COR! -E' T PS 1600.E83"' ""'""""' """"' V.I iiMtniulmuil!!? complete works. 3 1924 022 032 639 OLIN LIBRARY, - CIRCULATION DATE DUE AUfr-^ m^M^ k *U!!r^ ^^§^^^ KliWn 1" '•j^dMi^l^g^ j(i»-^«^* j«^) i^mm -u CAYLORD ^niNTCOINU.S.A. Cornell University Library The original of tinis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022032639 Date Due SJ\&,|,fj«f NATURE, ADDRESSES, AND LECTURES RALPH WALDO EMERSON jaeto ana Hebitifli ©Irtturn BOSTON HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY New York : 11 East Seventeenth Street i€fie Hioetgiie jJtei^, CamBribge 189s (^ A- 1 o'j^s'S' Copyright, 1855 and 1876, By PHILLIPS, SAMPSON & CO. ahd RALPH WALDO EMERSON. CopyrigM, 1883, Br EDWARD W. EMERSON. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass,, XT. S. A, Eleetrotyped and Printed by H. O. Hougliton & Company. : ,i:iii )l l) J ! i C VI ■ ■ ; V 1 14 Iff Y vw^n^i'i J PREFATORY NOTE. The first eight volumes of the present edition of Mr. Emerson's writings contain his collected Es- says as he left them, except son\e revision of the punctuation and the correction of obvious mistakes. The ninth volume comprises the pieces chosen by Mr. Emerson from the " Poems " and " May-Day " to form the " Selected Poems," with the addi- tion of some poems which were omitted in that se- lection, and some that have remained unpublished. In many instances emendations which were pen- cilled in the margin by Mr. Emerson, but were not adopted in the " Selected Poems," are now in- troduced, upon the ground that, as they seem to have suggested themselves at the time when his powers were in their fullest vigor, it may fairly be supposed that he would, upon reconsideration, have admitted them. The tenth and eleventh vol- umes consist of lectures hitherto unprinted, and of " Occasional Addresses " and other prose-writings which have appeared separately or in periodicals. The selection from Mr. Emerson's MSS. has IV PREFATORY NOTE. been made in pursuance of the authority given in his will to me, as his literary executor, acting in co-operation with his children, to publish or with- hold from publication any of his impublished pa- pers. The portrait in the first volume was etche4 by Mr. SchofE from a photographic copy (kindly fur- nished by Mr. Alexander Ireland, of Manchester, England) of a daguerreotype taken in 1847 or 1848, probably in England. J. E. CABOT. CONTENTS. PAGE Nattjee .13 . The American Scholak. An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, Aug. 31, 1837 81 - An Address delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838 117 LiTEEAKT Ethics. An Oration delivered before the Liter- ary Societies of Dartmouth College, July 24, 1 838 . . 149 The Method op Nature. An Oration delivered before , ae, the Society of the Adelphi, ia Waterville College, Maine, ^ August II, 1841 181 Man the Eeformee. A Lecture read before the Mechan- ics' Apprentices' Library Association, Boston, January 25, 1841 215 Lectdre on the Times. Bead at the Masonic Temple, Boston, December 2, 1841 245 The Conservative. A Lecture read in the Masonic Tem- ple, Boston, December 9, 1841 277 The Transcendentalist. A Lecture read in the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842 309 The Young American. A Lecture read before the Mer- cantile Library Association, in Boston, February 7, 1844 . 341 NATUEE. A SUBTLE chain of countless rings The next unto the farthest brings ; The eye reads omens where it goes, And speaks all languages the rose ; And, striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form. INTKODUCTION. OuR^jge is retrospective. It builds the sepul- dhies of the fathers. It writes biographies, histo- ries, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face ; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of iggjght and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs ? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the pow- ers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe ? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our ownworks and laws and wor- ship. Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection 10 INTRODUCTION. of the creation so far as to believe that whatever Curiosity the order of things has awakened in our Vinds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, de- scribing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition that shines so peacefully aroimd us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature ? All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of func- tions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain aU phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inex- plicable ; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex. Philosophically considered, the universe is com- posed of Nat ure and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the not me, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own INTRODUCTION. 11 body, must be ranked under this name, Nature. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word in both senses ; — in its common and in its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccu- racy is not material ; no confusion of thought will /Occur. Nature, in the common sense, refers to es«^ sences imchanged by man ; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will yiiih. the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result. NATUKE. CHAPTER I. To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from Ms chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. [But if a man would be alone, let Mm look at the stars.J The rays that come from those heavenly worlds wiU separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with tMs design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are ! Jf the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore ; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God wMch had been shown ! i But every night come out these envoys of beatffy, and light the universe with their admonishing smile. CThe stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but •■all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never 14 NATURE. wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wis- est man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never be- came a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the ani- mals, the moimtains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood. When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but mostjpoetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objectsT,' It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. uEhere js a 'property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet, f This is the best part of these men's farms, yet tolhis their warranty-deeds give no title. \To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly ad- justed to each other ; who has retained the spirit ' ''' NATURE. 15 of infancy even into the era of manhood. His in- tercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature a wild de- light runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the simjjr the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every ^ hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, ia snow puddles, at twi- ^ light, under a clouded sky, without having in myi. thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the - woocU Jis . j)ergetual_yQiith. Withia these planta^ tions of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a per- ennial festival is dressed, and the guest see s no t how he should tire of them in a thousand yearsAjn the woods, we r eturn to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no dis- grace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repaii^j Standing on the bare groimd. 16 NATURE. — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — aUmean egotismvanishes. il become a transparent eye-baU ; I am nothing; I see all ; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me ; I am part_or_garcel of God. / The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental : to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his o^n nature. 'The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the sugggation^f^anoccult relation be- twgen inanand^hejegetable. I "am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. ' Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same NATURE. 17 scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glit- tered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy to-day. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit . To a marTIaboring under ca- lamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population. y CHAPTER n. COMMODITY. Whoever considers tlie final cause of the world will discern a multitude of uses that enter as parts into that result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes : Commodity ; Beauty ; Language ; and Discipline. jlJnder the general name of commodity, I rank aU those advantages which our senses owe to na- ture. This, of course, is a benefit which is tempo- rary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul. Yet although low, it is perfect in its kind, and is the only use of nature which all men appre- hend. The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through the heavens. What angels invented these splendid ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this ocean of water beneath, this firma- ment of earth between? this zodiac of lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of cli- mates, this fourfold year? Beasts, fire, water, COMMODITY. 19 stones, and corn serve him. The field is at once his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, and his bed. I " More servants wait on man 1 Than he '11 take notice of." J^ Lbfature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. AU the__paEt§„ incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed ; the sun evaporates the sea ; the wind blows the vapor to the field ; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this ; the rain feeds the plant ; the plant feeds the animal ; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nour- ish man. rT?he useful arts are reproductions or new com- bmations by the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors. I He no longer waits for favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of uEolus's , bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish frie^ tion, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mount- ing a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, Hke an eagle or a swaUow through the air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon ! The 20 COMMODITY. private poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the post-office, and the hmnan race run on his errands ; to the book-shop, and the human race read and write of all that hap- pens, for him ; to the court-house, and nations re- pair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, and cut a path for him. But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class of uses. The catalogue is endless, and the examples so obvious, that I shall leave them to the reader's reflection, with the general remark, that this mercenary benefit is one which has re- spect to a farther good. A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work. CHAPTER III. BEAUTY. NOBLER want of man is served by naturef namely, the love of Beauty, j The ancient Greeks called the world koV/hos, beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight ' in and for them- selves ; a pleasure arising from outline, color, mo- tion, and grouping;/ This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual action of its structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, into a weU colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compdse is round and sym- metrical. And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters.- There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and 22 BEAUTY. time, make aU matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this general grace diffused over nature, almost aU the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, searsheUs, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm. For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of Beauty in a threefold manner. l.<, First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight.^ The influence of the forms and ac- tions in nature is so needful to man, that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of commodity and beauty. To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eter- nal cahn, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough. But in other hours. Nature satisfies by its loveli- ness, and without any mixture of corporeal benefit. I see the spectacle of morning from the hiU-top BEAUTY. 23 over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out Jnto that silent . aea._. I-seem to partake its^ rapid transformations ; the active enchantment reaches my dust, ani I dilate and conspire with the__morning_^iod. How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements ! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of empe- rors ridicidous. T^be dawn is my Assyria ; the sun- set and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable ) realms of faerie ; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night s hall b e my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams. | Not less excellent, except for our less suscep- tibility in the afternoon, was the charm, last even- ing, of a January sunset. The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints of unspeakable softness, and the air had so much life and sweetness that it was a pain to come within doors. What was it that nature would say ? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind the mfll, and which Homer or Shakspeare could not re-form for me in words ? The leafless trees become spires of flame in the sunset, with the blue east for their back- 24 BEAUTY. ground, and the stars of the dead callces of flow- ers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost, contribute something to the mute mu- sic. The inhabitants of cities suppose that the coun- try landscape is pleasant only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the winter scen- ery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial influences of summer. To the at- tentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. The hea vens change^ every moment, and reflect their ^lory or gloom on the plains beneath. The state of the crop ia the surrounding farms alters the expression of the earth from week to week. The succession of native plants in the pastures and roadsides, which makes the silent clock by which time tells the smnmer hours, wUl make even the divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer. The tribes of birds and insects, like the plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and the year has room for aU. By watercourses, the variety is greater. In July, the blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow parts of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies 'in con- tinual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of pur- BEAUTY. 25 pie and gold. Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament. (TBut this heauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, or- chards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, be- come shows merely, and mock us with their unreal- ity.^ Go^out of the house to see^the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it_wiU not please as when its light sMneuigon_20ur ngcessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it ? Go forth to find it, and it is gone ; -'t is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence. <^ 2> The presence of a higher, namely, of the spirit- ual "Blement is essential toJia, perfection. The high and divine beauty which can be loved without ef- feminacy, is that which is found in combination with the human wUl. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine^ We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational creature has aU nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he wiU. He may divest himself of it ; he may creep into a comer, and abdicate his kingdom, as 26 BEAUTY. most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and will, he takes up the world into him- self. " All those things for which men plough, build, or sail, obey virtue ; " said Sallust. " The winds and waves," said Gibbon, "are always on the side of the ablest navigators." So are the sun and moon and all the stars of heaven. When a noble act is done, — perchance in a scene of great natural beauty ; when Leonidas and his three hun- dred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at them once ia the steep defile of Thermopylae ; when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Aus- trian spears to break the line for his comrades ; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed ? When the bark of Columbus nears the shore of America ; — before it, the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of aU their huts of cane ; the sea behind ; and the purple mountains of the Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the living picture ? Does not the New World clothe his form with her palm -groves and savannahs as fit dra- pery? Ever does natural beauty_ steal ia like air, and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry Vane was dragged up the Tower-hiU, sitting on BEAUTY. 27 a sled, to suffer death as the champion of the Eng- lish laws, one of the multitude cried out to him, " You never sate on so glorious a seat ! " Charles II., to intimidate the citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Eussell to be drawn in an open coach through the principal streets of the city on his way to the scaffold. " But," his biographer says, "the multitude imagi ned j fliey saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side.X \In private places, among sordid objects, an act (if""truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its tem- ple, the sun as its candle. Nature stretches out her arms to emb:Eace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness»/ /Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his_Jthou^hts_be of equal scope,^and the^frame will suitJhejiiQture. A virtuous man is in unison with her works, and ma.kes the central figure of the visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate them- selves fitly in OUT memory with the geography and climate of Greece. The visible heavens and earth sympathize with Jesus. And in common life whoso- ever has seen a person of powerful character and happy genius, will have remarked how easily he took aU things along with him, — the persons, the opinions, and the day, and nature became ancillary to a man. 28 BEAUTY. / 3. There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world may be viewed, namely, as it becomes an object of the intellect. Beside the re- lation of things to virtue, they have a relation to though4_ The ■ intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in the miud of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of the one generates the exclusive activity of the other./ There is something imfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and worldng in animals; each prepares and will be followed by the other. Therefore does beauty, which, in re- lation to actions, as we have seen, comes unsought, and comes because it is unsought, remain for the apprehension and pursuit of the intellect ; and then again, in its turn, of the active power. Nothing divine dies All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty"of nature re-forms itself iu the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new cre- ation. \ r 1. VVords are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history ; the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material ap- pearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; trans- gression, the crossing of a line ; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to ex- press emotion, the head to denote thought ; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual 32 LANGUAGE. nature. Most of the process by whicli this trans- formation is made, is hidden from us in the re- mote time when language was framed ; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts. ", 2. But this origin of aU words that convey a spiritual import, — so conspicuous a fact in the hiss.^- tory of language, — is our least debt to nature, ^t is not words only that are emblematic ; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. ,' Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind,\ and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its pic- ture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite ; flowers express to us the delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and ignorance ; and heat for love. Visi- ble distance behind and before us, is respectively our image of memory and hope. Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things ? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all LANGUAGE. 33 influence. \Man is conscious j)f ajjniversal soul within _or behind his , indiyicjTjal life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Jjigtice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and jiJiioe. {This universal soul he calls Eeason : it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its ; we are its property and men. /And the blue sky in which the private eartlris "buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlast- ing orbs, is the type of EeasonlT That which intel- lectually considered we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call SpiritTtX Spirit is the Creator. Spirit J]|ith_Ii^_^in_itseffi And man in aU ages and countries embodies it in his language^ as the Father. . ""^ It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these analogies, but that they are constant, and pervade nature. These are not the ' dreams of a few poets, here and there, but'fman is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. 4 He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. Aqd neither canjnaji_be_undeist©©d-srithout these I objeets^nor these objecte wTjthout-jnan.N All the? » facts in natural history taken by themselves, have "^ no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life. Whole floras, all Linnaeus' and Buffon's volumes, are dry catalogues of facts ; but the most trivial of 34 LANGUAGE. these facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, oi work, or noise of an insect, applied to the illustrar tion of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or in any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most lively and agreeable manner. The seed of a plant, — to what aff ectiag analogies in the nature of man is that little fruit made use of, in aU dis- course, up to the voice of Paul, who calls the hu- man corpse a seed, — "It is sown a natural body ; it is raised a spiritual body." The motion of the earth round its axis and round the sun, makes the day and the year. These are certain amounts of brute light and heat. But is there no latent of an analogy between man's life and the seasons? And do the seasons gain no grandeur or pathos from that analogy ? The instincts of the ant are very unimportant considered as the ant's ; but the mo- ment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then aU its hab- its, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime. j<^ Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures. \ As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry ; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural LANGUAGE. 35 symbols/' The same symbols are found to make the original elements of all languages. It has moreover been observed, that the idioms of aU languages approach each other in passages of the greatest eloquence and power. Andr as this is the first language, so is it the last, i This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conver- sion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish! ' (^ XA. man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth and his desire to cormnunicate it without loss^ The corruption of man is followed by the cor- ruption of language./ When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, — and duplic- ity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will is in a degree lost ; new imagery ceases to be cre- ated, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not ; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time the fraud is manifest, and words lose aU power to stim- 36 LANGUAGE. ulate the understanding or tlie affections. Him- dreds of writers may be found in every long-civUized nation who for a short time believe and make others believe that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural gar- ment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the jjoiintry, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. : But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things ; so that pictur- esque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God. <('The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts and is ia- flamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image more or less luminous arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. I Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are jierpetual alle- gories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation.\ It is the work- ing of the Original Cause through the instruments he has already made. ', ^These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses, for a powerful mind, over the LANGUAGE. 37 artificial and curtailed life of cities^ We know more from nature-than we can at will communicate. Its light flowsWto the mind evermore, and we for- get its presence. 'The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, with- out design and without heed, — shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitation and terror in national councils, — in the hour of revolu- tion, — these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river roUs and shines, , \ and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw lo^b '^ and heard them in his infancy. And with these o^^^ forms, the speUs of persuasion, the keys of power —n<^ are put into his hands. 3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations ! Did it need such noble races of creatures, this pro- fusion of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to fur- nish man with the dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech ?/ Whilst we use this grand cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel that we have not yet put it to its use, neither are < 38 LANGUAGE. able. We are like travellers using tlie cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. \Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question whether the charac- ters are not significant of themselves. Have moun- tains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them wh^we employ them as emblems of our thoughts ? i The world is emblem- atic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of na ture is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of mat- ter as face to face in a glass,;/" The visible world and the relation of its parts,- is the dial plate of the invisible." The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, " the whole is greater than its part ; " " reaction is equal to action ; " " the small- est weight may be made to lift the greatest, the dif- ference of weight being compensated by time ; " and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and imiversal sense when ap- plied to human life, than when confined to techni- cal use. In like manner, the memorable words of history and the proverbs of nations consist usually of a natural fact, selected as a picture or parable of a moral truth. Thus ; A rolling stone gathers no moss ; A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; LANGUAGE. 