men who make themselves felt in the world avail themselves of a certain
fate in their constitution, which they know how to use. But they never
deeply interest us, unless they lift a corner of the curtain, or betray
never so slightly their penetration of what is behind it. ’Tis the charm
of practical men, that outside of their practicality are a certain poetry
and play, as if they led the good horse Power by the bridle, and preferred
to walk, though they can ride so fiercely. Bonaparte is intellectual, as
well as Cæsar; and the best soldiers, sea-captains, and railway men have a
gentleness, when off duty; a good-natured admission that there are
illusions, and who shall say that he is not their sport? We stigmatize the
cast-iron fellows, who cannot so detach themselves, as “dragon-ridden,”
“thunder-stricken,” and fools of fate, with whatever powers endowed.
Since our tuition is through emblems and indirections, ’tis well to know
that there is method in it, a fixed scale, and rank above rank in the
phantasms. We begin low with coarse masks, and rise to the most subtle and
beautiful. The red men told Columbus, “they had an herb which took away
fatigue”; but he found the illusion of “arriving from the east at the
Indies” more composing to his lofty spirit than any tobacco. Is not our
faith in the impenetrability of matter more sedative than narcotics? You
play with jack-straws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics;
but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will
show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must
migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion,
“the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor,” must come down and be dealt with
in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play
and playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself,
and that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions we are
learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples,
cities, and men were swallowed up and all trace of them gone. We are
coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all
vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were
framed upon.
There are deceptions of the senses, deceptions of the passions, and the
structural, beneficent illusions of sentiment and of the intellect. There
is the illusion of love, which attributes to the beloved person all which
that person shares with his or her family, sex, age, or condition, nay,
with the human mind itself. ’Tis these which the lover loves, and Anna
Matilda gets the credit of them. As if one shut up always in a tower, with
one window, through which the face of heaven and earth could be seen,
should fancy that all the marvels he beheld belonged to that window. There
is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? or
come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only
the distribution of wholes into causal series? The intellect sees that
every atom carries the whole of Nature; that the mind opens to
omnipotence; that, in the endless striving and ascents, the metamorphosis
is entire, so that the soul doth not know itself in its own act, when that
act is perfected. There is illusion that shall deceive even the elect.
There is illusion that shall deceive even the performer of the miracle.
Though he make his body, he denies that he makes it. Though the world
exist from thought, thought is daunted in presence of the world. One after
the other we accept the mental laws, still resisting those which follow,
which however must be accepted. But all our concessions only compel us to
new profusion. And what avails it that science has come to treat space and
time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical,
and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading
with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities; but the
incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which
yesterday was a finality to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?
With such volatile elements to work in, ’tis no wonder if our estimates
are loose and floating. We must work and affirm, but we have no guess of
the value of what we say or do. The cloud is now as big as your hand, and
now it covers a county. That story of Thor, who was set to drain the
drinking-horn in Asgard, and to wrestle with the old woman, and to run
with the runner Lok, and presently found that he had been drinking up the
sea, and wrestling with Time, and racing with Thought, describes us who
are contending, amid these seeming trifles, with the supreme energies of
Nature. We fancy we have fallen into bad company and squalid condition,
low debts, shoe-bills, broken glass to pay for, pots to buy, butcher’s
meat, sugar, milk, and coal. “Set me some great task, ye gods! and I will
show my spirit.” “Not so,” says the good Heaven; “plod and plough, vamp
your old coats and hats, weave a shoestring; great affairs and the best
wine by-and-by.” Well, ’tis all phantasm; and if we weave a yard of tape
in all humility, and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was
no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the
threads were Time and Nature.
We cannot write the order of the variable winds. How can we penetrate the
law of our shifting moods and susceptibility? Yet they differ as all and
nothing. Instead of the firmament of yesterday, which our eyes require, it
is to-day an eggshell which coops us in; we cannot even see what or where
our stars of destiny are. From day to day, the capital facts of human life
are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up, and reveals them,
and we think how much good time is gone, that might have been saved had
any hint of these things been shown. A sudden rise in the road shows us
the system of mountains, and all the summits, which have been just as near
us all the year, but quite out of mind. But these alternations are not
without their order, and we are parties to our various fortune. If life
seem a succession of dreams, yet poetic justice is done in dreams also.
The visions of good men are good; it is the undisciplined will that is
whipped with bad thoughts and bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we
lose our hold on the central reality. Like sick men in hospitals, we
change only from bed to bed, from one folly to another; and it cannot
signify much what becomes of such castaways,—wailing, stupid, comatose
creatures,—lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the
nothing of death.
In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations.
There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at home, and a severe
barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are played
with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy
with the last honesty and truth. I look upon the simple and childish
virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in
character. Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all
kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as
my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined,
to all the éclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of
friendship, religion, poetry, and art. At the top or at the bottom of all
illusions, I set the cheat which still leads us to work and live for
appearances, in spite of our conviction, in all sane hours, that it is
what we really are that avails with friends, with strangers, and with fate
or fortune.
One would think from the talk of men, that riches and poverty were a great
matter; and our civilization mainly respects it. But the Indians say, that
they do not think the white man with his brow of care, always toiling,
afraid of heat and cold, and keeping within doors, has any advantage of
them. The permanent interest of every man is, never to be in a false
position, but to have the weight of Nature to back him in all that he
does. Riches and poverty are a thick or thin costume; and our life—the
life of all of us—identical. For we transcend the circumstance
continually, and taste the real quality of existence; as in our
employments, which only differ in the manipulations, but express the same
laws; or in our thoughts, which wear no silks and taste no ice-creams. We
see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.
The early Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Xenophanes measured their
force on this problem of identity. Diogenes of Apollonia said, that unless
the atoms were made of one stuff, they could never blend and act with one
another. But the Hindoos, in their sacred writings, express the liveliest
feeling, both of the essential identity, and of that illusion which they
conceive variety to be: “The notions, I am, and This is mine, which
influence mankind, are but delusions of the mother of the world. Dispel, O
Lord of all creatures! the conceit of knowledge which proceeds from
ignorance.” And the beatitude of man they hold to lie in being freed from
fascination.
