FATE.

It chanced during one winter, a few years ago, that our cities were bent

on discussing the theory of the Age. By an odd coincidence, four or

five noted men were each reading a discourse to the citizens of Boston

or New York, on the Spirit of the Times. It so happened that the

subject had the same prominence in some remarkable pamphlets and

journals issued in London in the same season. To me, however, the

question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the

conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the

times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing

ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only

obey our own polarity. 'Tis fine for us to speculate and elect our

course, if we must accept an irresistible dictation.

In our first steps to gain our wishes, we come upon immovable

limitations. We are fired with the hope to reform men. After many

experiments, we find that we must begin earlier,--at school. But the

boys and girls are not docile; we can make nothing of them. We decide

that they are not of good stock. We must begin our reform earlier

still,--at generation: that is to say, there is Fate, or laws of the

world.

But if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation understands

itself. If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm

liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the

power of character. This is true, and that other is true. But our

geometry cannot span these extreme points, and reconcile them. What to

do? By obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will,

pounding on each string, we learn at last its power. By the same

obedience to other thoughts, we learn theirs, and then comes some

reasonable hope of harmonizing them. We are sure, that, though we know

not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the

world, my polarity with the spirit of the times. The riddle of the age

has for each a private solution. If one would study his own time, it

must be by this method of taking up in turn each of the leading topics

which belong to our scheme of human life, and, by firmly stating all

that is agreeable to experience on one, and doing the same justice to

the opposing facts in the others, the true limitations will appear. Any

excess of emphasis, on one part, would be corrected, and a just balance

would be made.

But let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for

superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and

buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned

themselves to face it. The Spartan, embodying his religion in his

country, dies before its majesty without a question. The Turk, who

believes his doom is written on the iron leaf in the moment when he

entered the world, rushes on the enemy's sabre with undivided will. The

Turk, the Arab, the Persian, accepts the foreordained fate.

"On two days, it steads not to run from thy grave,

The appointed, and the unappointed day;

On the first, neither balm nor physician can save,

Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay."

The Hindoo, under the wheel, is as firm. Our Calvinists, in the last

generation, had something of the same dignity. They felt that the

weight of the Universe held them down to their place. What could _they_

do? Wise men feel that there is something which cannot be talked or

voted away,--a strap or belt which girds the world.

"The Destiny, minister general,

That executeth in the world o'er all,

The purveyance which God hath seen beforne,

So strong it is, that tho' the world had sworn

The contrary of a thing by yea or nay,

Yet sometime it shall fallen on a day

That falleth not oft in a thousand year;

For, certainly, our appetites here,

Be it of war, or peace, or hate, or love,

All this is ruled by the sight above."

CHAUCER: _The Knight's Tale_.

The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense: "Whatever is fated, that

will take place. The great immense mind of Jove is not to be

transgressed."

Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The broad ethics of

Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which preach an

election or favoritism. And, now and then, an amiable parson, like Jung

Stilling, or Robert Huntington, believes in a pistareen-Providence,

which, whenever the good man wants a dinner, makes that somebody shall

knock at his door, and leave a half-dollar. But Nature is no

sentimentalist,--does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the

world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman;

but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of

persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an

apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect

no persons. The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake

and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers,

the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,--these

are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just dined,

and, however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the

graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,--expensive races,--race

living at the expense of race. The planet is liable to shocks from

comets, perturbations from planets, rendings from earthquake and

volcano, alterations of climate, precessions of equinoxes. Rivers dry

up by opening of the forest. The sea changes its bed. Towns and

counties fall into it. At Lisbon, an earthquake killed men like flies.

At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed in a few

minutes. The scurvy at sea; the sword of the climate in the west of

Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New Orleans, cut off men like a

massacre. Our western prairie shakes with fever and ague. The cholera,

the small-pox, have proved as mortal to some tribes, as a frost to the

crickets, which, having filled the summer with noise, are silenced by a

fall of the temperature of one night. Without uncovering what does not

concern us, or counting how many species of parasites hang on a bombyx;

or groping after intestinal parasites, or infusory biters, or the

obscurities of alternate generation;--the forms of the shark, the

_labrus_, the jaw of the sea-wolf paved with crushing teeth, the weapons

of the grampus, and other warriors hidden in the sea,--are hints of

ferocity in the interiors of nature. Let us not deny it up and down.

Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of

no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to

dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth

of a student in divinity.

Will you say, the disasters which threaten mankind are exceptional, and

one need not lay his account for cataclysms every day? Aye, but what

happens once, may happen again, and so long as these strokes are not to

be parried by us, they must be feared.

But these shocks and ruins are less destructive to us, than the stealthy

power of other laws which act on us daily. An expense of ends to means

is fate;--organization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or

forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird,

the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. So is the

scale of races, of temperaments; so is sex; so is climate; so is the

reaction of talents imprisoning the vital power in certain directions.

Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the

spirit.