39 A cripple in the right way will beat a racer in the . wrong ; Make hay while the svm shines ; 'T is hard to carry a full cup even ; Vinegar is the son of wine ; The last ounce hroke the camel's back ; Long-lived trees make roots first; — and the Uke. In their primary sense these are trivial facts, but we repeat them for the value of their analogical import. What is true, of proverbs, is true of all fables, parables, and allegories. This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. It appears to men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate hours we ponder this miracle, the wise man doubts if at all other times he is not blind and deaf; / " Can these things be, / And overcome us like a summer's cloud, Without our special wonder ? " for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than its own shines through it. It is the standing problem which has exercised the won- der and the study of every fine genius since the world began ; from the era of the Egyptians an the Brahmins to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, o: Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at read- 40 LANGUAGE. ing her rid(31e. ■, There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms;, and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of pre- ceding affections in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisi- ble world, r ^'Material objects," said a French philosopher-, " are necessarily kinds of scorice of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin ; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side." This doctrine is abstruse, and though the im- ages of " garment," " scorise," " mirror," &c., may stimulate the fancy, we must summon the aid of subtler and more vital expositors to make it plain. " Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth," — is the fundamental law of criticism. / A life in harmony with Nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent ob- jects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause. \ A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the LANGUAGE. 41 view now suggested, we contemplate the fearful extent and multitude of objects ; since " every ob- ject rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul." That which was unconscious truth, becomes, when interpreted and defined in an object, a part of the domain of knowledge, — a new weapon in the mag- azine of power. CHAPTER V. t ' DISCIPLINE. In view of the significance of nature, we arrive at once at a new fact, that nature is a discipline. This use of the world includes the preceding uses, as parts of itself. Space, tune, society, labor, climate, food, locomo- tion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is un- limited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding, — its solidity or re- sistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its di- visibility. The understanding adds, divides, com- bines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Rear son transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind. 1. Nature is a discipline of the under standing, in intellectual truths. fOur dealing with sensible ob- j ects is a constant exercise in the necessary lessons of_^iffereiice^ of likeness, of order, of being and DISCIPLINE. 43 s eeming', of ^prog ressive arrangem ent; of_ ascent from particular to general ; of combination to one end of manif old_f grcesn Proportioned to the impor- tance of the organ to be formed, is the extreme care with which its tuition is provided, — a care preter- mitted in no single case. What tedious traioing, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form the common sense ; what continual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas ; what rejoic- ing over us of little men ; what disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest, — and aU to form the Hand of the mind ; — to instruct us that " good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed! " \ The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems of debt and credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the or- phan, and the sons of genius fear and hate ; — debt, which consumes so much time, which so crip- ples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be forgone, and is needed most by those who suf- fer from it most. Moreover, property, which has been well compared to snow, — "if it fall level to- day, it wiU be blown into drifts to-morrow," — is the surface action of internal machinery, like the index on the face of a clock. Whilst now it is the gymnastics of the understanding, it is hiving, in 44 DISCIPLINE. the foresight of the spirit, experience in profounder laws. The whole character and fortune of the individ- ual are affected by the least inequalities in the culture of the understanding ; for example, in the perception of differences. Therefo re is Space, and t^eisf ore. Time, that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and iBjdi^ddual. A bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear ; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in separsr tion, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. What is not good they caU the worst, and what is not hateful, they call the best. In like manner, what good heed Nature forms in us ! She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay. The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zo- ology (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take), teach that Nature's dice are always loaded ; that in her heaps and rub- bish are concealed sure and useful results. How_calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the laws of physics ! What DISCIPLINE. 45 n oble emoti ons dilate the mortal as he enters into the comisels of the creation, and feels by knowl- edgejthe privilege to Be ! His insight refines him. The beauty of nature shines in his own breast. Man_is greater that he can see this, and the uni- ' 'verse less, because Time and Space relations vanish as laws are known. Here again we are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to be- explored. " What we know is a point to what we do not know." Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning Light, Heat, Elec- tricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted. Passing by many particulars of the discipline of nature, we must not omit to specify two. The exercise of the Will, or the lesson of power, is taught in every event. From the child's succes- sive possession of his several senses up to the horn- when he saith, " Thy wiU be done ! " he is learn- ing the secret that he can reduce under his wUl, not only particular events but great classes, nay, the whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character. Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to sgrxfii , It receiiesJhe jdominion of man as meekly as the ass^on which the Saviour r^de. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the 46 DISCIPLINE. raw material wMcli he may mould into what is use- ful. Man is never weary of working it up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command. One after another his / victorious^ thought comes up with and reduces all / things, until the world becomes at last only a real- ized wiU, ^jthe^doublaxiLthe-man. 2. Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect the conscience. All things are moral ; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. I Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion; that every globe in' the remotest heaven, every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life, every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine, every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandmenfe. There- fore is Nature ever the ally of Religioni^-lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This ethical char- acter so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the end for which it was made. What- ever private purpose is answered by any member DISCIPLINE. 47 or part, this is its public and universal function, and is never omitted. Nothing in nature is ex- hausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the-«ttenp^ost, it is whoUy new for an ulterior service. In God, every end is converted into a new m4ans. Thus the use of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the mind an education in the doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good only so far as it serves ^ that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the pro- duction of an end is essential to any being?'°'"^e first and gross manifestation of this truth is our inevitable and hated training in values and wants, iE^orn and meat. , ilt, has already been illustrated, that every nat- ural process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every pro- cess, "j^ things with which we deal, preach to us. W£ at is a farm ^but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, in- sects, sun, — it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. But the saUor,. the shepherd, the miner, the merchant, in their several resorts, have each an experience precisely parallel, and leading to the same conclusion : be- 48 DISCIPLINE. cause all organizations are radieally, alike. Nor can it be doubted that this moral sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and impreg- nates the waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him. Who can esti- mate this? Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman ? how much tranquillity has been reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no wrinkle or stain? how much indus- try and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes ? What a searching preacher of self-command is the Varying phenome- i' ' non of Health ! ' Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature, — the unity in variety, — which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things make an identical impression^/ Xenophanes com- plained in his old age, j;hat;7look where he would, aU things hastened back to Unity. He was weary of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety of forms. The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is re- lated to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world. DISCIPLINE. 49 Not only resemblances exist in things whose an- alogy is obvious, as when we detect th e type of the hiinianjtiamd^in^the flipper of the fossil saurus, but also in objdCra wherein there is great superficial unlikeness. Thus architecture is c^Eed " frozen music," by x)& Stael and Goethe. ! Vitriraas thought an architect should be a musician. [/^A Grothi£ ehur(jk," said Coleridge, "is a petrified re- ligion." 1 Il^ichael Angelo maintained, that, to an architect, a Knowledge of anatomy is essential\)ln Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the "imagi- nation not only motions, as of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also ; as the green grass. ^X^e law of harmonic sounds reappears in the harmonic colors. The granite is differenced in its laws only by the more or less of heat from the river that wears it away. The river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it ; the air resem- bles the light which traverses it with more subtile currents ; the light resembles the heat which rides with it through Space. Each creature is only a modification of the other ; the likeness in them is more than the difEerence, and their radical law is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this _Unity., that, it is- easily seen, it liesjinder the undermost garment of .nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For it per- 50 DI&CIPLINE. vades Thought also. Every universal truth which we express jn words;- implies or supposes every other truth] Omne verum vero consona}. It is like a great circle on a sphere, comprising all pos- sible circles ; which, howeverf-;piay he drawn and comprise it in like manner. \Sisesj such truth is the absolute Ens_ seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides. \ I The central TJnity is still more conspicuous in '""actions. Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it. An actim^ is the perfection and publication of thought, p. right action seems |tO fill the eye, and to be related to aU nature. '*,The wise man, in doing one thing, does all ; or, in the one thing he does rightly, he sees the likeness of all which is done rightly." \ Words Saa actions are not the attributes of brute nature. They introduce us to the human form, of which all other organizations appear to be degradations. When this appears among so many that surround it, the spirit prefers it to all others. It says, " From such as this have I drawn joy and knowledge ; in such as this have I found and beheld myself ; I will speak to it ; it can speak again ; it can yield me thought already formed and alive." In fact, the eye, — the mind, — is always DISCIPLINE. 61 accompanied by these forms, male and female ; and these are incomparably the richest informations of the power and order that lie at the heart of things. Unfortunately every one of them bears the marks as of some injury ; is marred and superficially de- fective. Nevertheless, far different from the deaf and dumb nature around them, these aU rest like fountain-pipes on the unfathomed sea of thought and3'irtue whereto they alone, of all organizations, are the entrances. \J[t were a pleasant inquiry to follow into detail their ministry to our education, but where would it stop ? We are associated in adolescent and adult life with some friends, who, like skies and waters, are coextensive with our idea ; who, answering each to a certain affection of the soul, satisfy our desire on that side ; whom we lack power to put at such focal distance from us, that we can mend or even analyze them. We cannot choose but love them. When much intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a standard of excellence, and has increased our respect for the resources of God who thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal; when he has, moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst his character retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in the mind into solid and sweet wisdom, — it is a sign to us that his office is clos- ing, and he is commonlj withdrawn from our sight in a short tinte. CHAPTEE VI. IDEALISM. . Thus is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable meaning of the world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil, in every object of sense. To this one end of Discipline, all parts of nature con- spire. ■ A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, — whether this end be not the Final Cause of the Universe ; and whether nature outwardly exists. It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World, that God wiU teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of con- gruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the same, what is the difference, whether land and sea inter- IDEALISM. 53 act, and worlds revolve and intermingle without numlber or end, — deep yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, tkroughout absolute space, — or whether, without relations of time and space, the same appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man? Whether nature en- joy a substantial existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses. The frivolous make themselves merry with the Ideal theory, as if its consequences were burlesque ; as if it affected the stability of nature. It surely does not. God never jests with us, and will not compromise the end of nature by permitting any inconsequence in its procession. Any distrust of the permanence of laws would paralyze the facul- ties of man. Their permanence is sacredly re- spected, and his faith therein is perfect. "Jhe wheela_ajid._springs of . man are aU set to the hy- pothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of this struc- ture, that so long as the active powers predominate over the reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature is more short-lived or mutable than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the car- 54 IDEALISM. penter, the tollman, are much displeased at the in. timation. But whUst we acquiesce entirely in the perma^ nence of natural laws, the question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith iu the stability of particular phe-' nomena, as of heat, water, azote ; but to lead us to regard nature as phenomenon, not a substance ; to attribute necessary existence to spirit j to esteem nature as an accident and an effect. To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they never look beyond their sphere. The pres- ence of Reason mars this faith. The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher agency intervened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outliaes and colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added grace and expression. These proceed from imagi- nation and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimidated to more earnest vision, outlines and sur. IDEALISM. 55 faces become transparent, and are no longer seen ; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdraw- ing of nature before its God. Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 1. Our first institution in the Ideal philosophy is a hint from Nature herself. Nature is made to conspire with spirit to eman- cipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small al- teration in our local position, apprizes us of a dual- ism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the women, — talkT ing, running, bartering, fighting, — the earnest me- chanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized at once, or, at least, wholly detached from "all relation to the observer, and seen as ap- parent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of cormtry quite far miliar, in the rapid movement of the railroad car ! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make a very slight change in the point of vision,) please us most. In a camera obscura, the butcher's cart, and the figure 56 IDEALISM. of one of our own family amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years ! In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between the observer and the specta- cle, — between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe ; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt, from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprized that whilst the world is a spectadej^somethmg^in himself is stable. 2. In a higher manner the poet communicates the same pleasure. By a few strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we know them, but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his pri- mary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion, he uses matter as sym- bols of it. The sensual man conforms thoughts to things ; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast ; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexi- ble ; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the Reason. . The Imagi- IDEALISM. 67 nation may be defined to be the use which the Rea^ son makes ofthe niaterkl world. Shakspeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond aE poets. His im- perial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remo- test spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by a sub- tile spiritual connection. We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and aU ob- jects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers he finds to be the shadow of his beloved ; time, which keeps her from him, is his chest ; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament; The ornament of beauty is Suspect, A crow which flies in heaven's sweetest air. His passion is not the fridt of chance; it swells, as he speaks, to a city, or a state. No, it was builded far from accident; It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls Under the brow of thralling discontent; It fears not policy, that heretic, That works on leases of short numbered hours, But all alone stands hugely politic. In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids 58 IDEALISM. seem to Mm recent and transitory. The freshness of youth and love dazzles him with its resemblance to morning ; Tate those lips away Which so sweetly were forsworn; And those eyes, — the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn. The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say in passing, it would not be easy to match in literature. This transfiguration which all material objects undergo through the passion of the poet, — this power which he exerts to dwarf the great, to mag- nify the small, — might be illustrated by a thousand examples from his Plays. I have before me the Tempest, and will cite only these few liaes. Akiei,. The strong based promontory Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up The pine and cedar. Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, and his companions ; A solemn air, and the best comforter To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains Now useless, boUed within thy skull. Again ; The charm dissolves apace, And, as the morning steals upon the night, Melting the darkness, so their rising senses IDEALISM. 59 Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle Their clearer reason. Their understanding Begins to swell: and the approaching tide Will shortly fill the reasonable shores That now lie foul and muddy. The perception of real affinities between events (thatjsjosay, of {^eoTafiinities, for those only are real), enables the poet thus to make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and to assert the predominance of the soul. 3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end ; the other Truth. But the philosopher, not . less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of things to the empire of thought. " The problem of philosophy," according to Plato, "is, for aU that exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and absolute." It proceeds on the faith that a law determines all phenomena, which being known, the phenomena can be predicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty is infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles ? It 60 IDEALISM. is, in both cases, ttat a spiritual life has been im- parted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought ; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognized itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous cata- logues of particulars, and carries centuries of obser- vation in a single formula. Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual. The astronomer, the geom- eter, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and dis- dain the results of observation. The sublime re- mark of Euler on his law of arches, " This will be found contrary to all experience, yet is true ; " had already transferred nature iato the mind, and left matter like an outcast corpse. 4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of the existence of matter. Tur- got said, " He that has never doubted the existence of matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries." It fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas ; and in their presence we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream and a shade. "Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature as an appendix to the soul. We ascend IDEALISM. 61 into theix region, and know that these are "the thoughts of the Supreme Being. " These are they who were set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When he pre- pared the heavens, they were there ; when he es- tablished the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep. Then they were by him, as one brought up with him. Of them took he coun- sel." Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science they are accessible to few men. Yet aU men are capable of being raised by piety or by pas- sion, into their region. And no man ioufihes these divine natures, withput_becomiag,- in some degree, himself divine. Like a new soul, they renew the body. We become phj^ically nimble and light- some ; we tread on air ; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the ab- solute and the conditional or relative. We appre- hend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We^become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter ; that with a percep- tion of truth or a virtuous will they have no affinity. 5. Finally, religion and ethics, which may be 62 IDEALISM. fitly called the practice of ideas, or the introduc- tion of ideas into life, have an analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading nature and suggesting its dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein ; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man ; the other, from God./Eeligion includes the personality of God ; Ethics does not. They are one to our pres- ent design. They both put nature under foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, "The things that are seen, are temporal ; the things that are mi- seen, are eternal." It puts an affront upon nature. It does that for the unschooled, which philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform lan- guage that may be heard in the churches of the most ignorant sects is, — " Contemn the unsub- stantial shows of the world ; they are vanities, dreams, shadows, unrealities ; seek the realities of religion." The devotee flouts nature. Some theo- sophists have arrived at a certain hostility and in- dignation towards matter, as the Manichean and Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any look- ing back to these flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed of his body. In short, they might all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said of ex- ternal beauty, " It is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul which he has called into time." IDEALISM. 63 It appears that motion, poetry, physical and in- tellectual science, and religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in ex- panding too curiously the particulars of the gen- eral proposition, that all culture tends to imbue u? with idealism. I have no hostility to nature, bu^ a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to indicate the true position of nature in regard to nian, wherein to establish man all right education tends ; as the ground which to attain is the object of human life, that is, of man's connection with nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of na- ture, and brings the mind to call that apparent which ii uses^fo call real, and that real which it usegi to caU visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the external world. The belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture this faith wiU as surely arise on the mind as did the first. The advantage of the jdeal theory over the pop- ular faith is this, that it presents the world in pre- cisely that view which is most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Eeason, both speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For seen in the light of thought, the 64 IDEALISM. world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordi- nates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle^ of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and re- ligion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after a,ct, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture which God paints on the in- stant eternity for the contemplation of the soul. Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and microscopic study of the universal tablet. It respects the end too much to immerse itself in the means. It sees something more important in Chris- tianity than the scandals of ecclesiastical history or the niceties of criticism ; and, very incurious concerning persons or miracles, and not at all dis- turbed by chasms of historical evidence, it accepts from God the phenomenon, as it finds it, as the pure and awful form of religion in the world. It is not hot and passionate at the appearance of what it calls its own good or bad fortune, at the union or opposition of other persons. No man is its en- emy. It accepts whatsoever befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer, and it is a doer, only that it may theTetter watch. CHAPTEE VII. SPIRIT. It is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should contain somewhat progressive. Uses that are exhausted or that may be, and facts that end in the statement, cannot be aU that is true of this brave lodging wherein man is harbored, and whereiii all his faculties find appropriate and end- less exercise. And aU the uses of nature admit of being summed in one, which yields tKe activity of man an infinite scope. Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things, it is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin. It always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow poiating aLwaysJp jfche, sunjbehind us. The aspect of Nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands [ folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he \ who learns from nature the lesson of worshipj^^^ _ Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, hi that thinks most, wiU say least. . We can fore- see God in the coarse, and, as it were, distant I VOL. I. 5 66 SPIRIT. phenomena of matter ; but when we try to define and describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and sav- ages. That essence refuses to be recorded in prop- ositions, but when man has worshipped him in- tellectually, the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it. When we consider Spirit, we see that the views already presented do not include the whole circum- ference of man. We must add some related thoughts. Three problems are put by nature to the mind ; What- is matter? Whence is it? and Whereto? The first of these questions only, the ideal theory answers. Idealism saith : matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of our own being and the evidence of the world's being. The one is perfect ; the other, incapable of any assur- ance ; the mind is a part of the nature of things ; the world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day. Idealism is a hypothesis to account for n" ture by other principles than those of carpentr and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the existenci SPIRIT. 67 of matter, it does not satisfy the demands of tlie spirit. It leaves God out of me. It leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander without end. Then the heart resists it, because it balks the affections in denying substan- tive being to men and women. Nature is so per- vaded with human life that there is something of humanity in all and in every particular. But this theory makes nature foreign to me, and does not account for that consanguinity which we acknowl- edge to it. Let it stand then, in the present state of our knowledge, merely as a useful introductory hypoth- esis, serving to apprise us of the eternal distinc- tion between the soul and the world. But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to inquire. Whence is matter? and Where- to ? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is pres- ent to the soul of man ; that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are ; that spirit creates ; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present ; one and not compound it does not act upon us from without, that- ia,„in space and time, but spiritually, or _ through ourselves : therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, 68 SPIRIT. does not build up .naJairfi^arjOUixd-HS but. puts it forth througbus^ as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God ; he is nourished by unfail- ing fountains, and draws at his need inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man? Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This view, which admonishes me where the sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to vir- tue as to " The golden key Which opes the palace of eternity," carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it animates me to create my own world through the purification of my soul. The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is_a remoter and inferior incarna- tion of God, a projection of God in the uncon- scious. BuJL it .differs from the body in one impor- tant respect.^ _ It is not, liEeTEat^ now subjected to the Jmrnan^-will. Its^ ^rend> order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to -us, the present expositor of the divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure. As we degenerate, SPIRIT. 69 the contrast between us and our house Is more evi- dent. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God. We do not im^derstand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us ; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as com and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, ■ a face of him ? Yet this may show us what dis- cord is between man and nature, for you cannot freely admire a noble landscape if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds some- thing ridiculous in his delight until he is out of the sight of men. CHAPTEE VIII. PEOSPECTS. In Inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is al- ways the truest. That which seems faintly pos- sible, it is so refined, is often faint and dim be- cause it is deepest seated in the mind among the eternal verities. Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions and processes to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility ; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments. PROSPECTS. 71 For the problems to be solved are precisely those which the physiologist and the naturalist omit to state. It is not so pertinent to man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to know whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity ia his constitution, which evermore separates and classiQes things, endeavoring to reduce the most diverse to one form. When I behold a rich land- scape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details, so long as there is no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon the metaphysics of con- ehology, of botany, of the arts, to show the rela- tion of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, archi- tecture, to the mind, and build science upon ideas. In a cabinet of natural history, we become sen- sible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldly and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect. The American who has been confined, in his own eoimtry, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also, — faint copies of an invisible ar- chetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, so. 72 PROSPECTS. long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world ; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart j^and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or at- mospheric influence which observation or analysis lays open. A perception of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert, the beautifid. psalroist of the seventeenth century. The following lines are part of his little poem on Man. " Man is all symmetry, Full of proportions, one limb to another, And to all the world besides. Each part may call the farthest, brother ; For head with foot hath private amity. And both with moons and tides. " Nothing hath got so far But man hath caught and kept it as his prey ; His eyes dismount the highest star : He is in little all the sphere. Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they Find their acquaintance there. "For us, the winds do blow. The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow; Nothing we see, but means our good, As our delight, or as our treasure; PROSPECTS. 73 The whole ia either our cupboard of food, Or cabinet of pleasure. " The stars have us to bed: Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws. Music and light attend our head. All things unto our flesh are kind, In their descent and being; to our mind. In their ascent and cause. " More servants wait on man Than he '11 take notice of. In every path. He treads down that which doth befriend him When sickness makes him pale and wan. Oh mighty love ! Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him." The perception of this class of truths makes the attraction which draws men to science, but the end is lost sight of ia attention to the means. In view of this half -sight of science, we accept the sentence of Plato, that " poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history." Every surmise and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth, to digested sys- tems which have no one valuable suggestion. A wise writer wiU feel that the ends of study and com- position are best answered by announcing undis- covered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit. 74 PROSPECTS. I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and nature, which a certain poet sang to me ; and which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy. ' The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the old- est chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known indi- viduals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation. ' We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own and disown our relation to it, by turns. We are like Nebuchadnezzar, de- throned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can set limits to the remedial force of spirit ? ' A man is a god in ruins. When men are inno- cent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the im- mortal as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these dis- organizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise. ' Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was per- PROSPECTS. 75 meated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon ; from man the sun, from woman the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions extemized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge sheU, his waters retired ; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets ; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees that the structure stiU fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the stm, and woman the follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that if his law is still para- mount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his wiU. It is in- stinct.' Thus my Orphic poet sang. At present, man applies to nature but half his fbrce. He works on the world with his understand- ing alone. He lives in it and masters it by a pen- ny-wisdom ; and he that works most in it is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power 76 PROSPECTS. over it, is through the understandiag, as by mar nure ; the economic use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner's needle ; steam, coal, chemical agricul- ture ; the repairs of the human body by the dentist and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of power as if a banished king should buy his territo- ries inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once into his throne. Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are not wanting gleams of a better light, — occasional examples of the action of man upon nature with his entire force, — with reason as well as understand- ing. Such examples are, the traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity of all nations ; the history of Jesus Christ ; the achievements of a principle, as in religious and political revolutions, and in the abolition of the slave-trade ; the miracles of enthu- siasm, as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers ; many obscure and yet contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal Magnetism ; prayer ; eloquence ; self-healing ; and the wisdom of children. These are examples of Reason's momentary grasp of the sceptre ; the ex- ertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power. The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in say- ing, that the knowledge of man is an evening knowl- edge, vespertina cognitio, but that of God is a morning knowledge, matutina cognitio. PROSPECTS. 11 The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and ■10 they appear not transparent but opaque. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist until he satis- fies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand as perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other. In the uttermost mean- ing of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep. But in actual life, the marriage is not celebrated. There are in- nocent men who worship God after the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of aU their faculties. And there are patient naturalists, but they freeze their subject under the wintry light of the understand- ing. Is not prayer also a study of truth, — a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation. 78 PROSPECTS. It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. "What is a day ? What is a year ? What is smn- mer ? What is woman ? What is a child? What is sleep ? To our blindness, these things seem un- affecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door. You also are a man. Man and woman and their social life, poverty, labor, sleep, fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none of these things is superficial, but that each phenom- enon has its roots in the faculties and affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract question occupies your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to be solved by your hands. It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to compare, point by point, espe- cially at remarkable crises in life, our daily history with the rise and progress of ideas in the mind. So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth ? and of the affections, ~- What is good ? by yielding itself passive to the PROSPECTS. 79 educated WiU. Then shall come to pass what my poet said ; ' Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or brute- ness of nature" is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. E very spirit builds itself a house and beyond its house a world and beyond its world a Jieaven. Know then that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth ; Csesar called his house, Kome ; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler's trade ; a hundred acres of ploughed land ; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for Hue and point for point your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things win attend the influx of the spirit. So fast wiU disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen. The sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up and the wind exhale. As when the summer comes from the south the snow-banks melt and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so shall the 80 PROSPECTS. advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, and carry with it the beauty it visits and the song which enchants it ; it shall draw beautiful faces, warm hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts, around its way, until evil is no more seen. The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with obser- vation, — a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God, — he shall enter without more won- der than the blind man feels who is gradually re- stored to perfect sight.' THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. AN ORATION DELIVEEED BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOOIETT, AT CAMBRIDGE, AUGUST 81, 1837. THE AMEEICAN SCHOLAE. Me. Peesident and Gentlemen, I GEEET you on the reconunencement of our lit- erary year. Om- anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies,' and odes, like the ancient Greeks ; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours ; nor for the advancement of sci- ence, like our contemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a p^ple too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is al-~^ ready come when it ought to be, and wUl be, some- thing else ; when the sluggard intellect of this con- tinent win look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Oiu'_ day of dependence, oui' long apprenticeship to the •learning of other lands, draws to a close. The mil- 84 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. lions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign har- vests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in oui zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years ? In this hope I accept the topic which not only usage but the nature of our association seem to prescribe to this day, — the Americaij Scholae. Year by year we come up hither to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on his char- acter and his hopes. It is one of those fables which out of an imknown antiquity convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself ; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end. The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, — present to all particular men only partially, or through one fac- ulty ; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 85 and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and can- not be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking mon- sters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an el- bow, but never a man. Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out" into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form ; the attorney a statute-book ; the mechanic a machine ; the sailor a rope of the ship. In this distribution of functions the scholar is 86 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. the delegated intellect. In the right state_hg_i? Mgm^_TMnkmg. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the the- ory of his office is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures ; him the past instructs ; him the future invites. Is not indeed every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student's behoof ? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true master ? But the old oracle said, " All things have two handles : be- ware of the wrong one." In life, too often, the scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privi- lege. Let us see him in his school, and consider i him in reference to the main influences he re- I . ' ceives. I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun ; and, after sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow ; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him ? There is never a beginning, there is never THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 87 an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into it- self. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — so entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, up- ward, downward, without centre, without circum- ference, — in the mass and in the particle. Nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begias. To the young mind every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature ; then three, then three thousand ; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumu- lation and classifying of facts. But what is classi- fication but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind ? The as- tronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstrac- tion of the human mind, is the measure of plan- etary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter ; and sci- ence is nothing but the finding of analogy, iden- 88 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. tity, ill the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact ; one after an- other reduces all strange constitutions, aU new pow- ers, to their class and their law, and goes on for- ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight. Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bend- ing dome of day, is suggested that he and it pro- ceed from one root ; one is leaf and one is flower ; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that root? Is not that the soul of his soul? A thought too bold; a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, — when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philo- sophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever ex- panding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attain- ments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, " Know thyself," and the modern precept, " Study nature," become at last one maxim. THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 89 II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the mind of the Past, — in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth, — learn the amount of this influence more conveniently, — by considering their value alone. The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around ; brooded thereon ; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into bim life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions ; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business ; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact ; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Pre- cisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing. Or, I might say, it depends on how far the pro- cess had gone, of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the distUlation, so wiU the purity and imperishableness of the pro- duct be. But none is qidte perfect. As no air- pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the con- 90 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. ventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pui'e thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this. Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacred- ness which attaches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man : henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit : henceforward it is settled the book is perfect ; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious :^ the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incur- sions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are buUfc on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogpias, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wi'ote these books. THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 91 Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the book - learned class, who value books, as such ; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bib- liomaniacs of aU degrees. Books a re the best " f tliings^^ ell used ; ab used, \ a mong the wo rst. What is the right use ? What ^ is the one end which all means go to effect ? They are for nothing but tojnspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite in- stead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is en- titled to ; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius ; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence it is progressive. The book, the coUege, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, ^ let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward : the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead; man hopes : genius creates. 92 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Whatever talents may be, if tte man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his ; — cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words ; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but spring- ing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good and fair. On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods of soli- tude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disser- vice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the en- emy of genius by over-influence. The literature of every nation bears me witness. The English dra- matic poets have Shakspearized now for two hun- dred years. Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments, ^i ^ooks arfi _fQr the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, — when the sun is hid and the stars with- draw their shining, — we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 93 that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, " A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful." It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction that one nature vreote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modem joy, — with a pleas- ure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well- nigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the iden- tity of all minds, we should suppose some preestab- lished harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their fu- ture wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see. I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and 94 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. heroic men have existed who had ahnost no other information than by the printed page. I only would say that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, " He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is then creativ e read ing asjgBU as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakspeare, only that least part, — only the authentic utterances of the oracle ; — aU the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's and Shakspeare' s. Of course there is a portion of reading quite indis- pensable, to a wise man. History q,nd exact scien ce h,&jauatJeaxa_bj_laborioji« reading. Colleges, in like"^ manner, have their indispensable office, — to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us whe% they aim not to drill, but to create ; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their i hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set ! THE AMERICAN SCBOLAR. 