The intellect is stimulated by the statement of truth in a trope, and the
will by clothing the laws of life in illusions. But the unities of Truth
and of Right are not broken by the disguise. There need never be any
confusion in these. In a crowded life of many parts and performers, on a
stage of nations, or in the obscurest hamlet in Maine or California, the
same elements offer the same choices to each new comer, and, according to
his election, he fixes his fortune in absolute nature. It would be hard to
put more mental and moral philosophy than the Persians have thrown into a
sentence:—
Fooled thou must be, though wisest of the wise:
Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice.
There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and
gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal
enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they
pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their
thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions.
He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and
whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned,
insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously
commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should
resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new
changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And
when, by-and-by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a
little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones—they
alone with him alone.
Delicate omens traced in air
To the lone bard true witness bare;
Birds with auguries on their wings
Chanted undeceiving things,
Him to beckon, him to warn;
Well might then the poet scorn
To learn of scribe or courier
Hints writ in vaster character;
And on his mind, at dawn of day,
Soft shadows of the evening lay.
For the prevision is allied
Unto the thing so signified;
Or say, the foresight that awaits
Is the same Genius that creates. |
It chanced during one winter, a few years ago, that our critics were bent
on discussing the theory of the Age. By an odd coincidence, four or five
noted men were each reading a discourse to the citizens of Boston or New
York, on the Spirit of the Times. It so happened that the subject had the
same prominence in some remarkable pamphlets and journals issued in London
in the same season. To me, however, the question of the times resolved
itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live?
We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge
orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their
opposition. We can only obey our own polarity. ’Tis fine for us to
speculate and elect our course, if we must accept an irresistible
dictation.
In our first steps to gain our wishes, we come upon immovable limitations.
We are fired with the hope to reform men. After many experiments, we find
that we must begin earlier—at school. But the boys and girls are not
docile; we can make nothing of them. We decide that they are not of good
stock. We must begin our reform earlier still—at generation: that is to
say, there is Fate, or laws of the world.
But, if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation understands
itself. If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm
liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the
power of character. This is true, and that other is true. But our geometry
cannot span these extreme points, and reconcile them. What to do? By
obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding on
each string, we learn at last its power. By the same obedience to other
thoughts, we learn theirs, and then comes some reasonable hope of
harmonizing them. We are sure, that, though we know not how, necessity
does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with
the spirit of the times. The riddle of the age has for each a private
solution. If one would study his own time, it must be by this method of
taking up in turn each of the leading topics which belong to our scheme of
human life, and, by firmly stating all that is agreeable to experience on
one, and doing the same justice to the opposing facts in the others, the
true limitations will appear. Any excess of emphasis, on one part, would
be corrected, and a just balance would be made.
But let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for
superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and
buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves
to face it. The Spartan, embodying his religion in his country, dies
before its majesty without a question. The Turk, who believes his doom is
written on the iron leaf in the moment when he entered the world, rushes
on the enemy’s sabre with undivided will. The Turk, the Arab, the Persian,
accepts the fore-ordained fate.
On two days, it steads not to run from thy grave,
The appointed, and the unappointed day;
On the first, neither balm nor physician can save,
Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay.
The Hindoo, under the wheel, is as firm. Our Calvinists, in the last
generation, had something of the same dignity. They felt that the weight
of the Universe held them down to their place. What could they do? Wise
men feel that there is something which cannot be talked or voted away—a
strap or belt which girds the world.
The Destiny, minister general,
That executeth in the world o’er all,
The purveyance which God hath seen beforne,
So strong it is that tho’ the world had sworn
The contrary of a thing by yea or nay,
Yet sometime it shall fallen on a day
That falleth not oft in a thousand year,
For, certainly, our appetites here,
Be it of war, or peace, or hate, or love,
All this is rulèd by the sight above.
Chaucer: The Knighte’s Tale.
The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense: “Whatever is fated, that will
take place. The great immense mind of Jove is not to be transgressed.”
Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The broad ethics of
Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which preach an
election or favoritism. And, now and then, an amiable parson, like Jung
Stilling, or Robert Huntington, believes in a pistareen-Providence, which,
whenever the good man wants a dinner, makes that somebody shall knock at
his door, and leave a half-dollar. But Nature is no sentimentalist—does
not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly,
and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like
a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood,
benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the
elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. The way of
Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of
the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones
of his prey in the coil of the anaconda—these are in the system, and our
habits are like theirs. You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the
slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is
complicity—expensive races—race living at the expense of race. The
planet is liable to shocks from comets, perturbations from planets,
rendings from earthquake and volcano, alterations of climate, precessions
of equinoxes. Rivers dry up by opening of the forest. The sea changes its
bed. Towns and counties fall into it. At Lisbon, an earthquake killed men
like flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed
in a few minutes. The scurvy at sea; the sword of the climate in the west
of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New Orleans, cut off men like a
massacre. Our Western prairie shakes with fever and ague. The cholera, the
small-pox, have proved as mortal to some tribes, as a frost to the
crickets, which, having filled the summer with noise, are silenced by a
fall of the temperature of one night. Without uncovering what does not
concern us; or counting how many species of parasites hang on a bombyx; or
groping after intestinal parasites, or infusory biters, or the obscurities
of alternate generation;—the forms of the shark, the labrus, the jaw of
the sea-wolf paved with crushing teeth, the weapons of the grampus, and
other warriors hidden in the sea—are hints of ferocity in the interiors
of nature. Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough,
incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its
huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in
a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.
Will you say, the disasters which threaten mankind are exceptional, and
one need not lay his account for cataclysms every day? Ay, but what
happens once, may happen again, and so long as these strokes are not to be
parried by us, they must be feared.
But these shocks and ruins are less destructive to us than the stealthy
power of other laws which act on us daily. An expense of ends to means is
fate—organization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and
powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of
the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. So is the scale of races,
of temperaments; so is sex; so is climate; so is the reaction of talents
imprisoning the vital power in certain directions. Every spirit makes its
house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit.
