the compass, the printing-press, watches, the spiral spring, the
barometer, the telescope. Yet so many inventions have been added,
that life seems almost made over new; and as Leibnitz said of Newton,
“that if he reckoned all that had been done by mathematicians from the
beginning of the world down to Newton, and what had been done by him,
his would be the better half,” so one might say that the inventions
of the last fifty years counterpoise those of the fifty centuries
before them. For the vast production and manifold application of iron
is new; and our common and indispensable utensils of house and farm
are new; the sewing-machine, the power-loom, the McCormick reaper,
the mowing-machines, gas-light, lucifer-matches, and the immense
productions of the laboratory, are new in this century, and one franc’s
worth of coal does the work of a laborer for twenty days.
Why need I speak of steam, the enemy of space and time, with its
enormous strength and delicate applicability, which is made in
hospitals to bring a bowl of gruel to a sick man’s bed, and can twist
beams of iron like candy-braids, and vies with the forces which
upheaved and doubled over the geologic strata? Steam is an apt scholar
and a strong-shouldered fellow, but it has not yet done all its work.
It already walks about the field like a man, and will do anything
required of it. It irrigates crops, and drags away a mountain. It
must sew our shirts, it must drive our gigs; taught by Mr. Babbage,
it must calculate interest and logarithms. Lord Chancellor Thurlow
thought it might be made to draw bills and answers in chancery. If
that were satire, it is yet coming to render many higher services of
a mechanico-intellectual kind, and will leave the satire short of the
fact.
How excellent are the mechanical aids we have applied to the human
body, as in dentistry, in vaccination, in the rhinoplastic treatment;
in the beautiful aid of ether, like a finer sleep; and in the boldest
promiser of all,--the transfusion of the blood,--which, in Paris, it
was claimed, enables a man to change his blood as often as his linen!
What of this dapper caoutchouc and gutta-percha, which make water-pipes
and stomach-pumps, belting for mill-wheels, and diving bells, and
rain-proof coats for all climates, which teach us to defy the wet,
and put every man on a footing with the beaver and the crocodile?
What of the grand tools with which we engineer, like kobolds and
enchanters,--tunnelling Alps, canalling the American Isthmus, piercing
the Arabian desert? In Massachusetts, we fight the sea successfully
with beach-grass and broom,--and the blowing sand-barrens with pine
plantations. The soil of Holland, once the most populous in Europe,
is below the level of the sea. Egypt, where no rain fell for three
thousand years, now, it is said, thanks Mehemet Ali’s irrigations and
planted forests for late-returning showers. The old Hebrew king said,
“He makes the wrath of man to praise him.” And there is no argument of
theism better than the grandeur of ends brought about by paltry means.
The chain of western railroads from Chicago to the Pacific has planted
cities and civilization in less time than it costs to bring an orchard
into bearing.
What shall we say of the ocean telegraph, that extension of the eye and
ear, whose sudden performance astonished mankind as if the intellect
were taking the brute earth itself into training, and shooting the
first thrills of life and thought through the unwilling brain?
There does not seem any limit to these new informations of the same
Spirit that made the elements at first, and now, through man, works
them. Art and power will go on as they have done,--will make day out
of night, time out of space, and space out of time.
Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph
devised, than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found.
The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for
his balloon. When commerce is vastly enlarged, California and Australia
expose the gold it needs. When Europe is over-populated, America and
Australia crave to be peopled; and so, throughout, every chance is
timed, as if Nature, who made the lock, knew where to find the key.
Another result of our arts is the new intercourse which is surprising
us with new solutions of the embarrassing political problems. The
intercourse is not new, but the scale is new. Our selfishness would
have held slaves, or would have excluded from a quarter of the planet
all that are not born on the soil of that quarter. Our politics are
disgusting; but what can they help or hinder when from time to time
the primal instincts are impressed on masses of mankind, when the
nations are in exodus and flux? Nature loves to cross her stocks,--and
German, Chinese, Turk, Russ, and Kanaka were putting out to sea, and
intermarrying race with race; and commerce took the hint, and ships
were built capacious enough to carry the people of a county.