95 the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pre- tension avail nothing. Gowns and pecuniary foun- dations, though of towns of gold, can never counter- vail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their pub- lic importance, whilst they grow richer every year. III. There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any handiwork or public labor as a pen- knife for an axe. The so-caUed " practical men " sneer at speculative men, as if, because they specu- late or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy, — who are always, more uni- versally than any other class, the scholars of their day, — are addressed as women ; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised ; and indeed there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Ac- tion is withJheuSctolar-«HfeoidiEatejJbuiJ±J£^esse^^ tial. Without it he is not yet man. "Without it thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic 96 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. (Only f;rt mjin.h i\n T_Vnnyrj gg I havejiateebl Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not. The world, — this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct that so shall the dumb abyss be Tocal with speech. I pierce its order ; I dissi- pate its fear ; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. I do not see how any man " can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is j pearls and rubies to his discourse. I)rudgfi]g:,_ca- lamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in elo- quence a nd_ wisdo m. The true scuokr grudges every opportunity of action past by, ag a 'Joss of It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process too, this by which experience is converted into THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 97 thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours. The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our re- cent actions, — with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or Imow it than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life, — remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised, transfigured ; the corruptible has put on in- corruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Ob- serve too the impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cra- dle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled 98 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. the whole sky, are gone already ; friend and rela- tive, profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing. Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger and pine ; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and discovered that they had whittled up the last of their pine-trees. Au- thors we have, in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable pru- dence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trap- per into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish their merchantable stock. If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our diction - ary. . Years are well spent in country labors ; in town ; in the insight into trades and manufactures ; in frank intercourse with many men and women ; in science ; in art ; to the one end of mastering in aU their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 99 througli the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tHes and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made. But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than books, is that it is a resource. "^ That great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath ; in desire and satiety ; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity, — these " fits of easy transmission and reflection," as Newton caUed them, — are the law of nature because they are the law of spirit. y> The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit re- produces the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended and books are a weariness, — he has always the re- source to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the function- ary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truth ? He can still fall back on this elemen- 100 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. tal force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine ia his affairs. Let the beauty of af- fection cheer his lowly roof. Those " far from fame," who dwell and act with him, wiQ feel the force of his constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him that the gphfilaj-Jngpa nn Tinnr whipb thArnan HveS. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instiact, screened from influence. What is lost in seemli- ness is gained in strength. Not out of those on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled sav- age nature ; out of terrible Druids and Berserkers come at last Alfred and Shakspeare. I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome ; always we are invited to work ; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activ- ity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action. I have now spoken of the education of the THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 101 scholar by nature, b y book s, and by action . It re- mains to say somewhat of his duties. They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in self-trust. < The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts ami^st_afipeai;a«i^es. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of ob- servation. Flamsteed. and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and the results being splen- did and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his pri- vate observatory, cataloguiag obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, — watching days and months sometimes for a few facts ; correcting stUl his old records ; — must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, — how often ! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of tread- ing the old road, accepting the fashions, the educa- tion, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent imcertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in 102 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. the way of the self-relying and self-directed ; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset ? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes and lives -rm— pnhlin TCTul'jVlngJ T^innaT thoug hts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to re- sist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions, — these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her in- violable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day, — this he shall hear and promul- gate. These being his fimctions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down, " THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 103 The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe ab- straction, let him hold by himself ; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of re- proach, and bide his own time, — happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him. to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into t he secrets of his own mind he has'descendedriBlJoTKe^^e^iataLiiLall minds. Tie learns that he who has mastered any law in his pri- vate thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of aU into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is fou nd to have record ed that which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The-orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, until he finds that he is the comple- ment of his hearers ; — that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature ; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest pre- 104 TBE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. sentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it ; the better part of every man feels, This ismy^music ; this_is_my§elf . In seK-trust all the virtues are comprehended, Free should the scholar be, ; — free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, " ■withaut any hindrance that does not arise out of his own consti- tution." Brave ; for fear is a thmg which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a shame to HmTf^is tranquillity, amid dangerous times, arise from the presumption that like children and women his is a protected class ; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich m. the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger stiU. ; so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look into its eye and search its nature, in- spect its origin, — see the whelping of this lion, — which lies no great way back ; he wOl then find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent ; he wiU have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it and pass on superior. The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind cus- THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 105 torn, what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance, — by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow. Yes, we are the cowed, — we the trustless. It isj a mischievous notion that we are come late into na-' ture ; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of liis attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may ; but in propor- tion as a man has any thing in him divine, the fir- mament flows before him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, butf he who can alter my state of miud. They are theS kings of the world who give the color of their pres- ent thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table. Linnaeus makes botany the most alluriag of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman ; Davy, chemistry ; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims. The un- stable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon. 106 THE AMEBXCAN SCHOLAR. For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, — darker than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my an- dience in stating my own belief. But I have al- ready shown the ground of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are spawn, and are called " the mass " and " the herd." In a century, in a millennium, one or two men ; that is 'to say, one or two approximations to the ^ right state of every man. All the rest behold in % the hero or the poet their own green and crude being, — ripened ; yes, and are content to be less, so that may attain to its full stature. What a testi- mony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief. The poor and the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their acquies- cence in a political and social inferiority. They are content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 107 to be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.|/ Men such as they are, very naturally seek money ^ or power ; and power because it is as good as money, — the "spoils," so called, "of office." And why not? for they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them and they shall quit the false good and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual do- mestication of the idea of Culture. The main en- y terprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strewn along the ground. The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in his- tory. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of aU men. Each philoso- pher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is that but saying that we have come up with the 108 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. point of view which the imiversal mind took through the eyes of one scribe ; we have been that man, and have passed on. First, one, then another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these sup plies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side to this un- bounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, light- ens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates aU. men. But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this ab- straction of the Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say of nearer reference to the time and to this country. Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Ee- flective or Philosophical age. With the views I have intimated of the oneness or the identity of the mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each indi- THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 109 vidual passes througli all three. The boy is a Greek ; the youth, romantic ; the adult, reflective. I deny not however that a revolution in the leading idea may be distinctly enough traced. Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are crit- ical ; we are embarrassed with second thoughts ; we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists ; we are lined with eyes ; we see with our feet ; the time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness, — " Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." It is so bad then ? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind ? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class as a mere announcement of the fact that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried ; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there is any period one would de- sire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution ; when the old and the new stand side by_side_ ani^ admit of being compared ; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope ; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era ? This time, 110 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. I read witk some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science, through church and state. One of these signs is the fact that the same movement which effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state, assumed in lit- erature a very marked and as benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. That which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning them- selves for long journeys into far countries, is sud- denly found to be richer than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of house- hold life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign, — is it not ?— of new vigor when the extremities are made active, when cur- rents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic ; what is doing in Italy or Arabia ; what is Greek art, or Proven9al minstrelsy ; I embrace the com- mon, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give , me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What THE AMERICAN SCSOLAR. Ill . would we really know the meaning of ? The meal in the firkin ; the milk in the pan ; the ballad in the street ; the news of the boat ; the glance of the eye ; the form and the gait of the body ; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters ; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature ; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law ; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing ; — and the world lies no longer a duU miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order ; there is no trifle, there is no puz- zle, but one design imites and animates the far- thest pinnacle and the lowest trench. This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cowpes, and, in a newer time, of Goethe, "Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This idea they have differently followed and with various success. In contrast with their writing, the style of Pope, of Johnson, of Gibbon, looks cold and pedantic. This writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to aU nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in 112 TEE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. this very thing the most modern of the modems, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients. There is one man of genius who has done much for this philosophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated ; — I m ean Ema u- uel Swedenborg. The most imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such an attempt of course must have difficulty which no genius coidd surmomit. But he saw and showed the connection between nature and the af- fections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangi- ble world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature ; he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul material forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of insanity, of beasts, of unclean and fearful things. .tVnother sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is the new impor- tance given to the single person. Every thing that tends to iusulate the individual, — to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shaU treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state, THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 113 — tends to true union as well as greatness. " I learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi, " that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man." Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must" take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. . If there be one lesson more than another which should pierce his ear, it is. The world is nothing, the man is all ; in yourself is the law of all na/- ture, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends ; in yourself slumbers the whole of Rea- son ; it is for you to know all ; it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confi- dence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American f reemanlislalready^suspeeted- to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private ava- rice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See al- ready the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats up on it - self. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon ovir shores, inflated 114 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. by the mountain -winds, shined upon by all the stars ' of God, find the earth below not in unison with these,' but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is man- aged inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the remedy ? They did not yet see, and thousands of yoimg men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience, — patience ; with the shades of all the good and great for company ; and for solace the perspective of your own infinite life ; and for work the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conver- sion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit ; — not to be reck- oned one character ; — not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we be- long ; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south ? Not so, brothers and friends, — please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we wiH work with our own hands; we will speak our ownjiiads. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pityj THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 115 for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of de- fence and a wreath of joy around aU. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each be- lieves himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men. AN ADDRESS DELIVEEED BEFOEB THE SENIOR CLASS IN DIVINITY COlLEaB, CAMBRIDGE, SUNDAY EVENING, JULY 16, 1838. ADDEESS. In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tiut of flowers. The air is fuU of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the bahn-of- Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward has not yielded yet one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world in which our senses converse. How wide ; how rich ; what invi- tation from every property it gives to every faculty of man ! In its fruitful soils ; in its navigable sea ; 120 ADDRESS. in its monntains of metal and stone ; in its forests of all woods ; in its animals ; in its chemical ingre- dients ; in. the powers and path of light, heat, at- traction and life, it is well worth the pith and heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it. The planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the astrono- mers, the builders of cities, and the captains, his- tory delights to honor. But when the mind opens and reveals the laws which traverse the universe and make things what they are, then..shr4nliS-JJie_great_world at ongajnto a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I ? and What is ? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. Behold these outrunning laws, which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that, but not come full circle. Behold these infinite rela- tions, so like, so unlike ; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I would admire forever. These works of thought have been the entertain- ments of the human spirit ia all ages. A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed ia what is above him. He learns that his being is without bound ; that to the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and weakness. That which he venerates is still his own, though he ADDRESS. 121 has not realized it yet. He ought. He knows the sense of that grand word, though his analysis fails to render account of it. When in uinoceney or when by intellectual perception he attains to say, — - " I love the Right ; Truth is beautiful within and without forevermore. Virtue, I am thine ; save me ; use me ; thee will I serve, day and night, in great, in small, that I may be not virtuous, but vir- tue ; " — then is the end of the creation answered, and God is well pleased. The ^entiment of virtue is a reverence and de- light ia the presence of certain divine laws. It per- ceives that this homely game of Hfe we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that as- tonish. The child amidst his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force ; and in the game of human life, love, fear, justice, appetite, man, and God, interact. These laws re- fuse to be adequately stated. They wiU not be written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. They elude our persevering thought ; yet we read them hourly in each other's faces, in each other's ac- tions, in our own remorse. The moral traits which are all globed into every virtuous act and thought, — in speech we must sever, and describe or suggest by painful enumeration of many particulars. Yet, as this sentiment is the essence of all religion, let me guide your eye to the precise objects of the sen- 122 ADDRESS. timent, by an enumeration of some of those classes of facts in which this element is conspicuous. The intuition of the moral sentiment is an ia- sight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire, f He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled, tie who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity .\ [ Jf- a. man is at heart just, then in so far is he God ; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice.y If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself. See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs, correcting appear- ances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is at last as sure as in the soul. By it a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich ; alms never ADDRESS. 123 impoverish ; murder mil speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie, — for example, the taiut of vanity, any attempt to make a good impres- sion, a favorable appearance, — will instantly vi- tiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all nar- ture and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we as- sociate. The good, by affi nity, seek the_goodj_the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own voli- tion, souls proceed into heaven, into heU. These facts have always suggested to man the subKme creed that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one wUl, of one mind ; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool ; and what- ever opposes that will is everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so, and not other- wise. Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute : it is like cold, which is the privation of lieat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much bene- volence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of this same spirit, which is 124 ADDRESS. differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes. AU things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, or auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of aU remote channels, he be- comes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death. The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which we caU the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to com- mand. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. It makes the sky and the hiUs sub- lime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought may work cold and in- transitive in things, and find no end or unity ; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign { over all natures ; and the worlds, time, space, eter- nity, do seem to break out into joy. This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable. ADDRESS. 125 Through it, the soul first knows itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by following the great, and hopes to de- rive advantages from another, — by showing the fountaia of aU good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Keason. When he says, " I ought ; " when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom. — Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship ; for he can never go behind this senti- ment. In the sublimest flights of the soul, recti- tude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown. ■ This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, and successively creates aU forms of worship. The , principle of veneration never dies out. Man fallen into superstition, into sensuality, is never quite without the visions of the moral sentiment. In like manner, all the expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent iu proportion to their purity. The expressions of this sentiment affect us more than aU other compositions. The sentences of the oldest time, which ejaculate this piety, are stiU fresh and fragrant. This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and con- templative East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in 126 ADDRESS. Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion. Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by / one stem condition; this, namely; it is an intui- tion. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he an- nounces, I must find true in me, or reject ; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing. On the contrary, the absence of this primary faith is the presence of degradation. As is the flood so is the ebb. Let this faith depart, and the very words it spake and the things it made become false and hurtful. Then falls the church, the state, art, letters, life. The doctrine of the ' divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infects and dwarfs the constitution. Once man was all; now he is an appendage, a nuisance. And be- cause the indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this perver- sion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or ADDRESS. 127 two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury. The doctrine of inspiration is lost ; the base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul. Miracles, proph- ecy, poetry, the ideal life, the holy life, exist as an- cient history merely; they are not in the belief, nor in the aspiration of society ; but, when sug- gested, seem ridiculous. Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only at- tend to what addresses the senses. These general views, which, whilst they are gen- eral, none wiU contest, find abundant illustration in the history of religion, and especially in the history of the Christian church. In that, all of us have had our birth and nurture. The truth contained in that, you, my young friends, are now setting forth to teach. As the Cultus, or established wor- ship of the civilized world, it has great historical interest for us. Of its blessed words, which have been the consolation of humanity, you need not that I should speak. I shall endeavor to discharge my duty to you on this occasion, by pointing out t wo errors in its ad ministration, which daily appear more gross from the point of view we have just now taken. Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of proph- ets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the 128 ADDRESS. soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sub- lime emotion, ' I am divine. Through me, God acts ; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me ; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.' But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages ! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Under- standing. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, ' This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kin you, if you say he was a man.' The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth ; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the po- etic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles ; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression ; it is Monster. ADDRESS. 129 It is not one with the blowiag clover and the falling rain. He felt respect for Moses and the prophets, hut no unfit tenderness at postponing their initial reve- lations to the hour and the man that now is; to the eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was he a true man. Having seen that the law ia us is command- ing, he would not suffer it to be commanded. Boldly, with hand, and heart, and life, he declared it was God. Thus is he, as I think, the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of man. \ 1. In this point of view we become sensible of the first defect of historical Christianity. Histori- ical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appeaxsJouSj and- as it has-appeared for. ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exag- geration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggera- tion about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which in- dolence and fear have buUt, the friend of man is made the injurer of man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with expressions which were once sallies of admiration and love, but are 130 ADDRESS. now petrified into official titles, kills aU generous sympathy and liking. All who hear me, feel that the language that describes Christ to Europe and America is not the style of friendship and enthusi- asm to a good and noble heart, but is appropriated and formal, — paints a demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. Accept the injurious impositions of our early cat- echetical instruction, and even honesty and self- denial were but splendid sins, if they did not wear the Christian name. One would rather be " A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn," than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into nature and finding not names and places, not land and professions, but even virtue and truth foreclosed and monopolized. You shall not be a man even. You shall not own the world ; you shall not dare and live after the infinite Law that is in you, and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in aU lovely forms ; but you must subordinate your nature to Christ's na- ture ; you must accept our interpretations, and take his portrait as the vulgar draw it. That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine. Obey thyself. That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, ADDRESS. 131 makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decease forever. The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my iateUect, of my strength. They admonish me that the gleams which €ash across my mind are not mine, but God's ; that they had the like, and were not disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I love them. Noble provocations go out from them, inviting me to resist evil ; to subdue the world ; and to Be. And thus ^byjjisjbyoly thoughts, Jesus serves us, and thus only. To, aim to convert a man by miracles, is a profanation of the soul. A true conyersion5_a_truB Chrjgi^Js now, as. always»_ to . be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments. It fs true that a great and rich soul, like his, falling among the simple, does so preponderate, that, as his did, it names the world. The world seems to them to exist for him, and they have not yet drunk so deeply of his sense as to see that only by coming again to themselves, or to God in themselves, can they grow forevermore. It is a low benefit to give me something ; it is a high benefit to enable me to do somewhat of myself. The time is comiug when all menjwill see Jhatihe-gift.of-- G«d to the soul is not a vauntin^j_ overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine 132 ADDRESS. and mine, and that so invites tHne and mine to be and to grow. The injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching is not less flagrant to Jesus than to the souls which it profanes. The preachers do not see that they make his gospel not glad, and shear him of the locks of beauty and the attributes of heaven. When I see a majestic Epaminondas, or Washington ; when I see among my contemporaries a true orator, an up- right judge, a dear friend ; when I vibrate to the melody and fancy of a poem ; I see beauty that is to be desired. And so lovely, and with yet more entire consent of my human being, sounds in my ear the severe music of the bards that have sung of the true God in aU ages. Now do not degrade the life and dialogues of Christ out of the circle of this charm, by insulation and peculiarity. Xiet them lie as they befel, alive and warm, part of human life and of the landscape and of the cheerful day. 2. T^ second defect of the traditionary and limited way of using the mind of Christ, is a conse- quence of the first ; this, namely ; that AeJ\Ioral Nature, that Law of laws whose revelations- intro- duce^ greataes^,"— yea,' Txod himself, — into the open soul, is not explored as the fountain of the es- tablished teaching in society. Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead. The injury to ADDRESS. 133 faith throttles the preacher ; and the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticu- late voice. It is very certain that it is the effect of conversa- tion with the beauty of the soul, to beget a desire and need to impart to others the same knowledge and love. If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man. Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told ; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy : sometimes with pen- cil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, some- times in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of in- definite music ; but clearest and most permanent, in words. The man enamored of this excellency becomes its priest or poet. The office is coeval with the world. But observe the condition, the spiritual limitation of the office. The spirit only can teach. Not any profane man, not any sensual, not any liar^not any slave can teach, but only he can give, who has ; he only can create, who is. ^he man on whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach ; and every man can open his door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues. But the man who aims to speak as books enable, as syn- ods use, as the fashion guides, and as interest com- mands, babbles. Let him hush. 134 ADDRESS. To this holy office you propose to devote youi> selves. I wish you may feel your call in throbs of desire and hope. The_office is the first ,in.tlie world. It is of that reality that it cannot suffer the deduction of any falsehood. And it is my duty to say to you that the need was never greater pf new revelation than now. From the views I have already expressed, you will infer the sad convic- tion, which I share, I believe, with numbers, of the universal decay and now almost death of faith in society. The soul is not preached. The Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion, any complaisance would be crim- inal which told you, whose hope and commission it is to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached. It is time that this ill-suppressed murmur of all thoughtful men against the famine of our churches ; — this moaning of the heart because it is bereaved of the consolation, the hope, the grandeur that come alone out of the culture of the moral nature, — shoidd be heard through the sleep of indolence, and over the din of routine. This great and per- petual office of the preacher is not discharged. Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of -life. In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul ; that the ADDRESS. 135 earth and heavens are passing into Ms mind ; that he is drinking forever the soul of God ? Where now sounds the persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises my heart, and so affirms its own origin in heaven ? Where shall I hear words such as in elder ages drew men to leave all and follow, — father and mother, house and land, wife and child ? Where shall I hear these august laws of moral be- ing so pronounced as to fiU my ear, and I feel en- nobled by the offer of my uttermost action and pas- sion ? The test of the true faith, certaialy, should be its power to charm and command the soul, as the laws of nature control the activity of the hands, — so commanding that we find pleasure and honor in obeying. The faith should blend with the light of rising and of setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird, and the breath of flowers. But now the priest's Sabbath has lost the splendor of nature ; it is unlovely ; we are glad when it is done ; we can make, we do make, even sitting in our pews, a far better, holier, sweeter, for ourselves. Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain to wrap our cloaks about us, and secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not. I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say I would go 136 ADDRESS. to cliurcli no more. Men go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow-storm was fall- ing around us. The snow-storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not' one fact in all his experience had he yet imported into his doo- trine. This man had ploughed and planted and talked and bought and sold ; he had read books ; he had eaten and drunken ; his head aches, his heart throbs ; he smiles and suffers ; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at aU. Not a line did he draw out of real history. The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, — life passed_ through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be told from his sermon what age of the world he fell in ; whether he had a father or a child ; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper ; whether he was a citizen or a country- ADDRESS. 137 man ; or any other fact of his biography. It seemed strange that the people should come to church. It seemed as if their houses were very un- entertaining, that they should prefer this thought- less clamor. It shows that there is a commanding attraction in the moral sentiment, that can lend a faint tint of light to dulness and ignorance coming in its name and place. The good hearer is sure he has been touched sometimes ; is sure there is somewhat to be reached, and some word that can reach it. When he listens to these vain words, he comforts himself by their relation to his remem- brance of better hours, and so they clatter and echo unchallenged. I am not ignorant that when we preach unworth- ily, it is not always quite in vain. There is a good ear, in some men, that draws supplies to virtue out of very indifferent nutriment. There is poetic truth concealed in all the common-places of prayer and of sermons, and though foolishly spoken, they may be wisely heard ; for each is some select ex- pression that broke out in a moment of piety from some stricken or jubilant soul, and its excellency made it remembered. The prayers and even the dogmas of our church are like the zodiac of Den- derah and the astronomical monuments of the Hin- doos, whoUy insulated from anything now extant in the life and business of the people. They mark the 138 ADDRESS. height to which the waters once rose. But this do. cUity is a cheek upon the mischief from the good and devout. In a large portion of the community, the religious service gives rise to quite other thoughts and emotions. We need not chide the negligent servant. We are struck with pity, rather, at the swift retribution of his sloth. Alas for the un- happy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and I not give bread of life. Everything that befalls, ac- ' cuses him. Would he ask contributions for the missions, foreign or domestic ? Instantly his face is suffused with shame, to propose to his parish that they should send money a hundred or a thousand miles, to furnish such poor fare as they have at home and would do well to go the hundred or the thousand miles to escape. Would he urge people to a godly way of living ; — and can he ask a fellow-creature to come to Sabbath meetings, when he and they aU know what is the poor uttermost they can hope for therein ? Will he invite them privately to the Lord's Supper ? He dares not. If no heart warm this rite, the hollow, dry, creaking formality is too plain than that he can face a man of wit and energy and put the invitation without terror. In the street, what has he to say to the bold viUage blasphemer ? The village blasphemer sees fear in the face, form, and gait of the min- ister. ADDRESS. 139 Let me not taint the sincerity of this plea by any oversight of the claims of good men. I know and honor the purity and strict conscience of nranbers of the clergy. What life the public worship re- tains, it owes to the scattered company of pious men, who minister here and there in the churches, and who, sometimes accepting with too great ten- derness the tenet of the elders, have not accepted from others, but from their own heart, the genuine impulses of virtue, and so still command our love and awe, to the sanctity of character. Moreover, the exceptions are not so much to be found in a few eminent preachers, as in the better hours, the truer inspirations of all, — nay, in the sincere moments of every man. But, with whatever exception, it is still true that tradition characterizes the preaching of this country ; that it comes out of the memory, and not out tes_of the hunianjvoice. They are an incalculable energy which countervails all other forces in nature, because they are ihe channel of supernatural powers. There is no interest or insti- tution so poor and withered, but if a new strong man could be bom into it, he would immediately redeem and replace it. A personal ascendency, — that is the only fact much worth considering. I re- member, some years ago, somebody shocked a circle of friends of order here in Boston, who supposed that our people were identified with their religious denominations, by declaring that an eloquent man, — let him be of what sect soever, — would be or- dained at once in one of our metropolitan churches. To be sure he would ; and not only in ours but in any church, mosque, or temple, on the planet ; but he must be eloquent, able to supplant our method and classification by the superior beauty of his own. Every fact we have was brought here by some per- son ; and there is none that will not change and pass away before a person whose nature is broader than the person which the fact in question repre- sents. And so I find the Age walking about in happy and hopeful natures, in strong eyes and pleas- | ant thoughts, and think I read it nearer and truer so, than in the statute-book, or in the investments i of capital, which rather celebrate with mournful music the obsequies of the last age. In the brain of a 252 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. fanatic ; in tlie wild hope of a mountain boy, called by city boys very ignorant, because they do not know what his hope has certainly apprised him shall be ; in the love-glance of a girl ; in the hair-splitting conscientiousness of some eccentric person who has foimd some new scruple to embarrass himself and his neighbors withal is to be found that which shall constitute the times to come, more than in the now organized and accredited oracles. For whatever is affirmative and now advancing, contains it. _I think that only is real which men love and_rejoice in; not what they tolerate, but what they choose ; what they_embrace^and avow, and not the things which chill, benumb, and terrify them. And so why not draw for these times a portrait gallery ? Let us paint the painters. WhUst the Daguerreotypist, with camera^obscura and silver plate, begins now to traverse the land, let us set up our Camera also, and let the sun paint the people. Let us paint the agitator, and the man of the old school, and the member of Congress, and the col- lege-professor, the formidable editor, the priest and reformer, the contemplative girl, and the fair as- pirant for fashion and opportunities, the woman of the world who has tried and knows ; — let us ex- amine how well she knows. Could we indicate the indicators, indicate those who most accurately rep- resent every good and evil tendency of the general LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 253 mind, in the just order which they take on this can- vas of Time, so that all witnesses shoxild recog- nize a spiritual law as each well known form flitted for a moment across the waU, we should have a series of sketches which would report to the next ages the color and quality of ours. Certainly I think if this were done there would be much to admire as well as to condemn ; souls of as lofty a port as any in Greek or Roman fame might appear ; men of great heart, of strong hand, and of persuasive speech ; subtle thinkers, and men of wide sympathy, and an apprehension which looks over aU history and everywhere recognizes its own. To be sure, there will be fragments and hints of men, more than enough : bloated promises, which end in nothing or little. And then truly great men, but with some defect in their composition which neutralizes their whole force. Here is a Damascus blade, such as you may search through nature in vain to parallel, laid up on the shelf in some village to rust and ruin. And how many seem not quite available for that idea which they represent ? Now and then comes a bolder spirit, I should rather say, a more surrendered soul, more informed and led by God, which is much in ad- vance of the rest, qtiite beyond their sympathy, but predicts what shall soon be the general fulness ; as when we stand by the seashore, whilst the tide ia 254 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. coming in, a wave comes up the beach far higher than any foregoing one, and recedes ; and for a long while none comes up to that mark ; but after some time the whole sea is there and beyond it. But we arejiot permitted to stand a s spectators of the pageant which the times exhibit; we are parties also, and have a responsibility which is not to be declined. A little while this interval of won- der and comparison is permitted us, but to the end that we shall play a manly part. As the solar sys- tem moves forward in the heavens, certain stars open before us, and certain stars close up behind us ; so is man's life. The reputations that were great and inaccessible change and tarnish. How great were once Lord Bacon's dimensions ! he is now reduced almost to the middle height ; and many another star has turned out to be a planet or an as- teroid : only a few are the fixed stars which have no parallax, or none for us. The change and de- cline of old reputations are the gracious marks of our own growth. Slowly, like light of morning, it steals on us, the new fact, that we who were pupils or aspirants are now society : do compose a portion of that head and heart we are wont to think worthy of aU reverence and heed. We are the represen- tatives of religion and intellect, and stand in the light of Ideas, whose rays stream through us to those younger and more in the dark. What further LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 256 relations we sustain, what new lodges we are enter- ing, is now unknown. To-day is a king in^isguise. To-day always looks mean to the thoughtless, in the face of an uniform experience that all good and great and happy actions are made up precisely of these blank to-days. Let us not be so deceived. Let us unmask the king as he passes. Let us not inhabit times of wonderful and various promise without divining their tendency. Let us not see the foundations of nations, and of a new and better order of things laid, with roving eyes, and an at- tention preoccupied with trifles. The two omnipresent parties of History, the party of the Past and the party of the Future, di- vide society to-day as of old. Here is the innumer- able multitude of those who accept the state and the church from the last generation, and stand on no argume nt but possession. They have reason also, and, as I think, better reason than is com- monly stated. No Burke, no Metternich has yet done full justice to the side of conservatism. But this class, however large^ relying not_on_thein±el- lect but on the instinct, blends itself with the brute forces of nature, is respectable only as nature is; but the individuals have no attraction for us. It is the dissenter, the theorist, the aspirant, who is quitting this ancient domain to embark on seas of adven- ture, who engages our interest. Omitting then for 256 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. the present all notice of the stationary class, we shall find that the, movement ^arty divides itself into two classes, the actors, and the students. The actors constitute that great army of martyrs who, at least in America, by their conscience and philanthropy ,joccupy:J;he ground which Calvinism occupied in the last age, and_compose the visible ^church of J;he existing generation. The present age will be marked by its harvest of projects for the reform of domestic, civil, literary, and ecclesi- astical institutions. The leaders of the crusades against War, Negro slavery. Intemperance, Govern- ment based on force. Usages of trade. Court and Custom-house Oaths, and so on to the agitators on the system of Education and the laws of Property, are the right successors of Luther, Ejiox, Eobin- son, Fox, Penn, Wesley, and Whitfield. They have the same virtues and vices ; tiie same^noble impulse, and the same bigotry. These movements are on all accounts important ; they not only check the special abuses, but they educate the conscience and the intellect of the people. How can such a question as the Slave-trade be agitated for forty years by all the Christian nations, without throw- ing great light on ethics into the general mind? The fury with which the slave-trader defends every inch of his bloody deck and his howling auction- platform, is a trumpet to alarm the ear of mankind, LECTURE ON TEE TIMES. 257 to wake the dull, and drive aU neutrals to take sides and to listen to the argument and the verdict. The Temperance-question, which rides the converr sation of ten thousand circles, and is tacitly recalled at every public and at every private table, drawing with it all the curious ethics of the Pledge, of the Wine-questicm, of the equity of the manufacture and the trade, is a gymnastic training to the cas^ uistry and conscience of the time. Anti-masonry had a deep right and wrong, which gradually emerged to sight out of the turbid controversy. The political questions touching the Banks ; the Tariff ; the limits of the executive power ; the right of the constituent to instruct the representative; the treatment of the Indians ; the Boundary wars ; the Congress of nations ; are all pregnant with ethical conclusions ; and it is well if government and our social order can extricate themselves from these alembics and find themselves still government and social order. The student of history will here- after compute the singular value of our endless discussion of questions to the mind of the period. Whilst each of these aspirations and attempts of the people for the Better is magnified by the nat- ural exaggeration of its advocates, until it excludes the others from sight, and repels discreet persons by the unfairness of the ple a, the movem ents are in reality all parts of one movement. There is a. TOL. 1." 