Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

And again in his latest publication:

"The gods of fable are the shining moments of great men. We run all our vessels into one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the necessary and structural action of the human mind."

"Man is that noble endogenous plant which grows, like the palm, from within, outward. I count him a great man

who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light, and in large relations; whilst they must make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error."

"The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. . . For a time our teachers serve us personally, as metres or milestones of progress. Once they were angels of knowledge, and their figures touched the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture, and limits; and they yielded their place to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names remain so high, that we have not been able to read them nearer, and age and comparison have not robbed them of a ray. But, at last, we shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall content ourselves with their social and delegated quality."

"Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say, great men exist that there may be greater men. The destiny of organized nature is amelioration, and who can tell its limits? It is for man to tame the chaos; on every side, whilst he lives, to scatter the seeds of science and of song, that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder, and the germs of love and benefit may be multiplied."

"The world is young; the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use."-Representative Men, pp. 10-11, 12, 38, 39-40, 284–285.

In this Emerson is more American than America herself. and is himself the highest exponent in literature of this Idea of human freedom and the value of man. Channing talks of the dignity of human nature, his great and brilliant theme; but he commonly, perhaps always subordinates the nature of man to some of the accidents of his history. This Emerson never does; no, not once in all his works, nor in all his life. Still we think it is not the whole of man from which he starts,

that he undervalues the logical, demonstrative and historical Understanding, with the results thereof, and also undervalues the Affections. Hence his Man, who is the measure of all things, is not the complete man. This defect appears in his ethics, which are a little cold, the ethics of marble men; and in his religious teachings, the highest which this age has furnished, full of reverence, full of faith, but not proportionably rich in affection.

Mr. Emerson has a method of his own as plainly marked as that of Lord Bacon or Descartes, and as rigidly adhered to. It is not the inductive method by which you arrive at a general fact from many particular facts, but never reach a universal law; it is not the deductive method, whereby a minor law is derived from a major, a special from a general law; it is neither inductive nor deductive demonstration. But Emerson proceeds by the way of intuition, sensational or spiritual. Go to the fact and look for yourself, is his command: a material fact you cannot always verify, and so for that must depend on evidence; a spiritual fact you can always legitimate for yourself. Thus he says:

"That which seems faintly possible it is so refined, is often faint and dim because 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."

"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 systems which have no one valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit."-Nature, pp. 82-83, 86-87.

And again:

"Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite him to history or reconcile him with themselves. As they come to revere their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains every fact, every word."

"The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, the essence of virtue, and the essence of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceedeth obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceedeth. We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and the fountain of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, of that inspiration of man which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us organs of its activity and receivers of its truth. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all metaphysics, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time, all mankind, · although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun."

-

[ocr errors]

For

"The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh, he should communicate not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice, should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, then old things pass away, means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now and absorbs past and future into the present hour."

"The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, how do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake."

6

"The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary; between poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope; between philosophers like Spinoza, Kant, and Coleridge, and philosophers like

Locke, Paley, Mackintosh, and Stewart; between men of the world who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying half-insane under the infinitude of his thought, is, that one class speak from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact; and the other class, from without, as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the fact, on the evidence of third persons. It is of no use to preach to me from without. I can do that too easily myself."

It

، The soul gives itself alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young, and nimble. is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows, and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars, and feel them to be but the fair accidents and effects which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in thoughts, and act with energies which are immortal."-Essays, pp. 23, 52-53, 53 — 54, 231, 237, 244

66

245.

All your learning of all literatures would never enable you to anticipate one of its thoughts or expressions, and yet each is natural and familiar as household words."-Nature and Addresses, p. 209.

The same method in his last work is ascribed to Plato:

"Add to this, he believes that poetry, prophecy, and the high insight, are from a wisdom of which man is not master; that the gods never philosophize; but, by a celestial mania, these miracles are accomplished."-Representative Men, p. 61.

Sometimes he exaggerates the value of this, and puts the unconscious before the self-conscious state:

"It is pitiful to be an artist, when, by forbearing to be artists, we might be vessels filled with the divine overflowings, enriched by the circulations of omniscience and omnipresence. Are there not moments in the history of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the Influenced, was God in distribution, God rushing into multiform benefit? It is sublime to receive, sublime to love, but this lust of imparting as from us, this desire to be loved, the wish to be recognized as individuals, is finite, comes of a lower strain."-Nature and Addresses, pp. 201-202.

He is sometimes extravagant in the claims made for his own method, and maintains that ecstasy is the natural and exclusive mode of arriving at new truths, while it is only one mode. Ecstasy is the state of intuition in which the man loses his individual self-consciousness. Moments of this character are few and rare even with men like the St. Victors, like Tauler, and Böhme and Swedenborg. The writings of all these men, especially of the two last, who most completely surrendered. themselves to this mode of action, show how poor and insufficient it is. All that mankind has learned in this way is little, compared with the results of reflection, of meditation, and careful, conscientious looking after truth: all the great benefactors of the world have been patient and continuous in their work;

"Not from a vain and shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought."

Mr. Emerson says books are only for one's idle hours; he discourages hard and continuous thought, conscious modes of argument, of discipline. Here he exaggerates his idiosyncracy into a universal law. The method of nature is not ecstasy but patient attention. Human nature avenges herself for the slight he puts on her, by the irregular and rambling character of his own productions. The vice appears more glaring in the Emersonidæ, who have all the agony without the inspiration; who affect the unconscious; write even more ridiculous nonsense than their "genius" requires; are sometimes so child-like as to become mere babies, and seem to forget that the unconscious state is oftener below the conscious than above it, and that there is an ecstasy of folly as well as of good sense.

Some of these imbeciles have been led astray by this extravagant and one sided statement. What if books have hurt Mr. Oldbuck, and many fine wits lie "sheathed to the hilt in ponderous tomes," sheathed and rusted in so that no Orson could draw the blade, we need not deny the real value of books, still less the value of the serious and patient study of thoughts and things. Michael Angelo and Newton had some genius; Socrates is thought not destitute of philosophical power; but no dauber of canvas, no sportsman with marble ever worked like Angelo; the two philosophers wrought by their genius, but with an attention, an order, a diligence, and a terrible industry and method of thought, without which their genius would have ended in nothing but guesswork.

« AnkstesnisTęsti »