This thousand-handed art has introduced a new element into the state.
The science of power is forced to remember the power of science.
Civilization mounts and climbs. Malthus, when he stated that the mouths
went on multiplying geometrically, and the food only arithmetically,
forgot to say that the human mind was also a factor in political
economy, and that the augmenting wants of society would be met by an
augmenting power of invention.
Yes, we have a pretty artillery of tools now in our social
arrangements: we ride four times as fast as our fathers did; travel,
grind, weave, forge, plant, till, and excavate better. We have new
shoes, gloves, glasses, and gimlets; we have the calculus; we have the
newspaper, which does its best to make every square acre of land and
sea give an account of itself at your breakfast-table; we have money,
and paper money; we have language,--the finest tool of all, and nearest
to the mind. Much will have more. Man flatters himself that his command
over nature must increase. Things begin to obey him. We are to have the
balloon yet, and the next war will be fought in the air. We may yet
find a rose-water that will wash the negro white. He sees the skull of
the English race changing from its Saxon type under the exigencies of
American life.
Tantalus, who in old times was seen vainly trying to quench his thirst
with a flowing stream, which ebbed whenever he approached it, has been
seen again lately. He is in Paris, in New York, in Boston. He is now in
great spirits; thinks he shall reach it yet; thinks he shall bottle the
wave. It is, however, getting a little doubtful. Things have an ugly
look still. No matter how many centuries of culture have preceded, the
new man always finds himself standing on the brink of chaos, always in
a crisis. Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money
not scarce? Can anybody remember when sensible men, and the right sort
of men, and the right sort of women, were plentiful? Tantalus begins to
think steam a delusion, and galvanism no better than it should be.
Many facts concur to show that we must look deeper for our salvation
than to steam, photographs, balloons, or astronomy. These tools
have some questionable properties. They are reagents. Machinery is
aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If
you do not use the tools, they use you. All tools are in one sense
edge-tools, and dangerous. A man builds a fine house; and now he has
a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and
keep it in repair, the rest of his days. A man has a reputation, and
is no longer free, but must respect that. A man makes a picture or
a book, and, if it succeeds, ’tis often the worse for him. I saw a
brave man the other day, hitherto as free as the hawk or the fox of
the wilderness, constructing his cabinet of drawers for shells, eggs,
minerals, and mounted birds. It was easy to see that he was amusing
himself with making pretty links for his own limbs.
Then the political economist thinks “’tis doubtful if all the
mechanical inventions that ever existed have lightened the day’s toil
of one human being.” The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine
is so perfect, the engineer is nobody. Every new step in improving the
engine restricts one more act of the engineer,--unteaches him. Once it
took Archimedes; now it only needs a fireman, and a boy to know the
coppers, to pull up the handles or mind the water-tank. But when the
engine breaks, they can do nothing.
What sickening details in the daily journals! I believe they have
ceased to publish the “Newgate Calendar” and the “Pirate’s Own Book”
since the family newspapers, namely, the New York Tribune and the
London Times, have quite superseded them in the freshness, as well
as the horror, of their records of crime. Politics were never more
corrupt and brutal; and Trade, that pride and darling of our ocean,
that educator of nations, that benefactor in spite of itself, ends in
shameful defaulting, bubble, and bankruptcy, all over the world.
Of course, we resort to the enumeration of his arts and inventions as a
measure of the worth of man. But if, with all his arts, he is a felon,
we cannot assume the mechanical skill or chemical resources as the
measure of worth. Let us try another gauge.
What have these arts done for the character, for the worth of mankind?
Are men better? ’Tis sometimes questioned whether morals have not
declined as the arts have ascended. Here are great arts and little men.