The gross lines are legible to the dull: the cabman is phrenologist so
far: he looks in your face to see if his shilling is sure. A dome of brow
denotes one thing; a pot-belly another; a squint, a pug-nose, mats of
hair, the pigment of the epidermis, betray character. People seem sheathed
in their tough organization. Ask Spurzheim, ask the doctors, ask Quetelet,
if temperaments decide nothing? or if there be anything they do not
decide? Read the description in medical books of the four temperaments,
and you will think you are reading your own thoughts which you had not yet
told. Find the part which black eyes, and which blue eyes, play severally
in the company. How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off
from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father’s or his
mother’s life? It often appears in a family, as if all the qualities of
the progenitors were potted in several jars—some ruling quality in each
son or daughter of the house—and sometimes the unmixed temperament, the
rank unmitigated elixir, the family vice, is drawn off in a separate
individual, and the others are proportionally relieved. We sometimes see a
change of expression in our companion, and say, his father, or his mother,
comes to the windows of his eyes, and sometimes a remote relative. In
different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if
there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin,—seven or
eight ancestors at least,—and they constitute the variety of notes for
that new piece of music which his life is. At the corner of the street,
you read the possibility of each passenger, in the facial angle, in the
complexion, in the depth of his eye. His parentage determines it. Men are
what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves
huckaback, why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this
engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber. Ask the digger in the
ditch to explain Newton’s laws: the fine organs of his brains have been
pinched by overwork and squalid poverty from father to son, for a hundred
years. When each comes forth from his mother’s womb, the gate of gifts
closes behind him. Let him value his hands and feet, he has but one pair.
So he has but one future, and that is already predetermined in his lobes,
and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form. All the
privilege and all the legislation of the world cannot meddle or help to
make a poet or a prince of him.
Jesus said, “When he looketh on her, he hath committed adultery.” But he
is an adulterer before he has yet looked on the woman, by the superfluity
of animal, and the defect of thought, in his constitution. Who meets him,
or who meets her, in the street, sees that they are ripe to be each
other’s victim.
In certain men, digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger
these are, the individual is so much weaker. The more of these drones
perish, the better for the hive. If, later, they give birth to some
superior individual, with force enough to add to this animal a new aim,
and a complete apparatus to work it out, all the ancestors are gladly
forgotten. Most men and most women are merely one couple more. Now and
then, one has a new cell or camarilla opened in his brain—an
architectural, a musical, or a philological knack, some stray taste or
talent for flowers, or chemistry, or pigments, or story-telling, a good
hand for drawing, a good foot for dancing, an athletic frame for wide
journeying, etc.—which skill nowise alters rank in the scale of nature,
but serves to pass the time, the life of sensation going on as before. At
last, these hints and tendencies are fixed in one, or in a succession.
Each absorbs so much food and force as to become itself a new centre. The
new talent draws off so rapidly the vital force, that not enough remains
for the animal functions, hardly enough for health; so that, in the second
generation, if the like genius appear, the health is visibly deteriorated,
and the generative force impaired.
People are born with the moral or with the material bias; uterine brothers
with this diverging destination; and I suppose, with high magnifiers, Mr.
Frauenhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to distinguish in the embryo at
the fourth day, this is a Whig, and that a Free-soiler.
It was a poetic attempt to lift this mountain of Fate, to reconcile this
despotism of race with liberty, which led the Hindoos to say, “Fate is
nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.” I find the
coincidence of the extremes of eastern and western speculation in the
daring statement of Schelling, “There is in every man a certain feeling,
that he has been what he is from all eternity, and by no means became
such in time.” To say it less sublimely—in the history of the individual
is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party
to his present estate.
A good deal of our politics is physiological. Now and then, a man of
wealth in the heyday of youth adopts the tenet of broadest freedom. In
England, there is always some man of wealth and large connection planting
himself, during all his years of health, on the side of progress, who, as
soon as he begins to die, checks his forward play, calls in his troops,
and becomes conservative. All conservatives are such from personal
defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and
blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act
on the defensive. But strong natures, backwoodsmen, New Hampshire giants,
Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams, Websters, Kossuths, are inevitable patriots,
until their life ebbs, and their defects and gout, palsy and money, warp
them.
The strongest idea incarnates itself in majorities and nations, in the
healthiest and strongest. Probably, the election goes by avoirdupois
weight, and, if you could weigh bodily the tonnage of any hundred of the
Whig and the Democratic party in a town, on the Dearborn balance, as they
passed the hay scales, you could predict with certainty which party would
carry it. On the whole, it would be rather the speediest way of deciding
the vote, to put the selectmen or the mayor and aldermen at the hayscales.
In science, we have to consider two things: power and circumstance. All we
know of the egg, from each successive discovery, is, another vesicle;
and if, after five hundred years, you get a better observer, or a better
glass, he finds within the last observed another. In vegetable and animal
tissue, it is just alike, and all that the primary power or spasm
operates, is, still, vesicles, vesicles. Yes—but the tyrannical
Circumstance! A vesicle in new circumstances, a vesicle lodged in
darkness, Oken thought, became animal; in light, a plant. Lodged in the
parent animal, it suffers changes, which end in unsheathing miraculous
capability in the unaltered vesicle, and it unlocks itself to fish, bird,
or quadruped, head and foot, eye and claw. The Circumstance is Nature.
Nature is, what you may do. There is much you may not. We have two
things—the circumstance, and the life. Once we thought, positive power
was all. Now we learn, that negative power, or circumstance, is half.
Nature is the tyrannous circumstance, the thick skull, the sheathed snake,
the ponderous, rock-like jaw; necessitated activity; violent direction;
the conditions of a tool, like the locomotive, strong enough on its track,
but which can do nothing but mischief off it; or skates, which are wings
on the ice, but fetters on the ground.
The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages—leaf
after leaf—never re-turning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of
granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand ages, and a
measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of marl and mud; vegetable
forms appear; her first misshapen animals, zoöphyte, trilobium, fish,
then, saurians—rude forms, in which she has only blocked her future
statue, concealing under these unwieldy monsters the fine type of her
coming king. The face of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate,
and man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it comes no more
again.