17 258 LECTURE ON TEE TIMES. perfect ctain, — see it, or see it not, — of reforms emergLng from the surrounding darkness, each cherisHng^oioe^art^of Jjtue_general idea, and all must be seen in order to do justice to any one. Seen in this their natural connection, they are sub- lime. The conscience of the Age demonstrates it- self in this effort to raise the life of man by putting it in harmony with his idea of the Beautiful and the Just. The history of reform is always identi- calj^it js the comparison of the idea with the. fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imag- ination. We suspect they are unworthy. We ar- raign our daily employments. They appear to us unfit, unworthy of the faculties we spend on them. In conversation with a wise man, we find ourselves apologizing for our employments ; we speak of / them with shame. Nature, literature, science, ' childhood, appear to us beautiful; but not our own daily work, not the ripe fruit and considered labors of man. This beauty which the fancy finds in everything else, certainly accuses the manner of life we lead. Why should it be hateful ? Why should it contrast thus with all natural beauty ? Why should it not be poetic, and invite and raise us ? Is there a necessity that the works of man should be sordid ? Perhaps not. — Out of this fair Idea in the mind springs the effort at the Perfect. It is the interior testimony to a fairer possibili^of LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 259 Jife^and^ manners which^ agitates society every day with the offer of some new amendment. If we would make more strict inquiry concerning its ori- gin, we find ourselves rapidly approaching the in- ner boundaries of thought, that term where speech becomes silence, and science conscience. _ For the origin of aU reforaa, is in that mysterious fountain of the m oral sentiment in man, which, amidst the natural, ever cont^i^^e Tsupernatural for men. That is new and creative. That is^live^ That alone can make a man other than he is. Here or nowhere resides unbounded energy, unbounded power. The new voices in the wilderness crying " Re- pent," have revived a hope, which had weU-nigh perished out of the world, that the thoughts of the mind may yet, in some distant age, in some happy hour, be executed by the hands. That is the hope, of ^Gclfail otiier hopesare parts. For some ages, these ideas have been consigned to the poet and musical composer, to the prayers and the sermons of churches ; but the thought that they can ever have any footing in real Hfe, seems long since to have been exploded by all judicious persons. Mil- ton, in his best tract, describes a relation between religion and the daUy occupations, which is true until this time. " A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and 260 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. to his profits, finds religion to be a traffic so en- tangled, and of so many piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skiU to keep a stock go- ing upon that trade. What should he do? Fain he woidd have the name to be religious ; fain he would bear up with his neighbors in that. What does he therefore, but resolve to give over toiling, and to find himself out some factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs ; some divine of note and estima- tion that must be. To him he adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with alL the locks and keys, into his custody ; and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion ; esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and com- mendatory of his own piety. So that a man may say his religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual moveable, and goes and comes near him, according as that good man frequents the house. He entertaias him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him ; his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep ; rises, is saluted, and after the malm- sey, or some weU spiced bruage, and better break- fasted than he whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs between Bethany and Je- rusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his religion." LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 261 This picture would serve for our times. Relig- ion was not invited to eat or drink or sleep with us, or to make or divide an estate, but was a holiday guest. Such omissions judge the church ; as the compromise made with the slaveholder, not much noticed at first, every day appears more flagrant mischief to the American constitution. But now the purists are looking into all these matters. The more intelligent are growing uneasy on the subject of Marriage. They wish to see the character re- presented also in that covenant. There shall be nothing brutal in it, but it shall honor the man and the woman, as much as the most diffusive and uni- versal action. Grimly the same spirit looks into the law of Property, and accuses men of driving a trade in the great boundless providence which had given the air, the water, and the land to men, to use and not to fence in and monopolize. It casts its eye on Trade, and Day Labor, and so it goes up and down, paving the earth with eyes, destroying privacy and making thorough-lights. Is all this for nothing ? Do you suppose that the reforms which are preparing wiU be as superficial as those we know? By the books it reads and translates, judge what books it wUl presently print. A great deal of the profoundest thinking of antiquity, which had be- come as good as obsolete for us, is now re-appear- 262 LECTURE ON TEE TIMES. ing in extracts and allusions, and in twenty years will get all printed anew. See how daring is the reading, the speculation, the experimenting of the time. If now some genius shall arise who could unite these scattered rays ! And alway;s_such_ a genius does embody the ideas^ of each time. Here is great variety and richness of mysticism, each part of which now only disgusts whilst it forms the sole thought of some poor Perfectionist or " Comer out," yet when it shall be taken up as the garniture of some profound and aU-reconeiling thinker, will appear the rich and appropriate decor- ation of his robes. These reforms are our contemporaries ; they are ourselves ; our own light, and sight, and conscience ; they only name the relation which subsists between us and the vicious institutions which they go to rec- tify. They are the simplest statements of man in these matters ; the plain right and wrong. I can- not choose but allow and honor them. The impulse is good, and the theory ; the practice is less beauti- ful. The Keformers affirm the inward life, but they do not trust it, but use outward and vulgar means. They do not rely on precisely that strength which wins me to their cause ; not on love, not on a principle, but on men, on multitudes, on circum- stances, on money:,_on jpajtyj_tha t is, on fear, on wrath, and pride. The love which lifted men to LECTURE ON TEE TIMES. 263 the sight of these better ends was the true and best distinction of this time, the disposition to trust a , principle more than a material force. I think that the soul of reform ; the conviction that not sensual- ism, not slavery, not war, not imprisonment, not even government, are needed, — biit in lieu of them aU, reliance on the sentiment of man, which will work best the more it is trustedTnbt reliance on i numbers, but, contrariwise, distrust of numbers and i the feeling that then are we strongest when most j private and alone. The young men who have been ' vexing society for these last years vnth regenerative methods seem to have made this mistake ; they all ; exaggerated some special means, and aU failed to see that the Eeform of Reforms must be accom- ' plished without means. The Reforms have their high origin in an ideal justice, but they^io not retain the purityjof-ait-idea. - They are quickly organizedTiTsome low, inadequate form, and present no more poetic image to the mind than the evil tradition which they reprobated'. They mix the fire of the moral sentiment with per- sonal and party heats, with measureless exaggerar tions, and the blindness that prefers some darling measure to justice and truth. Those who are urg- ing with most ardor what are called the greatest benefits of mankind, are narrow, self-pleasing, con- ceited men, and affect us arihe insane do They 264 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. bite us, and we run mad also. I think tlie work of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him ; but when I have seen it near, I do not like it better. It is done in the same way, it is done profanely, not piously ; by management, by tactics and clamor. It is a buzz in the ear. I cannot feel any pleasure in sacrifices which display to me such partiality of character. ^^_do not want actionsj^butmen ; not a chemical drop of wa- ter, but rain ; the spirit that sheds and showers ac- tions, countless, endless actions. You have on some occasion played a bold part. You have set your heart and face against society when you thought it wrong, and returned it frown for frown. Excel- lent : now can you^fford) to forgeLit, reckoning^^ your action no more than the passing of your hand through the air, or a little breath of your mouth ? The world leaves no track in space, and the great- est action of man no mark in the vast idea. To the youth diffident of his ability and fuU of com- punction at his unprofitable existence, the tempta- tion is always great to lend himself to public move- ments, and as one of a party accomplish what he cannot hope to effect alone. But he must resist the degradation of a man to a measure. _ I must get with truth, though I should never come to act, as you call it, with effect. I must consent to inac- tion. A patience which is grand ; a brave and cold ^' LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 265 '[ neglect of the offices wMch prudence exacts, so it be done in a deep upper piety ;_ a consent to soli- tude and inaction which proceeds out of an unwill- ingness to violate character, is the century which makes the gem. Whilst therefore I desire to ex- press the respect and joy I feel before this sublime connection of reforms now in their infancy around us, I urge the more earnestly the paramount duties of self-reliance.. I cannot find language of suffi- cient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity. All men, aU things, the state, the church, yea the friends of the heart are phan- tasms and unreal besideJ;he_sanctuary of the heart. With so much awe, with so much fear, let it Fe re- spected. The great majority of men, unable to judge of any principle until its light faUs on a fact, are not aware of the evil that is around them until they see it in some gross form, as in a class of intemper- ate men, or slaveholders, or soldiers, or fraudulent persons. Then they are greatly moved ; and mag- nifying the importance of that wrong, they fancy that if that abuse were redressed all would go well, and they fill the land with clamor to correct it. Hence the missionary, and other religious efforts. If every island and every house had a Bible, if every child was brought into the Sunday School, would the woimds of the world heal, and man be / upright ? ' 266 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. j But the man of ideas, accounting— tke—ciisuiQ- Istaace nothing, .judges of the_CQmmonw:.ealtL_irom. ( the state of his own mind. 'If,' he says, ' I am j selfish, then is there slavery, or the effort to estab- 1 lish it, wherever I go. But if I am just, then is j there no slavery, let the laws say what they will. j For if I 'treat all men as gods, how to me can there J be any such thing as a slave ? ' But how frivolous is your war against circumstances. Jhis denounc- _iiig_philanthropist is himself a slaveholder in every word and look. Does he free me ? Does he cheer me ? He is the state of Georgia, or Alabama, with their sanguinary slave-laws, walking here on our northeastern shores. "We are all thankful he has no more political power, as we are fond of liberty ourselves. I am afraid our virtue is a little geo- graphical. I am not mortified by our vice ; that is obduracy ; it colors and palters, it curses and swears, and I can see to the end of it ; but I own our virtue makes me ashamed ; so sour and narrow, so thin and blind, virtue so vice-like. Then again, how trivial seem the contests of the abolitionist, whilst he aims merely at the_ circumstance of the I slave. Give the slave the least elevation of relig- / ious sentiment, and he is no slave ; you are the slave ; he not only in his humility feels his superior- ity, feels that much deplored condition of his to be a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too. He is LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 267 the master. The exaggeration which our young people make of his wrongs, characterizes them- selves. What are no trifles to them, they naturally think are no trifles to Pompey. We say then -that the reforming movement is sacred in its origin} in its management and details, timid and profane. These benefactors hope to raise man by improving his circumstances : by com- bination of that which is dead they hope to make something alive. In vain. By new infusions alone of the spirit by which he is made and directed, can he be re-made and reinforced. The sad Pestalozzi, who shared with all ardent spirits the hope of Eu- rope on the outbreak of the French Revolution, af- ter witnessing its sequel, recorded his conviction that "the amelioration of outward circumstances wiU be the effect but can never be the means of mental and moral improvement." Quitting now the class of actors, let us turn to see how it stands with the other class of which we spoke, namely, the studentej_ A new disease has fallen on the life of man. Every Age, like every human body, has its own distemper. Other times have had war, or famine, or a barbarism, domestic or bordering, as their an- tagonism. Onv forefathers walked in the world and went to their graves tormented with the fear of Sin and the terror of the Day of Judgment. (5. 268 LECTURE ON TEE TIMES. These terrors have lost their force, and our tor- ment is Unbelief, the Uncertainty as to what we ..ought to do ; the distrust of the value of what we do, and the distrust that the Necessity (which we all at last believe in) is fair and beneficent. Our EeHgion assumes the negative form of rejection. Out of love of the true, we repudiate the false; and the Religion is an abolishing criticism. A great perplexity hangs like a cloud on the brow of all cultivated persons, a certain imbecility in the best spirits, which distinguishes the period. We do not find the same trait in the Arabian, in the Hebrew, in Greek, Roman, Norman, English peri- ods; no, but in other men a natural firmness. The men did not see beyond the need of the hour. They planted their foot strong, and doubted nothing. We mistrust, every step we take. We find it the worst thing about time that we know not what to do with it. We are so sharp-sighted that we can neither work nor think, neither read Plato nor not read him. Then there is what is called a too intellectual tendency. Can there be too much intellect ? We have never met with any such excess. But the criticism which is levelled at the laws and man- ners, ends, in thought, without causing a new method. -of life. The genius of 'the dayHoes not incline to a deed, but to a beholding. It is not LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 269 that men do not wish to act ; they pine to be em- ployed, hut are paralyzed by the uncertainty what they should do. The j nadequacy of the work to the faculties is the painful perception which keeps them still. This happens to the best. Then, tal- ents bring their^jisuaLtemptations, and the current literature and poetry with perverse ingenuity draw us away from life to solitude and meditation. This could weU be borne, if it were great and iavolun- tary ; if the men were ravished by their thought, and hurried into ascetic extravagances. Society could then manage to release their shoulder from its wheel and grant them for a time this privi- lege of sabbath. But they are not so. Thinking, which was a rage, is become an art. The thinker , gives-me results,, and never invites me to be pres- ent with him at his invocation of truth, and to en- joy with him its proceeding into his mind. So little action amidst such audacious and. yet sincere profession, that we begin to doubt if that great revolution in the art of war, which has made it a game of posts instead of a game of battles, has not operated on Eeform ; whether this be not also a war of posts, a paper blockade, in which each party is to display the utmost resources of his spirit and belief, and no conflict occur, but the world shall take that course which the demonstra- tion of the truth shall indicate. 270 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. But we must pay for being too intellectual, as they call it. People are not as light-hearted for it. I think men never loved life less. I question if care and doubt ever wrote their names so legibly on the faces of any population. This Ennui, for which we Saxons had no name, this word of France has got a terrific significance. It shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light. Old age begins in the nursery, and before the young American is put into jacket and trowsers, he says, 'I want something which I never saw before;' and 'I wish I was not I.' I have seen the same gloom on the brow even of those adventurers from the iatel- lectual class who had dived deepest and with most success into active life. I have seen the authentic sign of anxiety and perplexity on the greatest forehead of the State. The canker worms have crawled to the topmost bough of the wild elm, and swing down from that. Is there less oxygen in the atmosphere? What has checked in this age the animal spirits which gave to our forefathers their bounding pulse ? But have a little patience with this melancholy humor. ..Theit_unkelie£_mses_out of a greater Belief ; their inaction out of a scorn of inadequate action. By the side of these men, the hot agita- tors have a certain cheap and ridiculous air ; they even look smaiierthan~ffie~otEers^ Of the two, I LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 271 owfi t like the speculators best. They have some piety which looE'wrffijSittto^a fair Future, un- profaned by rash and unequal attempts to realize it. And truly we shall find much to console us, when we consider the ca use of their imeasiness. It is the love of ^greatness, it is the need of harmony, the contrast of the dwarfish Actual with the exor- bitant Tdea. No man can compare the ideas and aspirations of the innovators of the present day with those of former periods, without feeling how great and high this criticism is. The revolutions that impend over society are not now from ambi- tion and rapacity, from impatience of one or an- other form of government, but from new modes of thinking, which shall reeompose society after a new order, which shall animate labor by love and science, which shall destroy the value of many kinds of property and replace all property within the dominion of reason and equity. There was never so great a thought laboring in the breasts of men as now. It almost seems as if what was aforetime spoken fabulously and hieroglyphically, was now spoken plainly, the doctrine, namely, of the indwell- ing of the Creator in man. The spiritualist wishes this only, that the spiritual principle should be suf- fered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possi- ble applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual, that is, anything 272 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. positive, dogmatic, or perso nal. The excellence of this class consists in this, that they have believed ; that, affirmiag the need of new and higher modes of living and action, they have abstained from the recommendation of low methods. Their fault is that they have stopped at the intellectual percep- tion ; that their wiU is not yet iaspired from the Fountain of Love. But whose fault is this ? and what a fault, and to what inquiry does it lead! We have come to that which is the spring of aU power, of beauty and virtue, of art and poetry ; and who shall tell us according to what law its in- spirations and its informations are given or with- holden ? I do not wish to be guilty of the narrowness and pedantry of inferring the tendency and genius of the Age from a few and insufficient facts or per- sons. Every age has a thousand sides and signs and tendencies, and it is only when surveyed from inferior points of view that great varieties of char- acter appear. Our time too is fuU of activifry and _ performance. Is there not somethiag comprehen- sive ia the grasp of a society which to great mechan- ical invention and the best iustitutions of property adds the most daring theories ; which explores the subtlest and most universal problems? At the manifest risk of repeating what every other Age has thought of itself, we might say we think the LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 273 Gen ius of this Age more pMosopHcal than any- other has heen, righter in its aims, truer, with less fear, less fable, less mixture of any sort. But turn it how we wiU, as we ponder this mean- ing of the times, every new thought drives us to the deep farj^that thp, TimPi is thft child of the Eter- nity. _The main interest which any aspects of t he Times can have for us, is the great spirit which gazes through them, the light which they can shed on the wonderful questions. What we are? and Whither we tend? We do not wish to be deceived. Here we. drift, like white sail across the wild ocean, how bright on the wave, now darkling in the trough of the sea ; — but from what port did we sail ? Who knows? Or to what port are we bound? Who knows ? There is no one to tell us but such poor weather-tossed^ mariners a^s ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some sig- nal, or floated to us some letter in a bottle from far. But what know they more than w^?_ They also Toundfhemselves on this wondrous sea. No ; from the older sailors, nothing. Over aU their speaking- trumpets, the gray sea and the loud winds answer. Not ia us ; not in Time. Where then but in Our- selves, where but ia that Thought through which we communicate with absolute nature, and are made aware that whilst we shed the dust of which we are built, grain by grain, tiU it is all gone, the law VOL. I. 18 274 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. which clothes us with humanity remains anew? where but in the_intuitioiLS_ which are vouchsafed us from within, shall we learn the Truth ? Faith- less, faithless, we fancy that with the dust we de- part and are not, and do not know that the law and the perception of the law are at last one ; that only as much as the law enters us, becomes us, we are living men, — immortal with the immortality of this law. Underneath all these appearances lies that which is, that which lives, that which causes. This ever renewing generation of appearances rests on a reality, and a reality that is alive. To a true scholar the attraction of the aspects of nature, the departments of life, and the passages of his experience, is simply the information they yield him of this_supreme nature which lurks withia aU. That realityj^that caiSing force _is moral. The Moral Sentiment is but its other name. ~Il makes by its presence or absence right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, genius or depravation. As the gran- ite comes to the surface and towers into the highest mountains, and, if we dig down, we find it below the superficial strata, so in aU. the details of our domes- tic or civil life is hidden the eleniental_reality, which ever and anon comes to the surface, and forms the grand men, who are the leaders and examples, rather than the companions of the race. The gran- ite is curiously concealed under a thousand forma. LECTWRE ON THE TIMES. 275 tions and surfaces, under fertile soils, and grasses, and flowers, under well-manured, arable fields, and large towns and cities, but it makes the foundation of these, and is always indicating its presence by- slight but sure signs. So is it with the Life of our life ; so close does that also hide. I read it in glad and in weeping eyes ; I read it in the pride and in the humility of people ; it is recognized in every bargain and in every complaisance, in every criti- cism, and in all praise ; it is voted for at elections ; it wins the cause with juries ; it rides the stormy eloquence of the senate, sole victor; histories are written of it, holidays decreed to it ; statues, tombs, churches, built to its honor ; yet men seem to fear and to shun it when it comes barely to view in our immediate neighborhood. For that reality let us stand ; that let us serve, and for that speak. Only as far as iAa£_shines through them are these times or any tim es worth consideratioh. I wish to speak of the politics, ed- ucation, business, and religion around us without ceremony or false deference. You will absolve me from the charge of flippancy, or malignity, or the desire to say smart things at the expense of whom- soever, when you see that reality is all we prize, and that we are bound on our entrance into nature to speak for that. Let it not be recorded in our own memories that in this moment of the Eternity, 276 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. when we who were named by our names flitted across the light, we were afraid of any fact, or dis- graced the fair Day by a pusillanimous preference of our bread to our freedom. What is the scholar, what is the man for, but for hospitality to every new thought of his time? Have you leisure, power, property, friends ? You shall be the asylum and patron of every new thought, every unproven opin- ion, every untried project which proceeds out of good will and honest seeking. All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will of course at first de- fame what is noble ; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it: and the highest compliment man ever re- ceives from heaven is the sending to him its dis- guised and discredited angels. THE CONSEEVATIVE. A LECTUEB DELIVBKED AT THE MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, DECEMBER 9, 1841 THE CONSEEVATIVE. The two parties wHch divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the sub- ject of civil history. The conservative party estab- lished the reverend hierarchies and monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician and plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old us- age and accommodation to new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in all countries and times. The war rages not only in battle-fields, in national councils and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every man's bosom with opposing advantages every hour. On rolls the old world meantime, and now one, now the other gets the day, and stiU the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and^ot personalities. Such an irreconcilable antagonism of course must have a correspondent depth of seat in the hu- man constitution. It is the opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understand- 280 THE CONSERVATIVE. ing and tlie Reason. It is the primal antagonism, the appearance in trifles of the two poles of na- ture. There is a fragment of old fable which seems somehow to have been dropped from the current mythologies, which may deserve attention, as it ap- pears to relate to this subject. Saturn grew weary of sitting alone, or with none but the great Uranus or Heaven beholding him, and he created an oyster. Then he would act again, but he made nothing more, but went on creating the race of oysters. Then Uranus cried, ' A new work, O Saturn ! the old is not good again.' Saturn replied, ' I fear. There is not only the alternative of making and not making, but also of unmaking. Seest thou the great sea, how it ebbs and flows? so is it with me ; my power ebbs ; and if I put forth my hands, I shall not do, but imdo. Therefore I do what I have done ; I hold what I have got ; and so I resist Night and Chaos.' ' O Saturn,' replied Uranus, 'thou canst not hold thine own but by making more. Thy oysters are barnacles and cockles, and with the next flowing of the tide they will be pebbles and sea-foam.' ' I see,' rejoins Saturn, 'thou art in league with Night, thou art become an evil eye ; thou spakest from love ; now thy words smite me with hatred. THE CONSERVATIVE. 281 I appeal to Fate, must there not be rest ? ' — 'I appeal to Fate also,' said Uranus, ' must there not be motion ? ' — But Saturn was silent, and went on making oysters for a thousand years. After that, the word of Uranus came into his mind like a ray of the sun, and he made Jupiter ; and then he feared again ; and nature froze, the things that were made went backward, and to save the world, Jupiter slew his father Saturn. This may stand for the earliest account of a con- versation on politics between a Conservative and a Eadical which has come down to us. It is ever thus. It is the counteraction of the centripetal and the centrifugal forces. Innovation is the sa- lient energy ; Conservatism the pause on the last movement. 'That which is was made by God,' saith Conservatism. ' He is leaving that, he is en' tering this other,' rejoins Innovation. There is always a certain meanness in the argu- ment of conservatism, joined with a certain superi- ority in its fact. It affirms because it holds. Its fingers clutch the fact, and it will not open its eyes to see a better fact. The castle which conservatism is set to defend is the actual, state of things, good and bad. The project of innovation is the best possible state of things. Of course conservatism always has the worst of the argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that to 282 THE CONSERVATIVE. change would be to ileteriorate : it must saddle it- self with the mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny the ^possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet^?