Here is greatness begotten of paltriness. We cannot trace the triumphs
of civilization to such benefactors as we wish. The greatest meliorator
of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade. Every victory over matter
ought to recommend to man the worth of his nature. But now one wonders
who did all this good. Look up the inventors. Each has his own knack;
his genius is in veins and spots. But the great, equal, symmetrical
brain, fed from a great heart, you shall not find. Every one has more
to hide than he has to show, or is lamed by his excellence. ’Tis too
plain that with the material power the moral progress has not kept
pace. It appears that we have not made a judicious investment. Works
and days were offered us, and we took works.
The new study of the Sanskrit has shown us the origin of the old names
of God,--Dyaus, Deus, Zeus, Zeu pater, Jupiter,--names of the sun,
still recognizable through the modifications of our vernacular words,
importing that the Day is the Divine Power and Manifestation, and
indicating that those ancient men, in their attempts to express the
Supreme Power of the universe, called him the Day, and that this name
was accepted by all the tribes.
Hesiod wrote a poem which he called “Works and Days,” in which he
marked the changes of the Greek year, instructing the husbandman at
the rising of what constellation he might safely sow, when to reap,
when to gather wood, when the sailor might launch his boat in security
from storms, and what admonitions of the planets he must heed. It is
full of economies for Grecian life, noting the proper age for marriage,
the rules of household thrift, and of hospitality. The poem is full of
piety as well as prudence, and is adapted to all meridians, by adding
the ethics of works and of days. But he has not pushed his study of
days into such inquiry and analysis as they invite.
A farmer said “he should like to have all the land that joined his
own.” Bonaparte, who had the same appetite, endeavored to make the
Mediterranean a French lake. Czar Alexander was more expansive, and
wished to call the Pacific _my ocean_; and the Americans were obliged
to resist his attempts to make it a close sea. But if he had the earth
for his pasture, and the sea for his pond, he would be a pauper still.
He only is rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy,
or demon who possesses such power as that. The days are ever divine
as to the first Aryans. They are of the least pretension, and of the
greatest capacity, of anything that exists. They come and go like
muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but
they say nothing; and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry
them as silently away.
How the day fits itself to the mind, winds itself round it like a fine
drapery, clothing all its fancies! Any holiday communicates to us its
color. We wear its cockade and favors in our humor. Remember what
boys think in the morning of “Election day,” of the Fourth of July,
of Thanksgiving or Christmas. The very stars in their courses wink
to them of nuts and cakes, bonbons, presents, and fireworks. Cannot
memory still descry the old school-house and its porch, somewhat hacked
by jack-knives, where you spun tops and snapped marbles; and do you
not recall that life was then calendared by moments, threw itself
into nervous knots or glittering hours, even as now, and not spread
itself abroad an equable felicity? In college terms, and in years
that followed, the young graduate, when the Commencement anniversary
returned, though he were in a swamp, would see a festive light, and
find the air faintly echoing with plausive academic thunders. In
solitude and in the country, what dignity distinguishes the holy time!
The old Sabbath, or Seventh Day, white with the religions of unknown
thousands of years, when this hallowed hour dawns out of the deep,--a
clean page, which the wise may inscribe with truth, whilst the savage
scrawls it with fetishes,--the cathedral music of history breathes
through it a psalm to our solitude.
So, in the common experience of the scholar, the weathers fit his
moods. A thousand tunes the variable wind plays, a thousand spectacles
it brings, and each is the frame or dwelling of a new spirit. I used
formerly to choose my time with some nicety for each favorite book.
One author is good for winter, and one for the dog-days. The scholar
must look long for the right hour for Plato’s Timæus. At last the elect
morning arrives, the early dawn,--a few lights conspicuous in the
heaven, as of a world just created and still becoming,--and in its wide
leisures we dare open that book.
There are days when the great are near us, when there is no frown on
their brow, no condescension even; when they take us by the hand, and
we share their thought. There are days which are the carnival of the
year. The angels assume flesh, and repeatedly become visible. The
imagination of the gods is excited, and rushes on every side into
forms. Yesterday not a bird peeped; the world was barren, peaked,
and pining: to-day ’tis inconceivably populous; creation swarms and
meliorates.