The population of the world is a conditional population; not the best, but
the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the steadiness
with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to another, is as
uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in history what weight
belongs to race. We see the English, French, and Germans, planting
themselves on every shore and market of America and Australia, and
monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like the nervous and
victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We follow the step of
the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how much will has been
expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain. Look at the unpalatable
conclusions of Knox, in his “Fragment of Races,”—a rash and
unsatisfactory writer, but charged with pungent and unforgettable truths.
“Nature respects race, and not hybrids.” “Every race has its own
habitat.” “Detach a colony from the race, and it deteriorates to the
crab.” See the shades of the picture. The German and Irish millions, like
the negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried
over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to
make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green
grass on the prairie.
One more faggot of these adamantine bandages, is, the new science of
Statistics. It is a rule, that the most casual and extraordinary
events—if the basis of population is broad enough—become matter of fixed
calculation. It would not be safe to say when a captain like Bonaparte, a
singer like Jenny Lind, or a navigator like Bowditch, would be born in
Boston: but, on a population of twenty or two hundred millions, something
like accuracy may be had.[17]
’Tis frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They
have all been invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch machine,
of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps
himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure,
just so far as the need is. ’Tis hard to find the right Homer, Zoroaster,
or Menu; harder still to find the Tubal Cain, or Vulcan, or Cadmus, or
Copernicus, or Fust, or Fulton, the indisputable inventor. There are
scores and centuries of them. “The air is full of men.” This kind of
talent so abounds, this constructive tool-making efficiency, as if it
adhered to the chemic atoms, as if the air he breathes were made of
Vaucansons, Franklins, and Watts.
Doubtless, in every million there will be an astronomer, a mathematician,
a comic poet, a mystic. No one can read the history of astronomy, without
perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new
kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empedocles,
Aristarchus, Pythagoras, Œnopides, had anticipated them; each had the
same tense geometrical brain, apt for the same vigorous computation and
logic, a mind parallel to the movement of the world. The Roman mile
probably rested on a measure of a degree of the meridian. Mahometan and
Chinese know what we know of leap-year, of the Gregorian calendar, and of
the precession of the equinoxes. As, in every barrel of cowries, brought
to New Bedford, there shall be one orangia, so there will, in a dozen
millions of Malays and Mahometans, be one or two astronomical skulls. In a
large city, the most casual things, and things whose beauty lies in their
casualty, are produced as punctually and to order as the baker’s muffin
for breakfast. “Punch” makes exactly one capital joke a week; and the
journals contrive to furnish one good piece of news every day.
And not less work the laws of repression, the penalties of violated
functions. Famine, typhus, frost, war, suicide, and effete races, must be
reckoned calculable parts of the system of the world.
These are pebbles from the mountain, hints of the terms by which our life
is walled up, and which show a kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom
or mill, in what we call casual or fortuitous events.
The force with which we resist these torrents of tendency looks so
ridiculously inadequate, that it amounts to little more than a criticism
or a protest made by a minority of one, under compulsion of millions. I
seemed, in the height of a tempest, to see men overboard struggling in the
waves, and driven about here and there. They glanced intelligently at each
other, but ’twas little they could do for one another; ’twas much if each
could keep afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their eye-beams, and
all the rest was Fate.
We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping out in our planted
gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity
that does not admit the odious facts. A man’s power is hooped in by a
necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he
learns its arc.
The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate,
is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate. If we are
brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and dreadful shape. As we
refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the
antagonism takes a spiritual form. In the Hindoo fables, Vishnu follows
Maya through all her ascending changes, from insect and crawfish up to
elephant; whatever form she took, he took the male form of that kind,
until she became at last woman and goddess, and he a man and a god. The
limitations refine as the soul purifies, but the ring of necessity is
always perched at the top.
When the gods in the Norse heaven were unable to bind the Fenris Wolf with
steel or with weight of mountains,—the one he snapped and the other he
spurned with his heel,—they put round his foot a limp band softer than
silk or cobweb, and this held him: the more he spurned it, the stiffer it
grew. So soft and so staunch is the ring of Fate. Neither brandy, nor
nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hell-fire, nor ichor, nor poetry, nor
genius, can get rid of this limp band. For if we give it the high sense in
which the poets use it, even thought itself is not above Fate: that too
must act according to eternal laws, and all that is willful and fantastic
in it is in opposition to its fundamental essence.
And, last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals, Fate appears
as vindicator, leveling the high, lifting the low, requiring justice in
man, and always striking soon or late, when justice is not done. What is
useful will last; what is hurtful will sink. “The doer must suffer,” said
the Greeks: “you would soothe a Deity not to be soothed.” “God himself
cannot procure good for the wicked,” said the Welsh triad. “God may
consent, but only for a time,” said the bard of Spain. The limitation is
impassable by any insight of man. In its last and loftiest ascensions,
insight itself, and the freedom of the will, is one of its obedient
members. But we must not run into generalizations too large, but show the
natural bounds or essential distinctions, and seek to do justice to the
other elements as well.
Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind, and morals—in race, in retardations
of strata, and in thought and character as well. It is everywhere bound or
limitation. But fate has its lord; limitation its limits; is different
seen from above and from below; from within and from without. For, though
Fate is immense, so is power, which is the other fact in the dual world,
immense. If Fate follows and limits power, power attends and antagonizes
Fate. We must respect Fate as natural history, but there is more than
natural history. For who and what is this criticism that pries into the
matter? Man is not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and members, link
in a chain, nor any ignominious baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a
dragging together of the poles of the Universe. He betrays his relation to
what is below him—thick-skulled, small-brained, fishy,
quadrumanous—quadruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into biped, and has
paid for the new powers by loss of some of the old ones. But the lightning
which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him.
On one side, elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges,
peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and, on the other part, thought, the
spirit which composes and decomposes nature—here they are, side by side,
god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm,
riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.