^ whilst iniiovation ^ always in the right, triumph- ant, attacking, and sure of final success. Conser- vatism stands on man's confessed limitations, re- form on his indisputable^ infinitude ; conservatism on circumstance, liberalism on power ; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame, the other to postpone all thiags to the man himself ; conservatism is debonair and social, reform is in- dividual and imperious. We are reformers in spring and summer, in autumn and winter we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, con- servers at night. Reform is affirmative, conserva- tism negative; conservatism goes for comfort, re- form for truth. Conservatism is more candid to behold another's worth; reform more disposed to maintain and increase its own. Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no inven- tion ; it is all meniory. Eeform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry. It makes a great dif- ference to your figure and to your thought whether your foot is advancing or receding. Conservatism never puts the foot forward ; in the hour when it does that, it is not establishment, but reform. Con- servatism tends to universal_seCTaing a nd treachery , THE CONSERVATIVE. 283 believes in a negative fate ; belie ves that men'a temper governs them ; that for me it avails not to trust in principles, they wiU faiL me, I must bend a little ; it distrusts nature ; it thinks there is a general law without a particular application, — ■ law for aU that does not include any one. Reform in its antagonism incHnes to asinine resistance, to kick with hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated jelf: conc eit ; it runs to a bodiless pretension, to un- natural refining and elevation which ends in hypoc- risy and sensual reaction. And so, whilst we do not go beyond general state- ments, it may be safely affirmed of these two meta- physical antagonists, that each is a good half, but an -impossible whole. Each exposes~the abuses of the other, but in a true society, in a true man, both must combin e^ Nature does not give the crown of its approbation, namely beauty, to any action or emblem or actor but to one which combines both these elements ; not to the rock which resists the waves from age to age, nor to the wave which lashes incessantly the rock, but the superior beauty is with the oak which stands with its hundred arms against the storms of a century, and grows every year like a sapling; or the river whidL ever flowing, yet is f oimd in the same bed from age to age ; or, greatest of all, the man who has subsisted for years amid the changes of nature, yet has distanced himself, so 284 TEE CONSERVATIVE. that when you rememher what he was, and see what he is, you say, What strides ! what a disparity is here ! Throughout nature the past combines in every creature with the present. Each of the convolu- tions of the sea-shell, each node and spine marks one year of the fish's life ; what was the mouth of the shell for one season, with the addition of new matter by the growth of the animal, becoming an ornamental node. The leaves and a shell of soft wood are all that the vegetation of this summer has made ; but the solid columnar stem, which lifts that bank of foliage into the air, to draw the eye and to cool us with its shade, is the gift and legacy of dead and buried years. In nature, each of these elements being always present, each theory has a natural support. As we take our stand on Necessity, or on Ethics, shall we go for the conservative, or for the reformer. ^If we read the world historically, we shall say. Of all the ages, the present hour and circumstance is the cu- mulative result ; this is the best throw of the dice of nature that has yet been, or that is yet possible. If we see it from Jhe side of WiU, or the Moral Sentiment, we shall accuse the Past and' the Pres- ent, and require the impossible of the Future. But although this bifold fact lies thus united in real nature, and so united that no man can con- THE CONSERVATIVE. 285 tiniie to exist in whom both these elements do not work, yet men are not philosophers, but are rather very foolish children, who, by reason of their par- tiality, see everything in the most absurd manner, and are the victims at all times of the nearest ob- ject. There is even no phUosopher who is a phi- losopher at aU times. Our experience, our percep- tion is conditioned by the need to acquire in parts and in succession, that is, with every truth a cer- tain falsehood. As this is the invariable method of our training, we must give it allowance, and suffer men to learn as they have done for six millenni- ums, a word at a time; to pair off into insane par- ties, and learn the amount of truth each knows by the denial of an equal amount of truth. For the present, then, to come at what sum is attainar ble to us, we must even hear the parties plead as parties. That which is best about conser vatism, that which, though it cannot be expressed in detail, in- spires reverence in all, is the Inevitable . There is the question not only what the conservative says for himself, but, why must he say it ? What insur- mountable fact binds him to that side ? Here is the fact which men c all Fate, a nd fate in dread de- grees, fate behind fate, not to be disposed of by the consideration that the Conscience commands this or that, but necessitating the question whether the fao- 286 THE CONSERVATIVE. ulties of man ■will play him true in resisting the facts of universal experience ? For although the commands of the Conscience are essentially abso- lute, they are historically limitary. Wisdom does not seek a literal rectitude, but an useful, that is a conditioned one, such a one as the faculties of man and the constitution of things will warrant. The reformer, the partisan, loses himself in driving to the utmost some specialty of right conduct, until his own nature and all nature resist him; but Wis- dom attempts nothing enormous and dispropor- tioned to its powers, nothing which it cannot per- form or nearly perform. We have all a certain in- tellection or presentiment of reform existing in the mind, which does not yet descend into the charac- ter, and those who throw themselves blindly on this lose themselveg. Whatever they attempt in that direction, fails, and reacts suicidally on the actor himself. This is the penalty of having transcended nature. For the existing world is not Si dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream ; nei- ther is it a disease ; but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born. Reform converses with possibilities, perchance with impossibilities ; but here is sacred fact. This also was true, or it could not be : it had life in it, or it could not have existed ; it has life in it, or it could not continue. Your schemes may be feasible, or TEE CONSERVATIVE. 287 may not be, but this has the endorsement of nature and a long friendship and cohabitation with the powers of nature. This will stand until a better cast of the dice is made. The contest between the Future and the Past is one between Divinity enter- ing and Divinity departing. You are welcome to try your experiments, and, if you can, to displace the actual order by that ideal republic you an- nounce, for nothing but God will expel God. But plainly the burden of proof must lie with the pro- jector. We hold to this, until you can demonstrate something better. The system of property and law goes back for its origin to barbarous and sacred times ; it is the fruit of the same mysterious cause as the mineral or animal world. There is a natural sentiment and prepossession in favor of age, of ancestors, of barbarous and aboriginal usages, which is a hom- age to the element of necessity and divinity which is in them. The respect for the old names of places, of mountains and streams, is universal. The Indian and barbarous name can never be sup- pknted without loss. The ancients teU us that the gods loved the Ethiopians for their stable customs ; and the Egyptians and Chaldeans, whose origin could not be explored, passed among the junior tribes of Greece and Italy for sacred nations. Moreover, so deep is the foundation of the ex- 288 THE CONSERVATIVE. isting social system, that it leaves no one out of it. We may be partial, but Fate is not. AH men have their root in it. You who quarrel with the arrangements of society, and are willing to embroil aU, and risk the indisputable good that exists, for the chance of better, live, move, and have your being in this, and your deeds contradict your words every day. For as you cannot jump from the ground without using the resistance of the ground, nor put out the boat to sea without shov- ing from the shore, nor attain liberty without re- jecting obligation, so you are under the necessity of^using the Actual order ofTihingsT' in order to disuse it ; to live by it, whilst yo u wish t o take away its life. The past has baked your loaf, and mtEFsErength of its bread you would break up the oven. But you are betrayed by your own nature. You also are conservatives. However men please to style themselves, I see no otEeFthan a conservativ&^ ~"party7 ^ YoulifeTiot-only^4deTrticar with us in your needs, but also in your methods and aims. You quarrel with my conservatism, b ut it is to build u p one of your .own ; it wiU have a new beginning, but the same course and end, the same trials, the same pa,ssions_^q,mon g the lo vers of the newX.Q^-L „sep¥e-4hafr-4ljfij:ais^ jealousy .of_tlie.^ewest, and that the seceder from the seceder is as damnable as the pope himself. THE CONSERVATIVE. 289 On these and the like grounds of general state- ment, conservatism plants itself without danger of being displaced. Especially before this personal appeal, the innovator must confess his weakness, must confess that no man is to be found good enough to be entitled to stand champion for the principle. But when this great tendency comes to practical encounters, and is challenged by young men, to whom it is no abstraction, but a fact of hunger, distress, and exclusion from opportunities, it must needs seem injurious. The youth, of course, is an innovator by the fact of his birth. There he stands, newly born on the planet, a, universal beg- gar, with aU the reason of things, one would say, on his side. In his first consideration how to feed, clothe, and warm himself, he is met by warnings on every hand that this thing and that thing have owners, and he must go elsewhere. Then he says, ' If I am born in the earth, where is my part ? have the goodness, gentlemen of this world, to show me my wood-lot, where I may fell my wood, my field where to plant my com, my pleasant ground where to build my cabin.' ' Touch any wood, or field, or house-lot, on your peril,' cry all the gentlemen of this world ; ' but you may come and work in ours, for us, and we wiU give you a piece of bread,' ' And what is that peril ? ' VOL. I. 19 290 THE CONSERVATIVE. 'Knives and muskets, if we meet you in the actj imprisonment, if we find you afterward.' ' And by what authority, kind gentlemen ? ' ' By our law.' ' And your law, — is it just? ' ' As just for you as it was for us. We wrought for others under this law, and got our lands so.' ' I repeat the question. Is your law just ? ' ' Not quite just, but necessary. Moreover, it is juster now than it was when we were born ; we have made it milder and more equal.' ' I will none of your law,' returns the youth ; ' it encumbers me. I cannot understand, or so much as spare time to read that needless library of your laws. Nature has sufficiently provided me with rewards and sharp penalties, to bind me not to transgress. Like the Persian noble of old, I ask " that I may neither command nor obey." I do not wish to enter into your complex social sys- tem. I shall serve those whom I can, and they who can wiU serve me. I shall seek those whom I love, and shun those whom I love not, and what more can all your laws render me ? ' With equal earnestness and good faith, replies to this plaintiff an upholder of the establishment, a man of many virtues : 'Your opposition is feather-brained and over- fine. Yoimg man, I have no skUl to talk with THE CONSERVATIVE. 291 you, but look at me ; I have risen early and sat late, and toiled honestly and painfully for very many years. I never dreamed about methods ; I laid my bones to, and drudged for the good I pos- sess ; it was not got by fraud, nor by luck, but by work, and you must show me a warrant like these stubborn facts in your own fidelity and labor, be- fore I suffer you, on the faith of a few fine words, to ride into my estate, and claim to scatter it as your own.' ' Now you touch the heart of the matter,' re- plies the reformer. ' To that fidelity and labor I pay homage. I am unworthy to arraign your man- ner of living, until I too have been tried. But I should be more unworthy if I. did not teU you why I cannot walk in your steps. I find this vast net- work, which you cal]_groperi^„exteiuifid- over the whole planet. I cannot occupy the bleakest crag of the White Hills or the Alleghany Range, but some man or • corporation steps up to me to show me that it is his. Now, though I am very peace- able, and on my private account could well enough die, since it appears there was some mistake in my creation, and that I have been missent to this earth, where aU the seats were already taken, — yet I feel eaUed upon in behalf of rational nature, which I represent, to declare to you my opinion that if the Earth is yours so also is it mine. AU youi- aggre- 292 THE CONSERVATIVE. gate existences are less to me a fact than is my own ; as I am born to the Earth, so the Earth is given to me, what I want of it to tDl and to plant ; nor could I, without pusillanimity, omit to claim so much. I must not only have a name to live, I must Hve. My genius leads me to build a differ- ent manner of life from any of yours. I cannot then spare you the whole world. I love you bet- ter. I must teU you the truth practically ; and take that which you call yours. It is God's world and mine; yours as much as you want, mine as much as I want. Besides, I know your ways ; I know the symptoms of the disease. . To the end of your power you wiU serve this lie which cheats you. Your want is a gulf which the possession of the broad earth would not fill. Yonder sun in heaven you would pluck down from shining on the uni- verse, and make him a property and privacy, if you could ; and the moon and the north star you would quickly have occasion for in your closet and bed-chamber. What you do not want for use, you crave for ornament, and what your convenience could spare, your pride cannot.' On the other hand, precisely the defence which was set up for the British Constitution, namely that with all its admitted defects, rotten boroughs and monopolies, it worked well, and substantial justice was somehow done ; the wisdom and the TEE CONSERVATIVE. 293 worth did get into parliament, and every interest did by right, or might, or sleight, get represented ; — the same defence is set up for the existing insti- tutions. They are not the best ; they are not just ; and in respect to you, personally, O brave young man ! they cannot be justified. They have, it is most true, left you no acre for your own, and no law but our law, to the ordaining of which you were no party. But they do answer the end, they are really friendly to the good, unfriendly to the bad ; they second the industrious and the kind ; they foster genius. They really have so much flexibility as to afford your talent and character, on the whole, the same chance of demonstration and success which they might have if there was no law and no property. It is trivial and merely superstitious to say that nothing is given you, no outfit, no exhibition ; for in this institution of credit, which is as universal as honesty and promise in the human countenance, always some neighbor stands ready to be bread and land and tools and stock to the young adventurer. And if in any one respect they have come short, see what ample retribution of good they have made. They have lost no time and spared no expense to coUect libraries, museums, galleries, colleges, palaces, hospitals, observatories, cities. The ages have not been idle, nor kings slack, nor the rich nig^ 294 THE CONSERVATIVE. gardly. Have we not atoned for this small offence (which we could not help) of leaving you no right in the soU, by this splendid indemnity of ancestral and national wealth ? Would you have been born like a gipsy in a hedge, and preferred your free- dom on a heath, and the range of a planet which had no shed or boscage to cover you from sun and wind, — to this towered and citied world ? to this world of Rome, and Memphis, and Constantinople, and Vienna, and Paris, and London, and New York ? For thee Naples, Florence, and Venice ; for thee the fair Mediterranean, the sunny Adri- atic ; for thee both Indies smile ; for thee the hos- pitable North opens its heated palaces under the polar circle ; for thee roads have been cut in every direction across the land, and fleets of floating pal- aces with every security for strength and provision for luxury, swim by sail and by steam through aU the waters of this world. Every island for thee has a town ; every town a hotel. Though thou wast born landless, yet to thy industry and thrift and small condescension to the established usage, — scores of servants are swarming ia every strange place with cap and knee to thy command ; scores, nay hundreds and thousands, for thy wardrobe, thy table, thy chamber, thy library, thy leisure ; and every whim is anticipated and served by the best ability of the whole population of each country. THE CONSERVATIVE. 295 The king on the throne governs for thee, and the judge judges ; the barrister pleads, the farmer tills, the joiner hammers, the postman rides. Is it not exaggerating a trifle to insist on a formal acknowl- edgment of your claims, when these substantial ad- vantages have been secured to you ? Now can your children be educated, your labor turned to their ad- vantage, and its fruits secured to them after your death. It is frivolous to say you have no acre, be» cause you have not a mathematically measured piece of land. Providence takes care that you shall have a place, that you are waited for, and come accred- ited ; and as soon as you put your gift to use, you shall have acre or acre's worth according to your exhibition of desert, — acre; if you need land ; — acre's worth, if you prefer to draw, or carve, or make shoes or wheels, to the tilling of the soil. Besides, it might temper your indignation at the supposed wrong which society has done you, to keep the question before you, how society got into this predicament ? Who put things on this false basis ? No single man, but aU men. No man vol- untarily and knowingly ; but it is the result of that degree of culture there is in the planet. The or- der of things is as good as the character of the pop- ulation permits. Consider it as the work of a great and beneficent and progressive necessity, which, from the first pulsation in the first animal 296 THE CONSERVATIVE. life, up to the present high culture of the best na- tions, has advanced thus far. Thank the rude fos- ter-mother though she has taught you a better wis- dom than her own, and has set hopes in your heart which shall be history in the next ages. You are yourself the result of this manner of living, this foul compromise, this vituperated Sodom. It nour- ished you with care and love on its breast, as it had nourished many a lover of the right and many a poet, and prophet, and teacher of men. Is it so ir- remediably bad ? Then again, i£ the mitigations are considered, do not all the mischiefs virtually vanish? The form is bad, but see you not how every personal character reacts on the form, and makes it new ? A strong person makes the law and custom null before his own will. Then the principle of love and truth reappears in the strict- est courts of fashion and property. Under the richest robes, in the darlings of the selectest circles of European or American aristocracy, the strong heart will beat with love of mankind, with impa- tience of accidental distinctions, with the desire to achieve its own fate and make every ornament it wears authentic and real. Moreover, as we have already shown that there is no pure reformer, so it is to be considered that there is no pure conservative, no man who from the beginning to the end of his life maintains the THE CONSERVATIVE. 297 defective institutions ; but lie who sets Ms face like a flint against every novelty, when approached in the confidence of conversation, in the presence of friendly and generous persons, has also his gracious and relenting moments, and espouses for the time the cause of man ; and even if this be a shortlived emotion, yet the remembrance of it in private hours mitigates his selfishness and compliance with cus- tom. The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set forth to go to Eome to re- form the corruption of mankind. On his way he encountered many travellers who greeted him cour- teously, and the cabins of the peasants and the caslles of the lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. ' What ! ' he said, ' and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with cunning sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books about 298 THE CONSERVATIVE. you ? ' — ' Look at our pictures and books,' they said, ' and we will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons ; and last evening our family was collected and our husbands and brothers discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times.' Then came in the men, and they said, ' What cheer, brother ? Does thy convent want gifts ? ' Then the friar Bernard went home swiftly with other thoughts than he brought, saying, ' This way of life is wrong, yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers ; what can I do ? ' The reformer concedes that these mitigations ex- ist, and that if he proposed comfort, he should take sides with the establishment. Your words are excellent, but they do not teU the whole. Conser- vatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunniag juggle in riches. I observe that they take somewhat for everything they give. I look bigger, but am less ; I have more clothes, but am not so warm ; more armor, but less courage ; more books, but less wit. What you say of your planted, builded and decorated world is true enough, and I gladly avail myself of its convenience ; yet I have remarked that what holds in particular, holds in THE CONSERVATIVE. 299 general, that the plant Man does not require for his most glorious flowering this pomp of prepara- tion and convenience, but the thoughts of some beggarly Homer who strolled, God knows when, in the infancy and barbarism of the old world ; the gravity and sense of some slave Moses who leads away his fellow slaves from their masters ; the con- templation of some Scythian Anacharsis ; thfi erect, formidable valor of some Dorian townsmen in the town of Sparta ; the vigor of Clovis the Frank, and Alfred the Saxon, and Alaric the Goth, and Ma- homet, Ali and Omar the Arabians, Saladin the Curd, and Othman the Turk, sufficed to build what you call society on the spot and in the instant when the sound mind in a sound body appeared. Rich and fine is your dress, O conservatism ! your horses are of the best blood ; your roads are weU cut and well paved ; your pantry is full of meats and your cellar of wines, and a very good state and condi- tion are you for gentlemen and ladies to live under ; but every one of these goods steals away a drop of my blood. — Lwant the_ neceasity of supplying my _own_ wants. _ All this costly culture of yours is not necessary. Greatness does not need it. Yonder peasant, who sits neglected there in a corner, car- ties a whole revolution of man and nature in his head, which shall be a sacred history to some future ages. For man is the end of nature ; nothing so 300 THE CONSERVATIVE. easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he ; no moss, no lichen is so easily born ; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extem- pore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where aU was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love. These considerations, urged by those whose char- acters and whose fortunes are yet to be formed, must needs command the sympathy of all reasona- ble persons. But beside that charity which should make aU adult persons interested for the youth, and engage them to see that he has a free field and fair play on his entrance into life, we are bound to see that the society of which we compose a part, does not permit the formation or continuance of views and practices injurious to the honor and wel- 'fare of mankind. The objection to conservatism, 'when embodied in a party, is that in its love of acts it hates principles ; it lives in the senses, not in j truth ; it sacrifices to despair ; it goes for available- I ness in its candidate, not for worth ; and for expe- ( diency in its measures, and not for the right. Un- der pretence of allowing for friction, it makes so many additions and supplements to the machine of society that it will play smoothly and softly, but will no longer grind any grist. THE CONSERVATIVE. 301 The conservative party in the universe concedes that the r adical wo uld talk sufficiently to the pur- pose, if we were still in the garden of Eden ; he legislates for man as he ought to be ; his theory is right, but he ma kes no allowance for friction .; and this omission makes his whole doctrine false. The idealist retorts that the conservative falls into a far more noxious error in the other extreme. The con- s ervative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospitalpEFtotal legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flan- nels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea. Sickness gets organized as well as health, the vice as well as the virtue. Now that a vicious system of trade has existed so long, it has stereo- typed itself in the human generation, and misers are born. And now that sickness has got such a foothold, leprosy has grown cunning, has got into the baUot-box ; the lepers outvote the clean ; so- ciety has resolved itself into a Hospital Committee, and air its iawB are quarantine. If any man resist and set up aTfooEiE' bope he has entertained as good against the general despair. Society frowns on him, shuts him out of her opportunities, her granar ries, her refectories, her water and bread, and will serve him a sexton's turn. Conservatism takes, as low a view of every part of human action and pas- sion. Its religion is just as'1Bad7"a lozenge for the 302 THE CONSERVATIVE. sick ; a dolorous tune to beguile the distemper ; mitigations of pain by pillows and anodynes; al- ways mitigations, never remedies ; pardons for sin, funeral honors, -r-never self-help, renovation, and virtue. Its social ancl political action has no better aim ; to keep out wind and weather, to bring the week and year about, and make the world last our day ; not to sit on the world and steer it ; not to sink the memory of the past in the glory of a new and more excellent creation ; a timid cobbler and patcher, it degrades whatever it touches. The cause of education is urged in this country with the ut- most earnestness, — on what ground? Why on this, that the people have the power, and if they are not instructed to sympathize with the intelligent, read- ing, trading, and governing class ; inspired with a, taste for the same competitions and prizes, they will upset the fair pageant of Judicature, and per- haps lay a hand on the sacred muniments of wealth itself, and new distribute the land. Religion is taught in the same spirit. The contractors who were building a road out of Baltimore, some , years ago, f ovmd the Irish laborers quarrelsome and re- fractory to a degree that embarrassed the agents and seriously interrupted the progress of the work. The corporation were advised to call off the police and build a Catholic chapel, which they did ; the priest presently restored order, and the work went THE CONSERVATIVE. 