The gross lines are legible to the dull: the cabman is phrenologist so

far: he looks in your face to see if his shilling is sure. A dome of

brow denotes one thing; a pot-belly another; a squint, a pugnose, mats

of hair, the pigment of the epidermis, betray character. People seem

sheathed in their tough organization. Ask Spurzheim, ask the doctors,

ask Quetelet, if temperaments decide nothing? or if there be anything

they do not decide? Read the description in medical books of the four

temperaments, and you will think you are reading your own thoughts which

you had not yet told. Find the part which black eyes, and which blue

eyes, play severally in the company. How shall a man escape from his

ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from

his father's or his mother's life? It often appears in a family, as if

all the qualities of the progenitors were potted in several jars,--some

ruling quality in each son or daughter of the house,--and sometimes the

unmixed temperament, the rank unmitigated elixir, the family vice, is

drawn off in a separate individual, and the others are proportionally

relieved. We sometimes see a change of expression in our companion, and

say, his father, or his mother, comes to the windows of his eyes, and

sometimes a remote relative. In different hours, a man represents each

of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us

rolled up in each man's skin,--seven or eight ancestors at least,--and

they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which

his life is. At the corner of the street, you read the possibility of

each passenger, in the facial angle, in the complexion, in the depth of

his eye. His parentage determines it. Men are what their mothers made

them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckaback, why it does

not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical

discovery from that jobber. Ask the digger in the ditch to explain

Newton's laws: the fine organs of his brain have been pinched by

overwork and squalid poverty from father to son, for a hundred years.

When each comes forth from his mother's womb, the gate of gifts closes

behind him. Let him value his hands and feet, he has but one pair. So

he has but one future, and that is already predetermined in his lobes,

and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form. All

the privilege and all the legislation of the world cannot meddle or help

to make a poet or a prince of him.

Jesus said, "When he looketh on her, he hath committed adultery." But

he is an adulterer before he has yet looked on the woman, by the

superfluity of animal, and the defect of thought, in his constitution.

Who meets him, or who meets her, in the street, sees that they are ripe

to be each other's victim.

In certain men, digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the

stronger these are, the individual is so much weaker. The more of these

drones perish, the better for the hive. If, later, they give birth to

some superior individual, with force enough to add to this animal a new

aim, and a complete apparatus to work it out, all the ancestors are

gladly forgotten. Most men and most women are merely one couple more.

Now and then, one has a new cell or camarilla opened in his brain,--an

architectural, a musical, or a philological knack, some stray taste or

talent for flowers, or chemistry, or pigments, or story-telling, a good

hand for drawing, a good foot for dancing, an athletic frame for wide

journeying, &c.--which skill nowise alters rank in the scale of nature,

but serves to pass the time, the life of sensation going on as before.

At last, these hints and tendencies are fixed in one, or in a

succession. Each absorbs so much food and force, as to become itself a

new centre. The new talent draws off so rapidly the vital force, that

not enough remains for the animal functions, hardly enough for health;

so that, in the second generation, if the like genius appear, the health

is visibly deteriorated, and the generative force impaired.

People are born with the moral or with the material bias;--uterine

brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with high

magnifiers, Mr. Frauenhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to distinguish

in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a Whig, and that a Free-soiler.

It was a poetic attempt to lift this mountain of Fate, to reconcile this

despotism of race with liberty, which led the Hindoos to say, "Fate is

nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence." I find

the coincidence of the extremes of eastern and western speculation in

the daring statement of Schelling, "there is in every man a certain

feeling, that he has been what he is from all eternity, and by no means

became such in time." To say it less sublimely,--in the history of the

individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself

to be a party to his present estate.

A good deal of our politics is physiological. Now and then, a man of

wealth in the heyday of youth adopts the tenet of broadest freedom. In

England, there is always some man of wealth and large connection

planting himself, during all his years of health, on the side of

progress, who, as soon as he begins to die, checks his forward play,

calls in his troops, and becomes conservative. All conservatives are

such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or

nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can

only, like invalids, act on the defensive. But strong natures,

backwoodsmen, New Hampshire giants, Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams,

Websters, Kossuths, are inevitable patriots, until their life ebbs, and

their defects and gout, palsy and money, warp them.

The strongest idea incarnates itself in majorities and nations, in the

healthiest and strongest. Probably, the election goes by avoirdupois

weight, and, if you could weigh bodily the tonnage of any hundred of the

Whig and the Democratic party in a town, on the Dearborn balance, as

they passed the hayscales, you could predict with certainty which party

would carry it. On the whole, it would be rather the speediest way of

deciding the vote, to put the selectmen or the mayor and aldermen at the

hayscales.

In science, we have to consider two things: power and circumstance. All

we know of the egg, from each successive discovery, is, _another

vesicle_; and if, after five hundred years, you get a better observer,

or a better glass, he finds within the last observed another. In

vegetable and animal tissue, it is just alike, and all that the primary

power or spasm operates, is, still, vesicles, vesicles. Yes,--but the

tyrannical Circumstance! A vesicle in new circumstances, a vesicle

lodged in darkness, Oken thought, became animal; in light, a plant.

Lodged in the parent animal, it suffers changes, which end in

unsheathing miraculous capability in the unaltered vesicle, and it

unlocks itself to fish, bird, or quadruped, head and foot, eye and claw.

The Circumstance is Nature. Nature is, what you may do. There is much

you may not. We have two things,--the circumstance, and the life. Once

we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn, that negative power,

or circumstance, is half. Nature is the tyrannous circumstance, the

thick skull, the sheathed snake, the ponderous, rock-like jaw;

necessitated activity; violent direction; the conditions of a tool, like

the locomotive, strong enough on its track, but which can do nothing but

mischief off of it; or skates, which are wings on the ice, but fetters

on the ground.