The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and
future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought
a thread to the skyey web. ’Tis pitiful the things by which we are
rich or poor,--a matter of coins, coats, and carpets, a little more
or less stone, or wood, or paint, the fashion of a cloak or hat; like
the luck of naked Indians, of whom one is proud in the possession of
a glass bead or a red feather, and the rest miserable in the want
of it. But the treasures which Nature spent itself to amass,--the
secular, refined, composite anatomy of man,--which all strata go to
form, which the prior races, from infusory and saurian, existed to
ripen; the surrounding plastic natures; the earth with its foods; the
intellectual, temperamenting air; the sea with its invitations; the
heaven deep with worlds; and the answering brain and nervous structure
replying to these; the eye that looketh into the deeps, which again
look back to the eye,--abyss to abyss;--these, not like a glass bead,
or the coins or carpets, are given immeasurably to all.
This miracle is hurled into every beggar’s hands. The blue sky is a
covering for a market, and for the cherubim and seraphim. The sky
is the varnish or glory with which the Artist has washed the whole
work,--the verge or confines of matter and spirit. Nature could no
farther go. Could our happiest dream come to pass in solid fact,--could
a power open our eyes to behold “millions of spiritual creatures walk
the earth,”--I believe I should find that mid-plain on which they
moved floored beneath and arched above with the same web of blue depth
which weaves itself over me now, as I trudge the streets on my affairs.
’Tis singular that our rich English language should have no word to
denote the face of the world. _Kinde_ was the old English term, which,
however, filled only half the range of our fine Latin word, with its
delicate future tense,--_natura_, _about to be born_, or what German
philosophy denotes as a _becoming_. But nothing expresses that power
which seems to work for beauty alone. The Greek _Kosmos_ did; and
therefore, with great propriety, Humboldt entitles his book, which
recounts the last results of science, _Cosmos_.
Such are the days,--the earth is the cup, the sky is the cover, of the
immense bounty of nature which is offered us for our daily aliment; but
what a force of _illusion_ begins life with us, and attends us to the
end! We are coaxed, flattered, and duped, from morn to eve, from birth
to death; and where is the old eye that ever saw through the deception?
The Hindoos represent Maia, the illusory energy of Vishnu, as one of
his principal attributes. As if, in this gale of warring elements,
which life is, it was necessary to bind souls to human life as mariners
in a tempest lash themselves to the mast and bulwarks of a ship, and
Nature employed certain illusions as her ties and straps,--a rattle,
a doll, an apple, for a child; skates, a river, a boat, a horse, a
gun, for the growing boy;--and I will not begin to name those of the
youth and adult, for they are numberless. Seldom and slowly the mask
falls, and the pupil is permitted to see that all is one stuff, cooked
and painted under many counterfeit appearances. Hume’s doctrine was
that the circumstances vary, the amount of happiness does not; that
the beggar cracking fleas in the sunshine under a hedge, and the duke
rolling by in his chariot, the girl equipped for her first ball, and
the orator returning triumphant from the debate, had different means,
but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.
This element of illusion lends all its force to hide the values of
present time. Who is he that does not always find himself doing
something less than his best task? “What are you doing?” “O, nothing;
I have been doing thus, or I shall do so or so, but now I am only--”
Ah! poor dupe, will you never slip out of the web of the master
juggler,--never learn that, as soon as the irrecoverable years have
woven their blue glory between to-day and us, these passing hours shall
glitter and draw us, as the wildest romance and the homes of beauty and
poetry? How difficult to deal erect with them! The events they bring,
their trade, entertainments, and gossip, their urgent work, all throw
dust in the eyes and distract attention. He is a strong man who can
look them in the eye, see through this juggle, feel their identity, and
keep his own; who can know surely that one will be like another to the
end of the world, nor permit love, or death, or politics, or money,
war, or pleasure, to draw him from his task.