Nor can he blink the freewill. To hazard the contradiction—freedom is
necessary. If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and say,
Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man. Forever
wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul. Intellect annuls
Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. And though nothing is more
disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and
the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a
“Declaration of Independence,” or the statute right to vote, by those who
have never dared to think or to act, yet it is wholesome to man to look,
not at Fate, but the other way: the practical view is the other. His sound
relation to these facts is to use and command, not to cringe to them.
“Look not on nature, for her name is fatal,” said the oracle. The too much
contemplation of these limits induces meanness. They who talk much of
destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and
invite the evils they fear.
I cited the instinctive and heroic races as proud believers in Destiny.
They conspire with it; a loving resignation is with the event. But the
dogma makes a different impression, when it is held by the weak and lazy.
’Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of
Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature. Rude and
invincible except by themselves are the elements. So let man be. Let him
empty his breast of his windy conceits, and show his lordship by manners
and deeds on the scale of nature. Let him hold his purpose as with the tug
of gravitation. No power, no persuasion, no bribe shall make him give up
his point. A man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or
a mountain. He shall have not less the flow, the expansion, and the
resistance of these.
’Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at
sea, or the cholera in your friend’s house, or the burglar in your own, or
what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the
cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at
least, for your good.
For, if Fate is so prevailing, man also is part of it, and can confront
fate with fate. If the Universe have these savage accidents, our atoms are
as savage in resistance. We should be crushed by the atmosphere, but for
the reaction of the air within the body. A tube made of a film of glass
can resist the shock of the ocean, if filled with the same water. If
there be omnipotence in the stroke, there is omnipotence of recoil.
But Fate against Fate is only parrying and defense: there are, also, the
noble creative forces. The revelation of Thought takes man out of
servitude into freedom. We rightly say of ourselves, we were born, and
afterward we were born again, and many times. We have successive
experiences so important, that the new forgets the old, and hence the
mythology of the seven or the nine heavens. The day of days, the great day
of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity
in things, to the omnipresence of law—sees that what is must be, and
ought to be, or is the best. This beatitude dips from on high down to us,
and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it. If the air come to
our lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die. If the light come to our
eyes, we see; else not. And if truth come to our mind, we suddenly expand
to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds. We are as lawgivers; we speak
for Nature; we prophesy and divine.
This insight throws us on the party and interest of the Universe, against
all and sundry; against ourselves, as much as others. A man speaking from
insight affirms of himself what is true of the mind: seeing its
immortality, he says, I am immortal; seeing its invincibility, he says, I
am strong. It is not in us, but we are in it. It is of the maker, not of
what is made. All things are touched and changed by it. This uses, and is
not used. It distances those who share it, from those who share it not.
Those who share it not are flocks and herds. It dates from itself; not
from former men or better men—gospel, or constitution, or college, or
custom. Where it shines, Nature is no longer intrusive, but all things
make a musical or pictorial impression. The world of men show like a
comedy without laughter:—populations, interests, government,
history;—’tis all toy figures in a toy house. It does not overvalue
particular truths. We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from an
intellectual man. But, in his presence, our own mind is roused to
activity, and we forget very fast what he says, much more interested in
the new play of our own thought, than in any thought of his. ’Tis the
majesty into which we have suddenly mounted, the impersonality, the scorn
of egotisms, the sphere of laws, that engage us. Once we were stepping a
little this way, and a little that way; now, we are as men in a balloon,
and do not think so much of the point we have left, or the point we would
make, as of the liberty and glory of the way.
Just as much intellect as you add, so much organic power. He who sees
through the design, presides over it, and must will that which must be. We
sit and rule, and, though we sleep, our dream will come to pass. Our
thought, though it were only an hour old, affirms an oldest necessity, not
to be separated from thought, and not to be separated from will. They must
always have coexisted. It apprises us of its sovereignty and godhead,
which refuse to be severed from it. It is not mine or thine, but the will
of all mind. It is poured into the souls of all men, as the soul itself
which constitutes them men. I know not whether there be, as is alleged, in
the upper region of our atmosphere, a permanent westerly current, which
carries with it all atoms which rise to that height; but I see that, when
souls reach a certain clearness of perception, they accept a knowledge and
motive above selfishness. A breath of will blows eternally through the
universe of souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary. It is the
air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows
the worlds into order and orbit.
Thought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a
sphere where all is plastic. Of two men, each obeying his own thought, he
whose thought is deepest will be the strongest character. Always one man
more than another represents the will of Divine Providence to the period.
If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of
spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed. Yet we can see that with the
perception of truth is joined the desire that it shall prevail. That
affection is essential to will. Moreover, when a strong will appears, it
usually results from a certain unity of organization, as if the whole
energy of body and mind flowed in one direction. All great force is real
and elemental. There is no manufacturing a strong will. There must be a
pound to balance a pound. Where power is shown in will, it must rest on
the universal force. Alaric and Bonaparte must believe they rest on a
truth, or their will can be bought or bent. There is a bribe possible for
any finite will. But the pure sympathy with universal ends is an infinite
force, and cannot be bribed or bent. Whoever has had experience of the
moral sentiment cannot choose but believe in unlimited power. Each pulse
from that heart is an oath from the Most High. I know not what the word
sublime means, if it be not the intimations in this infant of a terrific
force. A text of heroism, a name and anecdote of courage, are not
arguments, but sallies of freedom. One of these is the verse of the
Persian Hafiz, “’Tis written on the gate of Heaven, ‘Woe unto him who
suffers himself to be betrayed by Fate!’” Does the reading of history make
us fatalists? What courage does not the opposite opinion show! A little
whim of will to be free gallantly contending against the universe of
chemistry.
But insight is not will, nor is affection will. Perception is cold, and
goodness dies in wishes; as Voltaire said, ’tis the misfortune of worthy
people that they are cowards; “un des plus grands malheurs des honnêtes
gens c’est qu’ils sont des lâches.” There must be a fusion of these two
to generate the energy of will. There can be no driving force, except
through the conversion of the man into his will, making him the will, and
the will him. And one may say boldly, that no man has a right perception
of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be
its martyr.
