"not fixed in the earth nor immovable, but heavenly, whose head, rising,
as it were, from a root upwards, is turned towards heaven." "A man ought
to carry himself in the world," says Henry Ward Beecher, continuing and
building on Plutarch's thought, "as an orange-tree would, if it could
walk up and down in the garden,--swinging perfume from every little
censer it holds up to the air."
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
This is the declaration of the great poet Pope, and a glance across the
world's literature will show that the mandate was unneeded. For ages
before the birth of the celebrated "wasp of Twickenham," mankind had
been at study on the subject. "The burden of history" says George
Finlayson, "is what man has been; of law, what he does; of physiology,
what he is; of ethics, what he ought to be; of revelation, what he shall
be." "Man is the product of his own history," says Theodore Parker. "The
discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so
valuable to him. The greatest star is that at the end of the telescope--