The world is always equal to itself, and every man in moments of deeper
thought is apprised that he is repeating the experiences of the people
in the streets of Thebes or Byzantium. An everlasting Now reigns in
nature, which hangs the same roses on our bushes which charmed the
Roman and the Chaldæan in their hanging gardens. ‘To what end, then,’
he asks, ‘should I study languages, and traverse countries, to learn so
simple truths?’
History of ancient art, excavated cities, recovery of books and
inscriptions,--yes, the works were beautiful, and the history worth
knowing; and academies convene to settle the claims of the old schools.
What journeys and measurements,--Niebuhr and Müller and Layard,--to
identify the plain of Troy and Nimroud town! And your homage to Dante
costs you so much sailing; and to ascertain the discoverers of America
needs as much voyaging as the discovery cost. Poor child! that flexile
clay of which these old brothers moulded their admirable symbols was
not Persian, nor Memphian, nor Teutonic, nor local at all, but was
common lime and silex and water, and sunlight, the heat of the blood,
and the heaving of the lungs; it was that clay which thou heldest but
now in thy foolish hands, and threwest away to go and seek in vain in
sepulchres, mummy-pits, and old book-shops of Asia Minor, Egypt, and
England. It was the deep to-day which all men scorn; the rich poverty,
which men hate; the populous, all-loving solitude, which men quit
for the tattle of towns. HE lurks, _he_ hides,--_he_ who is success,
reality, joy, and power. One of the illusions is that the present hour
is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every
day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly,
until he knows that every day is Doomsday. ’Tis the old secret of the
gods that they come in low disguises. ’Tis the vulgar great who come
dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in
their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior. In the Norse
legend of our ancestors, Odin dwells in a fisher’s hut, and patches
a boat. In the Hindoo legends, Hari dwells a peasant among peasants.
In the Greek legend, Apollo lodges with the shepherds of Admetus; and
Jove liked to rusticate among the poor Ethiopians. So, in our history,
Jesus is born in a barn, and his twelve peers are fishermen. ’Tis the
very principle of science that Nature shows herself best in leasts;
’twas the maxim of Aristotle and Lucretius; and, in modern times, of
Swedenborg and of Hahnemann. The order of changes in the egg determines
the age of fossil strata. So it was the rule of our poets, in the
legends of fairy lore, that the fairies largest in power were the least
in size. In the Christian graces, humility stands highest of all, in
the form of the Madonna; and in life, this is the secret of the wise.
We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the
common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the
seeming gang of gypsies and pedlers. In daily life, what distinguishes
the master is the using those materials he has, instead of looking
about for what are more renowned, or what others have used well. “A
general,” said Bonaparte, “always has troops enough, if he only knows
how to employ those he has, and bivouacs with them.” Do not refuse
the employment which the hour brings you, for one more ambitious. The
highest heaven of wisdom is alike near from every point, and thou must
find it, if at all, by methods native to thyself alone.
That work is ever the more pleasant to the imagination which is not now
required. How wistfully, when we have promised to attend the working
committee, we look at the distant hills and their seductions!
The use of history is to give value to the present hour and its duty.
That is good which commends to me my country, my climate, my means
and materials, my associates. I knew a man in a certain religious
exaltation, who “thought it an honor to wash his own face.” He seemed
to me more sane than those who hold themselves cheap.
Zoölogists may deny that horse-hairs in the water change to worms; but
I find that whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes. The
reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment.
Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present
moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they
hated and defied.
Another illusion is, that there is not time enough for our work. Yet
we might reflect that though many creatures eat from one dish, each,
according to its constitution, assimilates from the elements what
belongs to it, whether time, or space, or light, or water, or food. A
snake converts whatever prey the meadow yields him into snake; a fox,
into fox; and Peter and John are working up all existence into Peter
and John. A poor Indian chief of the Six Nations of New York made a
wiser reply than any philosopher, to some one complaining that he had
not enough time. “Well,” said Red Jacket, “I suppose you have all there
is.”