The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic

pages,--leaf after leaf,--never re-turning one. One leaf she lays down,

a floor of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand

ages, and a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of marl and

mud: vegetable forms appear; her first misshapen animals, zoophyte,

trilobium, fish; then, saurians,--rude forms, in which she has only

blocked her future statue, concealing under these unwieldly monsters the

fine type of her coming king. The face of the planet cools and dries,

the races meliorate, and man is born. But when a race has lived its

term, it comes no more again.

The population of the world is a conditional population; not the best,

but the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the

steadiness with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to

another, is as uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in

history what weight belongs to race. We see the English, French, and

Germans planting themselves on every shore and market of America and

Australia, and monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like

the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We

follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how

much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain. Look at the

unpalatable conclusions of Knox, in his "Fragment of Races,"--a rash and

unsatisfactory writer, but charged with pungent and unforgetable truths.

"Nature respects race, and not hybrids." "Every race has its own

_habitat_." "Detach a colony from the race, and it deteriorates to the

crab." See the shades of the picture. The German and Irish millions,

like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are

ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to

drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a

spot of green grass on the prairie. One more fagot of these adamantine

bandages, is, the new science of Statistics. It is a rule, that the

most casual and extraordinary events--if the basis of population is

broad enough--become matter of fixed calculation. It would not be safe

to say when a captain like Bonaparte, a singer like Jenny Lind, or a

navigator like Bowditch, would be born in Boston: but, on a population

of twenty or two hundred millions, something like accuracy may be

had.[1]

[1] "Everything which pertains to the human species, considered as a

whole, belongs to the order of physical facts. The greater the

number of individuals, the more does the influence of the

individual will disappear, leaving predominance to a series of

general facts dependent on causes by which society exists, and is

preserved."--QUETELET.

'Tis frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions.

They have all been invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch

machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models.

He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own

structure, just so far as the need is. 'Tis hard to find the right

Homer, Zoroaster, or Menu; harder still to find the Tubal Cain, or

Vulcan, or Cadmus, or Copernicus, or Fust, or Fulton, the indisputable

inventor. There are scores and centuries of them. "The air is full of

men." This kind of talent so abounds, this constructive tool-making

efficiency, as if it adhered to the chemic atoms, as if the air he

breathes were made of Vaucansons, Franklins, and Watts.

Doubtless, in every million there will be an astronomer, a

mathematician, a comic poet, a mystic. No one can read the history of

astronomy, without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not

new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus,

Empedocles, Aristarchus, Pythagoras, OEnopides, had anticipated them;

each had the same tense geometrical brain, apt for the same vigorous

computation and logic, a mind parallel to the movement of the world.

The Roman mile probably rested on a measure of a degree of the meridian.

Mahometan and Chinese know what we know of leap-year, of the Gregorian

calendar, and of the precession of the equinoxes. As, in every barrel

of cowries, brought to New Bedford, there shall be one _orangia_, so

there will, in a dozen millions of Malays and Mahometans, be one or two

astronomical skulls. In a large city, the most casual things, and things

whose beauty lies in their casualty, are produced as punctually and to

order as the baker's muffin for breakfast. Punch makes exactly one

capital joke a week; and the journals contrive to furnish one good piece

of news every day.

And not less work the laws of repression, the penalties of violated

functions. Famine, typhus, frost, war, suicide, and effete races, must

be reckoned calculable parts of the system of the world.

These are pebbles from the mountain, hints of the terms by which our

life is walled up, and which show a kind of mechanical exactness, as of

a loom or mill, in what we call casual or fortuitous events.

The force with which we resist these torrents of tendency looks so

ridiculously inadequate, that it amounts to little more than a criticism

or a protest made by a minority of one, under compulsion of millions. I

seemed, in the height of a tempest, to see men overboard struggling in

the waves, and driven about here and there. They glanced intelligently

at each other, but 'twas little they could do for one another; 'twas

much if each could keep afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their

eye-beams, and all the rest was Fate.

We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted

gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any

veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped

in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side,

until he learns its arc.

The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate,

is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate. If we

are brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and dreadful shape. As

we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture,

the antagonism takes a spiritual form. In the Hindoo fables, Vishnu

follows Maya through all her ascending changes, from insect and crawfish

up to elephant; whatever form she took, he took the male form of that

kind, until she became at last woman and goddess, and he a man and a

god. The limitations refine as the soul purifies, but the ring of

necessity is always perched at the top.

When the gods in the Norse heaven were unable to bind the Fenris Wolf

with steel or with weight of mountains,--the one he snapped and the

other he spurned with his heel,--they put round his foot a limp band

softer than silk or cobweb, and this held him: the more he spurned it,

the stiffer it drew. So soft and so stanch is the ring of Fate. Neither

brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hell-fire, nor ichor, nor

poetry, nor genius, can get rid of this limp band. For if we give it

the high sense in which the poets use it, even thought itself is not

above Fate: that too must act according to eternal laws, and all that is

wilful and fantastic in it is in opposition to its fundamental essence.