The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will. Society is
servile from want of will, and therefore the world wants saviours and
religions. One way is right to go: the hero sees it, and moves on that
aim, and has the world under him for root and support. He is to others as
the world. His approbation is honor; his dissent, infamy. The glance of
his eye has the force of sunbeams. A personal influence towers up in
memory only worthy, and we gladly forget numbers, money, climate,
gravitation, and the rest of Fate.
We can afford to allow the limitation, if we know it is the meter of the
growing man. We can stand against Fate, as children stand up against the
wall in their father’s house, and notch their height from year to year.
But when the boy grows to man, and is master of the house, he pulls down
that wall, and builds a new and bigger. ’Tis only a question of time.
Every brave youth is in training to ride, and rule this dragon. His
science is to make weapons and wings of these passions and retarding
forces. Now whether, seeing these two things, fate and power, we are
permitted to believe in unity? The bulk of mankind believe in two gods.
They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in
social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion: but in
mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they
think they come under another; and that it would be a practical blunder
to transfer the method and way of working of one sphere into the other.
What good, honest, generous men at home, will be wolves and foxes on
change! What pious men in the parlor will vote for what reprobates at the
polls! To a certain point, they believe themselves the care of a
Providence. But in a steamboat, in an epidemic, in war, they believe a
malignant energy rules.
But relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but
everywhere and always. The divine order does not stop where their sight
stops. The friendly power works on the same rules, in the next farm and
the next planet. But where they have not experience, they run against it,
and hurt themselves. Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under
the fire of thought—for causes which are unpenetrated.
But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us is convertible by
intellect into wholesome force. Fate is unpenetrated causes. The water
drowns ship and sailor, like a grain of dust. But learn to swim, trim your
bark, and the wave which drowned it will be cloven by it, and carry it,
like its own foam, a plume and a power. The cold is inconsiderate of
persons, tingles your blood, freezes a man like a dew-drop. But learn to
skate, and the ice will give you a graceful, sweet, and poetic motion. The
cold will brace your limbs and brain to genius, and make you foremost men
of time. Cold and sea will train an imperial Saxon race, which nature
cannot bear to lose, and, after cooping it up for a thousand years in
yonder England, gives a hundred Englands, a hundred Mexicos. All the
bloods it shall absorb and domineer: and more than Mexicos—the secrets of
water and steam, the spasms of electricity, the ductility of metals, the
chariot of the air, the ruddered balloon, are awaiting you.
The annual slaughter from typhus far exceeds that of war; but right
drainage destroys typhus. The plague in the sea-service from scurvy is
healed by lemon juice and other diets portable or procurable; the
depopulation by cholera and small-pox is ended by drainage and
vaccination; and every other pest is not less in the chain of cause and
effect, and may be fought off. And, whilst art draws out the venom, it
commonly extorts some benefits from the vanquished enemy. The mischievous
torrent is taught to drudge for man; the wild beasts he makes useful for
food, or dress, or labor; the chemic explosions are controlled like his
watch. These are now the steeds on which he rides. Man moves in all modes,
by legs of horses, by wings of wind, by steam, by gas of balloon, by
electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own
element. There is nothing he will not make his carrier.
Steam was, till the other day, the devil which we dreaded. Every pot made
by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the
enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof, and carry the house away. But the
Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and Fulton bethought themselves that where was
power was not devil, but was God; that it must be availed of, and not by
any means let off and wasted. Could he lift pots and roofs and houses so
handily? he was the workman they were in search of. He could be used to
lift away, chain, and compel other devils, far more reluctant and
dangerous, namely, cubic miles of earth, mountains, weight or resistance
of water, machinery, and the labors of all men in the world; and time he
shall lengthen, and shorten space.
It has not fared much otherwise with higher kinds of steam. The opinion of
the million was the terror of the world, and it was attempted, either to
dissipate it, by amusing nations, or to pile it over with strata of
society—a layer of soldiers; over that, a layer of lords; and a king on
the top; with clamps and hoops of castles, garrisons, and police. But,
sometimes, the religious principle would get in, and burst the hoops, and
rive every mountain laid on top of it. The Fultons and Watts of politics,
believing in unity, saw that it was a power, and, by satisfying it (as
justice satisfies everybody), through a different disposition of
society,—grouping it on a level, instead of piling it into a
mountain,—they have contrived to make of this terror the most harmless
and energetic form of a State.
Very odious, I confess, are the lessons of Fate. Who likes to have a
dapper phrenologist pronouncing on his fortunes? Who likes to believe that
he has hidden in his skull, spine, and pelvis, all the vices of a Saxon or
Celtic race, which will be sure to pull him down—with what grandeur of
hope and resolve he is fired—into a selfish, huckstering, servile,
dodging animal? A learned physician tells us, the fact is invariable with
the Neapolitan that, when mature, he assumes the forms of the unmistakable
scoundrel. That is a little overstated—but may pass.
But these are magazines and arsenals. A man must thank his defects, and
stand in some terror of his talents. A transcendent talent draws so
largely on his forces, as to lame him; a defect pays him revenues on the
other side. The sufferance, which is the badge of the Jew, has made him,
in these days, the ruler of the rulers of the earth. If Fate is ore and
quarry, if evil is good in the making, if limitation is power that shall
be, if calamities, oppositions, and weights are wings and means—we are
reconciled.
Fate involves the melioration. No statement of the universe can have any
soundness, which does not admit its ascending effort. The direction of the
whole, and of the parts, is toward benefit, and in proportion to the
health. Behind every individual closes organization: before him opens
liberty—the better, the best. The first and worst races are dead. The
second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the maturing of
higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new
perception, the love and praise he extorts from his fellows, are
certificates of advance out of fate into freedom. Liberation of the will
from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is the
end and aim of this world. Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint; and
where his endeavors do not yet fully avail, they tell as tendency. The
whole circle of animal life,—tooth against tooth,—devouring war, war for
food, a yelp of pain and a grunt of triumph, until, at last, the whole
menagerie, the whole chemical mass, is mellowed and refined for higher
use—pleases at a sufficient perspective.