303 on prosperously. Such liiiits, be sure, are too valu- able to be lost. If you do not value the Sabbath, or other religious institutions, give yourself no con- cern about maintaining them. They have already acquired a market value as conservators of prop- erty ; and if priest and church-member should fail, the chambers of commerce and the presidents of the banks, the very innholders and landlords of the county, would muster with fury to their support. Of course, religion in such hands loses its es- sence. Instea d of t hat reliance which thejoul _sug' gests. on jthe eternity of truth and duty, men are misled into a reliance on institutions, which, the moment .they_cease to be the instantaneo us c rea-^ tions of the devout sentiment, are worthless. Re- ligion among the low becomes low. As it loses its truth, it loses credit with the sagacious. They de- tect the falsehood of the preaching, but when they say so, aU good citizens cry. Hush ; do not weaken the State, do not take off the strait jacket from dangerous persons. Every honest fellow must keep up the hoax the best he can ; must patronize provi- dence and piety, and wherever he sees anything that wiU keep men amused, schools or churches or poetry or picture-galleries or music, or what not, he must cry " Hist-arboy," and urge the game on. What a compliment we pay to the good Spikit with our superserviceable zeal ! 304 TBE CONSERVATIVE. But not to balance reasons for and against the establishment any longer, and if it still be asked in this necessity of partial organization, which party on the whole has the highest claims on our sympathy, — I bring it home to the private heart, where all such questions must have their final arbi- trement. How will every strong and generous mind choose its ground, — with the defenders of the old ? or with the seekers of the new ? Wliich is that state which promises to edify a great, brave, and beneficent man ; to throw him on his resources, and tax the strength of his character ? On which part will each of us find himself in the hour of health and of aspiration ? I understand well the respect of mankind for war, because that breaks up the Chinese stagnation of society, and demonstrates the personal merits of all men. A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is so^ar^valuable that it pu ts every man on trial. The man of principle is known as such, and even in the fury of faction is respected. In the civil wars of France, Montaigne alone, among all the French gentry, kept his castle gates unbarred, and made his personal integrity as good at least as a regiment. The man~of ^courage and resources is shown, and the effeminate ^ind base person. Those who rise above war, and those who fall below it, it easily discriminates, as well as those THE CONSERVATIVE. 305 who, accepting its rude conditions, keep their own head by their own sword. But in peace and a commercial state we depend, not as we ought, on our knowledge and all men's knowledge that we are honest men, but we cow- ardly lean on the virtue of others. For it is al- ways at last the virtue of some men in the society, which keeps the law in any reverence and power. Is there not something shameful that I should owe my peaceful occupancy of my house and field, not to the knowledge of my countrymen that I am use- ful, but to their respect for sundry other repu- table persons, I know not whom, whose joint virtue stiU keeps the law in good odor ? Tt will Tifivgrjng,kfi any difference t o a hero what the l aws are. His greatness will shme and accom- plish itself unto the end, whether they second him or not. If he have earned his bread by drudgery, and in the narrow and crooked ways which were all an evil law had left him, he will make it at least honorable by his expenditure. Of the past he wiU take no heed; for its wrongs he will not Aold himself responsible : he will say. All the mean- ness of my progenitors shaU not bereave me of the power to make this hour and company fair and for- tunate. Whatsoever streams of power and com- modity flow to me, shall of me acquire healing vir- tue, and become fountains of safety. Cannot I too VOL. I. 20 306 THE CONSERVATIVE. descend a Redeemer into nature ? Whosover here- after shall name my name, shall not record a male- factor but a benefactor in the earth. If there be power in good intention, in fidelity, and in toU, the north wind shall be purer, the stars in heaven shall glow with a kindlier beam, that I have lived. I am primarily engaged to myself to be a public ser- 1 vant of all the gods, to demonstrate to all men that 1 there is intelligence and good will at the heart of things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings. These are my engagements ; how can your law further or hinder me in what I shall do to men? On the other hand, these dispositions establish their relations to me. Wherever there is worth, I shall be greeted. Wherever there are men, are the objects of my study and love. Sooner or later aU men will be my friends, and will testify in all methods the energy of their regard. I cannot thank your law for my protection. I protect it. It is not in its power to protect me. It is my busi- ness to make myself revered. I depend on my honor, my labor, and my dispositions for my place in the affections of mankind, and not on any con- ventions or parchments of yours. But if I allow myself in derelictions and become idle and dissolute, I quickly come to love the pro- tection of a strong law, because I feel no title in myself to my advantages. To the intemperate and TEE CONSERVATIVE. 307 covetous person no love flows; to him mankind would pay no rent, no dividend, if force were once relaxed ; nay, if they could give their verdict, they would say that his self-indulgence and his oppres- sion deserved punishment from society, and not that rich board and lodging he now enjoys. The law acts then as a screen of his unworthiness, and makes him worse the longer it protects him. In conclusion, to return from this alternation of partial views to the high platform of universal and necessary history, it is a happiness for mankind that innovation has got on so far and has so free a field before it. The boldness of the hope men en- tertain transcends all former experience. It calms and cheers them with the picture of a simple and equal life of truth and piety. And this hope flow- ered on what tree ? It was not imported from the stock of some celestial plant, but grew here on the wild crab of conservatism. It is much that this old and vituperated system of thiags has borne so fair a child. It predicts that amidst a planet peo- pled with conservatives, one Reformer may yet be born. THE TEANSCENDENTALIST. A LECTURE READ AT THE M4S0NIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, JANUARY, 1842. THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. The first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times. The light is always identical in its compo- sition, but it falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is first revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is formless, but in theirs ; in like man- ner, thought only appears in the objects it classi- fies. What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects. Materialists and Idealists ; the first class founding on experience, the second on con- sciousness ; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say. The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot teU. The materi- alist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the 312 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on in. spiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other af- firms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and thei^ asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt ; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a na- tive superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken ; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every materialist wiU be an idealist ; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist. The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He does not deny the sensuous fact : by no means ; but he wiU not see that alone. He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact which nearly concerns him. This manner of looking at things transfers every object in nature THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 313 from an independent and anomalous position with- out there, into the consciousness. Even the materi- alist Condillac, perhaps the most logical expounder of materialism, was constrained to say, " Though we should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out of ourselves ; it is always our own thought that we perceive." What more could an idealist say ? The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensa- tion, mocks at fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and heUeves that his life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but knows where he stands, and what he does. Yet how easy it is to show him. that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before his sense. The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house or Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube cor- responding to the angles of his structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither, — a bit of bullet, now 314 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. glimmering, now darkling througli a small cubio space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of empti- ness. And this wild balloon, in which his whole venture is embarked, is a just symbol of his whole state and faculty. One thing at least, he says, is certain, and does not give me the headache, that figures do not lie ; the multiplication table has been hitherto found unimpeachable truth ; and, more- over, if I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find it again to-morrow ; — • but for these thoughts, I know not whence they are. They change and pass away. But ask him why he believes that an uniform ex- perience wiU continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith in his figures, and he will per- ceive that his mental fabric is built up on just as strange and quaking foimdations as his proud edi- fice of stone. In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance. The materialist respects sensible masses. Society, Government, social art and luxury, every establishment, every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent of space, or amount of objects, every social action. The idealist has another measure, which is metaphysical, namely the rank which things themselves take in his conscious. THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 815 ness ; not at all the size or appearance. Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena. Although in his action overpowered by the laws of action, and so, warmly cooperating with men, even prefer- ring them to himself, yet when he speaks scientif- ically, or after the order of thought, he is con- strained to degrade persons into representatives of truths. He does not respect labor, or the products of labor, namely property, otherwise than as a manifold symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidel- ity of details the laws of being ; he does not respect government, except as far as it reiterates the law of his mind ; nor the church, nor charities, nor arts, for themselves ; but hears, as at a vast distance, what they say, as if his consciousness would speak to him through a pantomimic scene. His thought, . — that is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing perpetually outward from an in- visible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard aU things as having a subjective or relative exis- tence, relative to that aforesaid Unknown Centre of him. From this transfer of the world into the con- sciousness, this beholding of aU things in the mind, 316 THE TRANS CENDENTALTST. follow easily liis whole ethics. It is simpler to bo self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude. Everything real is self-existent. Everything divine shares the self- existence of Deity. All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought, of those that are dependent and of those that are in- dependent of your will. Do not cumber yourself with fruitless pains to mend and remedy remote ef- fects ; let the soul be erect, and all things will go well. You think me the child of my circumstances : I make my circumstance. Let any thought or mo- tive of mine be different from that they are, the difference vsdll transform my condition and econ- omy. I — this thought which is called I — is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world be- trays the shape of the mould. You call it the power of circumstance, but it is the power of me. Am I in harmony with myself ? my position will seem, to you just and commanding. Am I vicious and insane ? my fortunes wUl seem to you obscure and descending. As 1 am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act ; Csesar's history will paint out Ca9> sar. Jesus acted so, because he thought so. I do THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 317 not wish to overlook or to gainsay any reality ; I say I make my circumstance ; but if you ask me, Whence am I ? I feel like other men my relation to that Fact which cannot be spoken, or defined, nor even thought, but which exists, and wUl exist. The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connec- tion of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power ; he believes in inspi- ration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspirit- ual ; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit than its own. In action he easily incurs the charge of antino- mianism by his avowal that he, who has the Law- giver, may with safety not only neglect, but even contravene every written commandment. In the play of OtheUo, the expiring Desdemona absolves her husband of the murder, to her attendant Emilia. Afterwards, when Emilia charges him with the crime, Othello exclaims, " You heard her say herself it was not L" Enulia replies, 318 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. " The more angel slie, and thou the blacker devil." Of this fine incident, Jacobi, the Transcendental moralist, makes use, with other parallel instances, in his reply to Fichte. Jacobi, refusing aU meas- ure of right and wrong except the determinations of the private spirit, remarks that there is no crime but has sometimes been a virtue. " I," he says, " am that atheist, that godless person who, in op- position to an imaginary doctriae of calculation, would lie as the dying Desdemona lied ; would lie and deceive, as Pylades when he personated Ores- tes ; would assassinate like Timoleon ; would per- jure myself like Epaminondas and John de Witt ; I would resolve on suicide like Cato ; I would com- mit sacrilege with David ; yea, and pluck ears of corn on the Sabbath, for no other reason than that I was fainting for lack of food. For I have assure ance in myself that in pardoning these faults ac- cording to the letter, man exerts the sovereign right which the majesty of his being confers on him ; he sets the seal of his divine nature to the grace he ac- cords." ^ In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human thought or virtue, any reliance on the vast, the unknown ; any presentiment, any ex- travagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it as most in nature. The oriental mind has always 1 Coleridge's Translation. THE TRANS CENDENTALIST. 319 tended to this largeness. Buddhism is an expres- sion of it. The Buddhist, who thanks no man, who says " Do not flatter your benefactors," but who, in his conviction that every good deed can by no pos- sibility escape its reward, wiU not deceive the ben- efactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a Transeendentalist. You will see by this sketch that there is no such thing as a Transcendental party ; that there is no pure Transeendentalist ; that we know of none but prophets and heralds of such a philosophy ; that all who by strong bias of nature have leaned to the spiritual side in doctrine, have stopped short of their goaL We have had many harbingers and forerunners ; but of a purely spiritual life, history has afforded no example. I mean we have yet no man who has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angels' food ; who, trusting to his sentiments, found life made of miracles ; who, working for uni- versal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how ; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how, and yet it was done by his own hands. Only in the instinct of the lower animals we find the sug- gestion of the methods of it, and something higher than our understanding. The squirrel hoards nuts and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without self- ishness or disgrace. 820 THE TRANS CENDENTALIST. Shall we say then that Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith ; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the sat- isfaction of his wish ? Nature is transcendental, exists primarily, necessarily, ever works and ad- vances, yet takes no thought for the morrow. Man owns the dignity of the life which throbs around him, in chemistry, and tree, and animal, and in the involim.tary fimctions of his own body ; yet he is balked when he tries to fling himself into this en- chanted circle, where all is done without degrada- tion. Yet genius and virtue predict in man the same absence of private ends and of condescension to circumstances, united with every trait and talent of beauty and power. This way of thinking, falling on Roman times, made Stoic philosophers ; falling on despotic times, made patriot Catos and Brutuses; falling on su- perstitious times, made prophets and apostles ; on popish times, made protestants and ascetic monks, preachers of Faith against the preachers of Works; on prelatical times, made Puritans and Quakers ; and falling on Unitarian and commercial times, makes the peculiar shades of Idealism which we know. It is well known to most of my audience that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of TBE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 321 Transcendental from the use of that term by Im- manuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously ia the experience of the senses, by show- ing that there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by expe- rience, but through which experience was acquired ; that these were intuitions of the mind itself ; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man's thinking have given vogue to his nomenclar ture, in Europe and America, to that extent that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day Transcenden- tal. Although, as we have said, there is no pure Transcendentahst, yet the tendency to respect the intuitions and to give them, at least in our creed, aU authority over our experience, has deeply col- ored the conversation and poetry of the present day ; and the history of genius and of religion in these times, though impure, and as yet not incar- nated in any powerful individual, will be the his- tory of this tendency. It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and relig- ious persons withdraw themselves from the common VOL. I. 21 322 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain soli- tary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold themselves aloof : they feel the dispro- portion between their faculties and the work of- fered them, and they prefer to ramble in the coun- try and perish of ennui, to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can pro- pose to them. They are striking work, and crying out for somewhat worthy to do! What they do is done only because they are overpowered by the humanities that speak on all sides ; and they con- sent to such labor as is open to them, though to their lofty dream the writing of Iliads or Hamlets, or the building of cities or empires seems drudg- ery. Now every one must do after his-Mnd, be he asp or angel, and these must. The question which a wise man and a student of modern history will ask, is, what that Mnd is? And truly, as in ecclesias- tical history we take so much pains to know what the Gnostics, what the Essenes, what the Mani- chees, and what the Reformers believed, it would not misbecome us to inquire nearer home, what these companions and contemporaries of ours think and do, at least so f^r as these thoughts and actions appear to be not accidental and personal, but com- THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 323 mon to many, and tlie inevitable flower of the Tree of Time. Our American literature and spiritual history are, we confess, in the optative mood ; but whoso knows these seething brains, these admirable radicals, these unsocial worshippers, these talkers who talk the sun and moon away, will believe that this heresy cannot pass away without leaving its mark. They are lonely ; the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely ; they repel influences ; they shun general society ; they incline to shut them- selves in their chamber in the house, to live ia the country rather than ia the town, and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude. Society, to be sure, does not like this very well ; it saith. Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world ; he declares all to be unfit to be his companions ; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate. Meantime, this retirement does not proceed from any whim on the part of these separators ; but if any one will take pains to talk with them, he will find that this part is chosen both from temperament and from principle ; with some imwiUingness too, and as a choice of the less of two evils ; for these persons are not by nature melancholy, sour, and unsocial, — they are not stockish or brute, — but joyous, susceptible, affectionate ; they have even more than others a great wish to be loved. Like 324 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. the young Mozart, they are rather ready to cry ten times a day, " But are you sure you love me ? " Nay, if they tell you their whole thought, they will own that love seems to them the last and highest gift of nature ; that there are persons whom in their hearts they daily thank for existing, — per- sons whose faces are perhaps unknown to them, but whose fame and spirit have penetrated their soli- tude, — and for whose sake they wish to exist. To behold the beauty of another character, which in- spires a new interest in our own ; to behold the beauty lodged iu a human being, with such vivacity of apprehension that I am instantly forced home to inquire if I am not deformity itself ; to behold in another the expression of a love so high that it assures itself, — assures itself also to me against every possible casualty except my unworthiness ; — these are degrees on the scale of human happi- ness to which they have ascended ; and it is a fidel- ity to this sentiment which has made common as- sociation distasteful to them. They wish a just and even fellowship, or none. They cannot gossip with you, and they do not wish, as they are sincere and religious, to gratify any mere curiosity which you may entertain. Like fairies, they do not wish to be spoken of. Love me, they say, but do not ask who is my cousin and my uncle. If you do not need to hear my thought, because you can read THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 325 it in my face and behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset. If you cannot divine it, you would not understand what I say. I wiU not molest myself for you. I do not wish to be pro- faned. And yet, it seems as if this loneliness, and not this love, would prevail in their circimistanees, be- cause of the extravagant demand they make on human nature. That, indeed, constitutes a new feature iu their portrait, that they are the most ex- acting and extortionate critics. Their quarrel with every man they meet is not with his kind, but with his degree. There is not enough of him, — that is the only fault. They prolong their privilege of childhood in this wise; of doing nothing, but mak- ing immense demands on all the gladiators in the lists of action and fame. They make us feel the strange disappointment which overcasts every hu- man youth. So many promising youths, and never a finished man ! The profound nature wiU Iiave a savage rudeness ; the delicate one will be shallow, or the victim of sensibility; the richly accomplished will have some capital absurdity ; and so every piece has a crack. 'T is strange, but this master- piece is the result of such an extreme delicacy that the most unobserved flaw in the boy will neutralize the most aspiring genius, and spoil the work. Talk with a seaman of the hazards to life in his profession 326 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. and lie will ask you, ' Where are the old sailors ? Do you not see that all are young men?' And we, on this sea of human thought, in like manner in- quire. Where are the old idealists ? where are they who represented to the last generation that extrav- agant hope which a few happy aspirants suggest to ours ? In looking at the class of counsel, and power, and wealth, and at the matronage of the land, amidst all the prudence and all the triviality, one asks. Where are they who represented genius, virtue, the invisible and heavenly world, to these ? Are they dead, — taken in early ripeness to the gods, — as ancient wisdom foretold their fate ? Or did the high idea die out of them, and leave their unperfumed body as its tomb and tablet, announc- ing to all that the celestial inhabitant, who once gave them beauty, had departed ? Will it be bet- ter with the new generation ? We easily predict a fair future to each new candidate who enters the lists, but we are frivolous and volatile, and by low aims and ill example do what we can to defeat this hope. Then these youths bring us a rough but ef- fectual aid. By their unconcealed dissatisfaction they expose our poverty and the insignificance of man to man. A man is a poor limitary benefactor. He ought to be a shower of benefits — a great influ- ence, which should never let his brother go, but should refresh old merits continually with new ones; THE TRANS CENDENTALIST. 327 SO that though absent he should never be out of my mind, his name never far from my lips ; but if the earth should open at my side, or my last hour were come, his name should be the prayer I should utter to the Universe. But in our experience, man is cheap and friendship wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, but we do not ; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they let us go. These exacting children adver- tise us of our wants. There is no compliment, no smooth speech with them ; they pay you only this one compliment, of insatiable expectation ; they as- pire, they severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist in demanding unto the end, and without end,