And, last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals, Fate

appears as vindicator, levelling the high, lifting the low, requiring

justice in man, and always striking soon or late, when justice is not

done. What is useful will last; what is hurtful will sink. "The doer

must suffer," said the Greeks: "you would soothe a Deity not to be

soothed." "God himself cannot procure good for the wicked," said the

Welsh triad. "God may consent, but only for a time," said the bard of

Spain. The limitation is impassable by any insight of man. In its last

and loftiest ascensions, insight itself, and the freedom of the will, is

one of its obedient members. But we must not run into generalizations

too large, but show the natural bounds or essential distinctions, and

seek to do justice to the other elements as well.

Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind, and morals,--in race, in

retardations of strata, and in thought and character as well. It is

everywhere bound or limitation. But Fate has its lord; limitation its

limits; is different seen from above and from below; from within and

from without. For, though Fate is immense, so is power, which is the

other fact in the dual world, immense. If Fate follows and limits

power, power attends and antagonizes Fate. We must respect Fate as

natural history, but there is more than natural history. For who and

what is this criticism that pries into the matter? Man is not order of

nature, sack and sack, belly and members, link in a chain, nor any

ignominious baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of

the poles of the Universe. He betrays his relation to what is below

him,--thick-skulled, small-brained, fishy, quadrumanous,--quadruped

ill-disguised, hardly escaped into biped, and has paid for the new

powers by loss of some of the old ones. But the lightning which

explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On

one side, elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog,

forest, sea and shore; and, on the other part, thought, the spirit which

composes and decomposes nature,--here they are, side by side, god and

devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding

peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.

Nor can he blink the freewill. To hazard the contradiction,--freedom is

necessary. If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and

say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man.

Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul.

Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. And though

nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as

most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper

preamble like a "Declaration of Independence," or the statute right to

vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act, yet it is

wholesome to man to look not at Fate, but the other way: the practical

view is the other. His sound relation to these facts is to use and

command, not to cringe to them. "Look not on nature, for her name is

fatal," said the oracle. The too much contemplation of these limits

induces meanness. They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, &c.,

are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.

I cited the instinctive and heroic races as proud believers in Destiny.

They conspire with it; a loving resignation is with the event. But the

dogma makes a different impression, when it is held by the weak and

lazy. 'Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The

right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature.

Rude and invincible except by themselves are the elements. So let man

be. Let him empty his breast of his windy conceits, and show his

lordship by manners and deeds on the scale of nature. Let him hold his

purpose as with the tug of gravitation. No power, no persuasion, no

bribe shall make him give up his point. A man ought to compare

advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He shall have not

less the flow, the expansion, and the resistance of these.

'Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at

sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar in your own,

or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the

cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it,

at least, for your good.

For, if Fate is so prevailing, man also is part of it, and can confront

fate with fate. If the Universe have these savage accidents, our atoms

are as savage in resistance. We should be crushed by the atmosphere,

but for the reaction of the air within the body. A tube made of a film

of glass can resist the shock of the ocean, if filled with the same

water. If there be omnipotence in the stroke, there is omnipotence of

recoil.

1. But Fate against Fate is only parrying and defence: there are, also,

the noble creative forces. The revelation of Thought takes man out of

servitude into freedom. We rightly say of ourselves, we were born, and

afterward we were born again, and many times. We have successive

experiences so important, that the new forgets the old, and hence the

mythology of the seven or the nine heavens. The day of days, the great

day of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the

Unity in things, to the omnipresence of law;--sees that what is must be,

and ought to be, or is the best. This beatitude dips from on high down

on us, and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it. If the air

come to our lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die. If the light

come to our eyes, we see; else not. And if truth come to our mind, we

suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds. We are as

lawgivers; we speak for Nature; we prophesy and divine.

This insight throws us on the party and interest of the Universe,

against all and sundry; against ourselves, as much as others. A man

speaking from insight affirms of himself what is true of the mind:

seeing its immortality, he says, I am immortal; seeing its

invincibility, he says, I am strong. It is not in us, but we are in it.

It is of the maker, not of what is made. All things are touched and

changed by it. This uses, and is not used. It distances those who

share it, from those who share it not. Those who share it not are

flocks and herds. It dates from itself;--not from former men or better

men,--gospel, or constitution, or college, or custom. Where it shines,

Nature is no longer intrusive, but all things make a musical or

pictorial impression. The world of men show like a comedy without

laughter:--populations, interests, government, history;--'tis all toy

figures in a toy house. It does not overvalue particular truths. We

hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from an intellectual man.

But, in his presence, our own mind is roused to activity, and we forget

very fast what he says, much more interested in the new play of our own

thought, than in any thought of his. 'Tis the majesty into which we

have suddenly mounted, the impersonality, the scorn of egotisms, the

sphere of laws, that engage us. Once we were stepping a little this

way, and a little that way; now, we are as men in a balloon, and do not

think so much of the point we have left, or the point we would make, as

of the liberty and glory of the way.

Just as much intellect as you add, so much organic power. He who sees

through the design, presides over it, and must will that which must be.

We sit and rule, and, though we sleep, our dream will come to pass. Our

thought, though it were only an hour old, affirms an oldest necessity,

not to be separated from thought, and not to be separated from will.