But to see how fate slides into freedom, and freedom into fate, observe
how far the roots of every creature run, or find, if you can, a point
where there is no thread of connection. Our life is consentaneous and
far-related. This knot of nature is so well tied, that nobody was ever
cunning enough to find the two ends. Nature is intricate, overlapped,
inter-weaved, and endless. Christopher Wren said of the beautiful King’s
College chapel, “that, if anybody would tell him where to lay the first
stone, he would build such another.” But where shall we find the first
atom in this house of man, which is all consent, inosculation, and balance
of parts?
The web of relation is shown in habitat, shown in hibernation. When
hibernation was observed, it was found, that, whilst some animals become
torpid in winter, others were torpid in summer: hibernation then was a
false name. The long sleep is not an effect of cold, but is regulated by
the supply of food proper to the animal. It becomes torpid when the fruit
or prey it lives on is not in season, and regains its activity when its
food is ready.
Eyes are found in light; ears in auricular air; feet on land; fins in
water; wings in air; and each creature where it was meant to be, with a
mutual fitness. Every zone has its own Fauna. There is adjustment
between the animal and its food, its parasite, its enemy. Balances are
kept. It is not allowed to diminish in numbers, nor to exceed. The like
adjustments exist for man. His food is cooked when he arrives; his coal in
the pit; the house ventilated; the mud of the deluge dried; his companions
arrived at the same hour, and awaiting him with love, concert, laughter,
and tears. These are coarse adjustments, but the invisible are not less.
There are more belongings to every creature than his air and his food. His
instincts must be met, and he has predisposing power that bends and fits
what is near him to his use. He is not possible until the invisible things
are right for him, as well as the visible. Of what changes, then, in sky
and earth, and in finer skies and earths, does the appearance of some
Dante or Columbus apprise us!
How is this effected? Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way
to her ends. As the general says to his soldiers, “If you want a fort,
build a fort,” so nature makes every creature do its own work and get its
living—is it planet, animal, or tree. The planet makes itself. The animal
cell makes itself; then, what it wants. Every creature—wren or
dragon—shall make its own lair. As soon as there is life, there is
self-direction, and absorbing and using of material. Life is freedom—life
in the direct ratio of its amount. You may be sure, the new-born man is
not inert. Life works both voluntarily and supernaturally in its
neighborhood. Do you suppose he can be estimated by his weight in pounds,
or that he is contained in his skin—this reaching, radiating, jaculating
fellow? The smallest candle fills a mile with its rays, and the papillæ
of a man run out to every star.
When there is something to be done, the world knows how to get it done.
The vegetable eye makes leaf, pericarp, root, bark, or thorn, as the need
is; the first cell converts itself into stomach, mouth, nose, or nail,
according to the want; the world throws its life into a hero or a
shepherd, and puts him where he is wanted. Dante and Columbus were
Italians in their time: they would be Russians or Americans to-day. Things
ripen, new men come. The adaptation is not capricious. The ulterior aim,
the purpose beyond itself, the correlation by which planets subside and
crystallize, then animate beasts and men, will not stop, but will work
into finer particulars, and from finer to finest.
The secret of the world is, the tie between person and event. Person makes
event and event person. The “times,” “the age,” what is that, but a few
profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the
times?—Goethe, Hegel, Metternich, Adams, Calhoun, Guizot, Peel, Cobden,
Kossuth, Rothschild, Astor, Brunel, and the rest. The same fitness must be
presumed between a man and the time and event, as between the sexes, or
between a race of animals and the food it eats, or the inferior races it
uses. He thinks his fate alien, because the copula is hidden. But the soul
contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the
actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves for is always
granted. The event is the print of your form. It fits you like your skin.
What each does is proper to him. Events are the children of his body and
mind. We learn that the soul of Fate is the soul of us, as Hafiz sings—
Alas! till now I had not known,
My guide and fortune’s guide are one.
All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play for,—houses, land,
money, luxury, power, fame,—are the self-same thing, with a new gauze or
two of illusion overlaid. And of all the drums and rattles by which men
are made willing to have their heads broke, and are led out solemnly every
morning to parade, the most admirable is this by which we are brought to
believe that events are arbitrary, and independent of actions. At the
conjurer’s we detect the hair by which he moves his puppet, but we have
not eyes sharp enough to descry the thread that ties cause and effect.
Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit
of his character. Ducks take to the water, eagles to the sky, waders to
the sea margin, hunters to the forest, clerks to counting-rooms, soldiers
to the frontier. Thus events grow on the same stem with persons; are
sub-persons. The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it,
and not according to the work or the place. Life is an ecstasy. We know
what madness belongs to love—what power to paint a vile object in hues of
heaven. As insane persons are indifferent to their dress, diet, and other
accommodations, and, as we do in dreams, with equanimity, the most absurd
acts, so, a drop more of wine in our cup of life will reconcile us to
strange company and work. Each creature puts forth from itself its own
condition and sphere, as the slug sweats out its slimy house on the
pear-leaf, and the woolly aphides on the apple perspire their own bed, and
the fish its shell. In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as
brave as the zodiac. In age, we put out another sort of
perspiration—gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and
avarice.
A man’s fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man’s friends are his
magnetisms. We go to Herodotus and Plutarch for examples of Fate; but we
are examples. “Quisque suos patimur manes.” The tendency of every man to
enact all that is in his constitution is expressed in the old belief, that
the efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us
into it; and I have noticed, a man likes better to be complimented on his
position, as the proof of the last or total excellence, than on his
merits.
A man will see his character emitted in the events that seem to meet, but
which exude from and accompany him. Events expand with the character. As
once he found himself among toys, so now he plays a part in colossal
systems, and his growth is declared in his ambition, his companions, and
his performance. He looks like a piece of luck, but is a piece of
causation—the mosaic, angulated and ground to fit into the gap he fills.
Hence in each town there is some man who is, in his brain and performance,
an explanation of the tillage, production, factories, banks, churches,
ways of living, and society, of that town. If you do not chance to meet
him, all that you see will leave you a little puzzled: if you see him, it
will become plain. We know in Massachusetts who built New Bedford, who
built Lynn, Lowell, Lawrence, Clinton, Fitchburg, Holyoke, Portland, and
many another noisy mart. Each of these men, if they were transparent,
would seem to you not so much men, as walking cities, and, wherever you
put them, they would build one.