They must always have coexisted. It apprises us of its sovereignty and

godhead, which refuse to be severed from it. It is not mine or thine,

but the will of all mind. It is poured into the souls of all men, as

the soul itself which constitutes them men. I know not whether there

be, as is alleged, in the upper region of our atmosphere, a permanent

westerly current, which carries with it all atoms which rise to that

height, but I see, that when souls reach a certain clearness of

perception, they accept a knowledge and motive above selfishness. A

breath of will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the

direction of the Right and Necessary. It is the air which all

intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the worlds

into order and orbit.

Thought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a

sphere where all is plastic. Of two men, each obeying his own thought,

he whose thought is deepest will be the strongest character. Always one

man more than another represents the will of Divine Providence to the

period.

2. If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of

spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed. Yet we can see that with the

perception of truth is joined the desire that it shall prevail. That

affection is essential to will. Moreover, when a strong will appears, it

usually results from a certain unity of organization, as if the whole

energy of body and mind flowed in one direction. All great force is real

and elemental. There is no manufacturing a strong will. There must be

a pound to balance a pound. Where power is shown in will, it must rest

on the universal force. Alaric and Bonaparte must believe they rest on

a truth, or their will can be bought or bent. There is a bribe possible

for any finite will. But the pure sympathy with universal ends is an

infinite force, and cannot be bribed or bent. Whoever has had

experience of the moral sentiment cannot choose but believe in unlimited

power. Each pulse from that heart is an oath from the Most High. I

know not what the word _sublime_ means, if it be not the intimations in

this infant of a terrific force. A text of heroism, a name and anecdote

of courage, are not arguments, but sallies of freedom. One of these is

the verse of the Persian Hafiz, "'Tis written on the gate of Heaven, 'Wo

unto him who suffers himself to be betrayed by Fate!'" Does the reading

of history make us fatalists? What courage does not the opposite

opinion show! A little whim of will to be free gallantly contending

against the universe of chemistry.

But insight is not will, nor is affection will. Perception is cold, and

goodness dies in wishes; as Voltaire said, 'tis the misfortune of worthy

people that they are cowards; "_un des plus grands malheurs des honnetes

gens c'est qu'ils sont des laches_." There must be a fusion of these two

to generate the energy of will. There can be no driving force, except

through the conversion of the man into his will, making him the will,

and the will him. And one may say boldly, that no man has a right

perception of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be

ready to be its martyr.

The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will. Society is

servile from want of will, and therefore the world wants saviours and

religions. One way is right to go: the hero sees it, and moves on that

aim, and has the world under him for root and support. He is to others

as the world. His approbation is honor; his dissent, infamy. The glance

of his eye has the force of sunbeams. A personal influence towers up in

memory only worthy, and we gladly forget numbers, money, climate,

gravitation, and the rest of Fate.

We can afford to allow the limitation, if we know it is the meter of the

growing man. We stand against Fate, as children stand up against the

wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year.

But when the boy grows to man, and is master of the house, he pulls down

that wall, and builds a new and bigger. 'Tis only a question of time.

Every brave youth is in training to ride and rule this dragon. His

science is to make weapons and wings of these passions and retarding

forces. Now whether, seeing these two things, fate and power, we are

permitted to believe in unity? The bulk of mankind believe in two gods.

They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in

social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion: but in

mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics,

they think they come under another; and that it would be a practical

blunder to transfer the method and way of working of one sphere, into

the other. What good, honest, generous men at home, will be wolves and

foxes on change! What pious men in the parlor will vote for what

reprobates at the polls! To a certain point, they believe themselves

the care of a Providence. But, in a steamboat, in an epidemic, in war,

they believe a malignant energy rules.

But relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but

everywhere and always. The divine order does not stop where their sight

stops. The friendly power works on the same rules, in the next farm, and

the next planet. But, where they have not experience, they run against

it, and hurt themselves. Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed

under the fire of thought;--for causes which are impenetrated.

But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us, is convertible

by intellect into wholesome force. Fate is unpenetrated causes. The

water drowns ship and sailor, like a grain of dust. But learn to swim,

trim your bark, and the wave which drowned it, will be cloven by it, and

carry it, like its own foam, a plume and a power. The cold is

inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, freezes a man like a

dew-drop. But learn to skate, and the ice will give you a graceful,

sweet, and poetic motion. The cold will brace your limbs and brain to

genius, and make you foremost men of time. Cold and sea will train an

imperial Saxon race, which nature cannot bear to lose, and, after

cooping it up for a thousand years in yonder England, gives a hundred

Englands, a hundred Mexicos. All the bloods it shall absorb and

domineer: and more than Mexicos,--the secrets of water and steam, the

spasms of electricity, the ductility of metals, the chariot of the air,

the ruddered balloon are awaiting you.

The annual slaughter from typhus far exceeds that of war; but right

drainage destroys typhus. The plague in the sea-service from scurvy is

healed by lemon juice and other diets portable or procurable: the

depopulation by cholera and small-pox is ended by drainage and

vaccination; and every other pest is not less in the chain of cause and

effect, and may be fought off. And, whilst art draws out the venom, it

commonly extorts some benefit from the vanquished enemy. The

mischievous torrent is taught to drudge for man: the wild beasts he

makes useful for food, or dress, or labor; the chemic explosions are

controlled like his watch. These are now the steeds on which he rides.

Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of wind, by steam,

by gas of balloon, by electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to

hunt the eagle in his own element. There's nothing he will not make his

carrier.

Steam was, till the other day, the devil which we dreaded. Every pot

made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off

the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof, and carry the house away.

But the Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and Fulton bethought themselves,

that, where was power, was not devil, but was God; that it must be

availed of, and not by any means let off and wasted. Could he lift pots

and roofs and houses so handily? he was the workman they were in search

of. He could be used to lift away, chain, and compel other devils, far

more reluctant and dangerous, namely, cubic miles of earth, mountains,

weight or resistance of water, machinery, and the labors of all men in

the world; and time he shall lengthen, and shorten space.

It has not fared much otherwise with higher kinds of steam. The opinion

of the million was the terror of the world, and it was attempted, either

to dissipate it, by amusing nations, or to pile it over with strata of

society,--a layer of soldiers; over that, a layer of lords; and a king

on the top; with clamps and hoops of castles, garrisons, and police.

But, sometimes, the religious principle would get in, and burst the

hoops, and rive every mountain laid on top of it. The Fultons and Watts

of politics, believing in unity, saw that it was a power, and, by

satisfying it, (as justice satisfies everybody,) through a different

disposition of society,--grouping it on a level, instead of piling it

into a mountain,--they have contrived to make of this terror the most

harmless and energetic form of a State.

Very odious, I confess, are the lessons of Fate. Who likes to have a

dapper phrenologist pronouncing on his fortunes? Who likes to believe

that he has hidden in his skull, spine, and pelvis, all the vices of a

Saxon or Celtic race, which will be sure to pull him down,--with what

grandeur of hope and resolve he is fired,--into a selfish, huckstering,

servile, dodging animal? A learned physician tells us, the fact is

invariable with the Neapolitan, that, when mature, he assumes the forms

of the unmistakable scoundrel. That is a little overstated,--but may

pass.

But these are magazines and arsenals. A man must thank his defects, and

stand in some terror of his talents. A transcendent talent draws so

largely on his forces, as to lame him; a defect pays him revenues on the

other side. The sufferance, which is the badge of the Jew, has made

him, in these days, the ruler of the rulers of the earth. If Fate is ore

and quarry, if evil is good in the making, if limitation is power that

shall be, if calamities, oppositions, and weights are wings and

means,--we are reconciled.

Fate involves the melioration. No statement of the Universe can have

any soundness, which does not admit its ascending effort. The direction

of the whole, and of the parts, is toward benefit, and in proportion to

the health. Behind every individual, closes organization: before him,

opens liberty,--the Better, the Best. The first and worst races are

dead. The second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the

maturing of higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every

new perception, the love and praise he extorts from his fellows, are

certificates of advance out of fate into freedom. Liberation of the

will from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he has outgrown,

is the end and aim of this world. Every calamity is a spur and valuable

hint; and where his endeavors do not yet fully avail, they tell as

tendency. The whole circle of animal life,--tooth against

tooth,--devouring war, war for food, a yelp of pain and a grunt of

triumph, until, at last, the whole menagerie, the whole chemical mass is

mellowed and refined for higher use,--pleases at a sufficient

perspective.

But to see how fate slides into freedom, and freedom into fate, observe

how far the roots of every creature run, or find, if you can, a point

where there is no thread of connection. Our life is consentaneous and

far-related. This knot of nature is so well tied, that nobody was ever

cunning enough to find the two ends. Nature is intricate, overlapped,

interweaved, and endless. Christopher Wren said of the beautiful King's

College chapel, "that, if anybody would tell him where to lay the first

stone, he would build such another." But where shall we find the first

atom in this house of man, which is all consent, inosculation, and

balance of parts?

The web of relation is shown in _habitat_, shown in hybernation. When

hybernation was observed, it was found, that, whilst some animals became

torpid in winter, others were torpid in summer: hybernation then was a

false name. The _long sleep_ is not an effect of cold, but is regulated

by the supply of food proper to the animal. It becomes torpid when the

fruit or prey it lives on is not in season, and regains its activity

when its food is ready.

Eyes are found in light; ears in auricular air; feet on land; fins in

water; wings in air; and, each creature where it was meant to be, with a

mutual fitness. Every zone has its own Fauna. There is adjustment

between the animal and its food, its parasite, its enemy. Balances are

kept. It is not allowed to diminish in numbers, nor to exceed. The like

adjustments exist for man. His food is cooked, when he arrives; his

coal in the pit; the house ventilated; the mud of the deluge dried; his

companions arrived at the same hour, and awaiting him with love,

concert, laughter, and tears. These are coarse adjustments, but the

invisible are not less. There are more belongings to every creature

than his air and his food. His instincts must be met, and he has

predisposing power that bends and fits what is near him to his use. He

is not possible until the invisible things are right for him, as well as

the visible. Of what changes, then, in sky and earth, and in finer

skies and earths, does the appearance of some Dante or Columbus apprise

us!

How is this effected? Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest

way to her ends. As the general says to his soldiers, "if you want a

fort, build a fort," so nature makes every creature do its own work and

get its living,--is it planet, animal, or tree. The planet makes

itself. The animal cell makes itself;--then, what it wants. Every

creature,--wren or dragon,--shall make its own lair. As soon as there is

life, there is self-direction, and absorbing and using of material.

Life is freedom,--life in the direct ratio of its amount. You may be

sure, the new-born man is not inert. Life works both voluntarily and

supernaturally in its neighborhood. Do you suppose, he can be estimated

by his weight in pounds, or, that he is contained in his skin,--this

reaching, radiating, jaculating fellow? The smallest candle fills a mile

with its rays, and the papillae of a man run out to every star.

When there is something to be done, the world knows how to get it done.

The vegetable eye makes leaf, pericarp, root, bark, or thorn, as the

need is; the first cell converts itself into stomach, mouth, nose, or

nail, according to the want: the world throws its life into a hero or a

shepherd; and puts him where he is wanted. Dante and Columbus were

Italians, in their time: they would be Russians or Americans to-day.

Things ripen, new men come. The adaptation is not capricious. The

ulterior aim, the purpose beyond itself, the correlation by which

planets subside and crystallize, then animate beasts and men, will not

stop, but will work into finer particulars, and from finer to finest.

The secret of the world is, the tie between person and event. Person

makes event, and event person. The "times," "the age," what is that, but

a few profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the

times?--Goethe, Hegel, Metternich, Adams, Calhoun, Guizot, Peel, Cobden,

Kossuth, Rothschild, Astor, Brunel, and the rest. The same fitness must

be presumed between a man and the time and event, as between the sexes,

or between a race of animals and the food it eats, or the inferior races

it uses. He thinks his fate alien, because the copula is hidden. But

the soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only

the actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves for is

always granted. The event is the print of your form. It fits you like

your skin. What each does is proper to him. Events are the children of

his body and mind. We learn that the soul of Fate is the soul of us, as

Hafiz sings,

Alas! till now I had not known,

My guide and fortune's guide are one.

All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play for,--houses, land,

money, luxury, power, fame, are the selfsame thing, with a new gauze or

two of illusion overlaid. And of all the drums and rattles by which men

are made willing to have their heads broke, and are led out solemnly

every morning to parade,--the most admirable is this by which we are

brought to believe that events are arbitrary, and independent of

actions. At the conjuror's, we detect the hair by which he moves his

puppet, but we have not eyes sharp enough to descry the thread that ties

cause and effect.

Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the

fruit of his character. Ducks take to the water, eagles to the sky,

waders to the sea margin, hunters to the forest, clerks to

counting-rooms, soldiers to the frontier. Thus events grow on the same

stem with persons; are sub-persons. The pleasure of life is according to

the man that lives it, and not according to the work or the place. Life

is an ecstasy. We know what madness belongs to love,--what power to

paint a vile object in hues of heaven. As insane persons are

indifferent to their dress, diet, and other accommodations, and, as we

do in dreams, with equanimity, the most absurd acts, so, a drop more of

wine in our cup of life will reconcile us to strange company and work.

Each creature puts forth from itself its own condition and sphere, as

the slug sweats out its slimy house on the pear-leaf, and the woolly

aphides on the apple perspire their own bed, and the fish its shell. In

youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac.

In age, we put out another sort of perspiration,--gout, fever,

rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.

A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man's friends are his

magnetisms. We go to Herodotus and Plutarch for examples of Fate; but

we are examples. "_Quisque suos patimur manes_." The tendency of every

man to enact all that is in his constitution is expressed in the old

belief, that the efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only

serve to lead us into it: and I have noticed, a man likes better to be

complimented on his position, as the proof of the last or total

excellence, than on his merits.

A man will see his character emitted in the events that seem to meet,

but which exude from and accompany him. Events expand with the

character. As once he found himself among toys, so now he plays a part

in colossal systems, and his growth is declared in his ambition, his

companions, and his performance. He looks like a piece of luck, but is

a piece of causation;--the mosaic, angulated and ground to fit into the

gap he fills. Hence in each town there is some man who is, in his brain

and performance, an explanation of the tillage, production, factories,

banks, churches, ways of living, and society, of that town. If you do

not chance to meet him, all that you see will leave you a little

puzzled: if you see him, it will become plain. We know in Massachusetts

who built New Bedford, who built Lynn, Lowell, Lawrence, Clinton,

Fitchburg, Holyoke, Portland, and many another noisy mart. Each of

these men, if they were transparent, would seem to you not so much men,

as walking cities, and, wherever you put them, they would build one.

History is the action and reaction of these two,--Nature and

Thought;--two boys pushing each other on the curb-stone of the pavement.

Everything is pusher or pushed: and matter and mind are in perpetual

tilt and balance, so. Whilst the man is weak, the earth takes up him.

He plants his brain and affections. By and by he will take up the

earth, and have his gardens and vineyards in the beautiful order and

productiveness of his thought. Every solid in the universe is ready to

become fluid on the approach of the mind, and the power to flux it is

the measure of the mind. If the wall remain adamant, it accuses the

want of thought. To a subtler force, it will stream into new forms,

expressive of the character of the mind. What is the city in which we

sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed

the will of some man? The granite was reluctant, but his hands were

stronger, and it came. Iron was deep in the ground, and well combined

with stone; but could not hide from his fires. Wood, lime, stuffs,

fruits, gums, were dispersed over the earth and sea, in vain. Here they

are, within reach of every man's day-labor,--what he wants of them. The

whole world is the flux of matter over the wires of thought to the poles

or points where it would build. The races of men rise out of the ground

preoccupied with a thought which rules them, and divided into parties

ready armed and angry to fight for this metaphysical abstraction. The

quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the

Austrian and the American. The men who come on the stage at one period

are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air.