History is the action and reaction of these two,—Nature and Thought,—two
boys pushing each other on the curbstone of the pavement. Everything is
pusher or pushed: and matter and mind are in perpetual tilt and balance
so. Whilst the man is weak, the earth takes him up. He plants his brain
and affections. By-and-by he will take up the earth, and have his gardens
and vineyards in the beautiful order and productiveness of his thought.
Every solid in the universe is ready to become fluid on the approach of
the mind, and the power to flux it is the measure of the mind. If the wall
remain adamant, it accuses the want of thought. To a subtler force, it
will stream into new forms, expressive of the character of the mind.
What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous
materials, which have obeyed the will of some man? The granite was
reluctant, but his hands were stronger, and it came. Iron was deep in the
ground, and well combined with stone, but could not hide from his fires.
Wood, lime, stuffs, fruits, gums, were dispersed over the earth and sea,
in vain. Here they are, within the reach of every man’s day-labor—what he
wants of them.
The whole world is the flux of matter over the wires of thought to the
poles or points where it would build. The races of men rise out of the
ground preoccupied with a thought which rules them, and divided into
parties ready armed and angry to fight for this metaphysical abstraction.
The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the
Austrian and the American. The men who come on the stage at one period are
all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air. We
are all impressionable, for we are made of them; all impressionable, but
some more than others, and these first express them. This explains the
curious contemporaneousness of inventions and discoveries. The truth is in
the air, and the most impressionable brain will announce it first, but all
will announce it a few minutes later. So women, as most susceptible, are
the best index of the coming hour. So the great man, that is, the man most
imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man—of a fibre
irritable and delicate, like iodine to light. He feels the infinitesimal
attractions. His mind is righter than others, because he yields to a
current so feeble as can be felt only by a needle delicately poised.
The correlation is shown in defects. Möller, in his “Essay on
Architecture,” taught that the building which was fitted accurately to
answer its end would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not been
intended. I find the like unity in human structures rather virulent and
pervasive: that a crudity in the blood will appear in the argument; a hump
in the shoulder will appear in the speech and handiwork. If his mind could
be seen, the hump would be seen. If a man has a seesaw in his voice, it
will run into his sentences, into his poem, into the structure of his
fable, into his speculation, into his charity. And, as every man is hunted
by his own dæmon, vexed by his own disease, this checks all his activity.
So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A strong, astringent,
bilious nature, has more truculent enemies than the slugs and moths that
fret my leaves. Such an one has curculios, borers, knife-worms: a swindler
ate him first, then a client, then a quack, then a smooth, plausible
gentleman, bitter and selfish as Moloch.
This correlation really existing can be divined. If the threads are there,
thought can follow and show them. Especially when a soul is quick and
docile; as Chaucer sings,—
Or if the soul of proper kind
Be so perfect as men find,
That it wot what is to come,
And that he warneth all and some,
Of every of their aventures,
By previsions or figures;
But that our flesh hath not might
It to understand aright,
For it is warned too darkly.
Some people are made up of rhyme, coincidence, omen, periodicity, and
presage: they meet the person they seek: what their companion prepares to
say to them, they first say to him; and a hundred signs apprise them of
what is about to befall.
Wonderful intricacy in the web, wonderful constancy in the design, this
vagabond life admits. We wonder how the fly finds its mate, and yet year
after year we find two men, two women, without legal or carnal tie, spend
a great part of their best time within a few feet of each other. And the
moral is, that what we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from
us; as Goethe said, “what we wish for in youth, comes in heaps on us in
old age,” too often cursed with the granting of our prayer; and hence the
high caution, that, since we are sure of having what we wish, we beware to
ask only for high things.
One key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one solution to
the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists, the
propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. A man must ride
alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature, as the
equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or
plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the
other. So when a man is the victim of his fate, has sciatica in his loins,
and cramp in his mind; a club-foot and a club in his wit; a sour face, and
a selfish temper; a strut in his gait, and a conceit in his affection; or
is ground to powder by the vice of his race; he is to rally on his
relation to the universe which his ruin benefits. Leaving the dæmon who
suffers, he is to take sides with the Deity who secures universal benefit
by his pain.
To offset the drag of temperament and race, which pulls down, learn this
lesson—namely, that by the cunning co-presence of two elements, which is
throughout nature, whatever lames or paralyzes you draws in with it the
divinity, in some form, to repay. A good intention clothes itself with
sudden power. When a god wishes to ride, any chip or pebble will bud and
shoot out winged feet, and serve him for a horse.
Let us build altars to the Blessed Unity which holds nature and souls in
perfect solution, and compels every atom to serve an universal end. I do
not wonder at a snow-flake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of
the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies;
that all is and must be pictorial; that the rainbow, and the curve of the
horizon, and the arch of the blue vault, are only results from the
organism of the eye. There is no need for foolish amateurs to fetch me to
admire a garden of flowers, or a sun-gilt cloud, or a waterfall, when I
cannot look without seeing splendor and grace. How idle to choose a random
sparkle here or there, when the indwelling necessity plants the rose of
beauty on the brow of chaos, and discloses the central intention of nature
to be harmony and joy.
Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity. If we thought men were
free in the sense that in a single exception one fantastical will could
prevail over the law of things, it were all one as if a child’s hand could
pull down the sun. If, in the least particular, one could derange the
order of nature—who would accept the gift of life?
Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all is
made of one piece; that plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animal
and planet, food and eater, are of one kind. In astronomy is vast space,
but no foreign system; in geology, vast time, but the same laws as to-day.
Why should we be afraid of nature, which is no other than “philosophy and
theology embodied”? Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements,
we who are made up of the same elements? Let us build to the Beautiful
Necessity, which makes man brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger
that is appointed, nor incur one that is not; to the Necessity which
rudely or softly educates him to the perception that there are no
contingencies; that Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not
intelligent but intelligence,—not personal nor impersonal,—it disdains
words and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it vivifies nature,
yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnipotence.