We are all impressionable, for we are made of them; all impressionable,

but some more than others, and these first express them. This explains

the curious contemporaneousness of inventions and discoveries. The

truth is in the air, and the most impressionable brain will announce it

first, but all will announce it a few minutes later. So women, as most

susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour. So the great man,

that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the

impressionable man,--of a fibre irritable and delicate, like iodine to

light. He feels the infinitesimal attractions. His mind is righter than

others, because he yields to a current so feeble as can be felt only by

a needle delicately poised.

The correlation is shown in defects. Moeller, in his Essay on

Architecture, taught that the building which was fitted accurately to

answer its end, would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not

been intended. I find the like unity in human structures rather

virulent and pervasive; that a crudity in the blood will appear in the

argument; a hump in the shoulder will appear in the speech and

handiwork. If his mind could be seen, the hump would be seen. If a man

has a seesaw in his voice, it will run into his sentences, into his

poem, into the structure of his fable, into his speculation, into his

charity. And, as every man is hunted by his own daemon, vexed by his

own disease, this checks all his activity.

So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A strong, astringent,

bilious nature has more truculent enemies than the slugs and moths that

fret my leaves. Such an one has curculios, borers, knife-worms: a

swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack, then smooth,

plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish as Moloch.

This correlation really existing can be divined. If the threads are

there, thought can follow and show them. Especially when a soul is

quick and docile; as Chaucer sings,

"Or if the soul of proper kind

Be so perfect as men find,

That it wot what is to come,

And that he warneth all and some

Of every of their aventures,

By previsions or figures;

But that our flesh hath not might

It to understand aright

For it is warned too darkly."--

Some people are made up of rhyme, coincidence, omen, periodicity, and

presage: they meet the person they seek; what their companion prepares

to say to them, they first say to him; and a hundred signs apprise them

of what is about to befall.

Wonderful intricacy in the web, wonderful constancy in the design this

vagabond life admits. We wonder how the fly finds its mate, and yet

year after year we find two men, two women, without legal or carnal tie,

spend a great part of their best time within a few feet of each other.

And the moral is, that what we seek we shall find; what we flee from

flees from us; as Goethe said, "what we wish for in youth, comes in

heaps on us in old age," too often cursed with the granting of our

prayer: and hence the high caution, that, since we are sure of having

what we wish, we beware to ask only for high things.

One key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one solution

to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists, the

propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. A man must ride

alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature, as the

equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse,

or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of

the other. So when a man is the victim of his fate, has sciatica in his

loins, and cramp in his mind; a club-foot and a club in his wit; a sour

face, and a selfish temper; a strut in his gait, and a conceit in his

affection; or is ground to powder by the vice of his race; he is to

rally on his relation to the Universe, which his ruin benefits. Leaving

the daemon who suffers, he is to take sides with the Deity who secures

universal benefit by his pain.

To offset the drag of temperament and race, which pulls down, learn this

lesson, namely, that by the cunning co-presence of two elements, which

is throughout nature, whatever lames or paralyzes you, draws in with it

the divinity, in some form, to repay. A good intention clothes itself

with sudden power. When a god wishes to ride, any chip or pebble will

bud and shoot out winged feet, and serve him for a horse.

Let us build altars to the Blessed Unity which holds nature and souls in

perfect solution, and compels every atom to serve an universal end. I

do not wonder at a snow-flake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory

of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe

lies; that all is and must be pictorial; that the rainbow, and the curve

of the horizon, and the arch of the blue vault are only results from the

organism of the eye. There is no need for foolish amateurs to fetch me

to admire a garden of flowers, or a sun-gilt cloud, or a waterfall, when

I cannot look without seeing splendor and grace. How idle to choose a

random sparkle here or there, when the indwelling necessity plants the

rose of beauty on the brow of chaos, and discloses the central intention

of Nature to be harmony and joy.

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity. If we thought men were

free in the sense, that, in a single exception one fantastical will

could prevail over the law of things, it were all one as if a child's

hand could pull down the sun. If, in the least particular, one could

derange the order of nature,--who would accept the gift of life?

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all

is made of one piece; that plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy,

animal and planet, food and eater, are of one kind. In astronomy, is

vast space, but no foreign system; in geology, vast time, but the same

laws as to-day. Why should we be afraid of Nature, which is no other

than "philosophy and theology embodied"? Why should we fear to be

crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements? Let

us build to the Beautiful Necessity, which makes man brave in believing

that he cannot shun a danger that is appointed, nor incur one that is

not; to the Necessity which rudely or softly educates him to the

perception that there are no contingencies; that Law rules throughout

existence, a Law which is not intelligent but intelligence,--not

personal nor impersonal,--it disdains words and passes understanding; it

dissolves persons; it vivifies nature; yet solicits the pure in heart to

draw on all its omnipotence.