CHAPTER VIII.

PROSPECTS.

In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things,

the highest reason is always the truest. 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.

For, the problems to be solved are precisely those which the

physiologist and the naturalist omit to state. It is not so pertinent to

man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to know

whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his constitution, which

evermore separates and classifies things, endeavoring to reduce the most

diverse to one form. When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my

purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata,

than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of

unity. I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details, so long as there is

no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon

the _metaphysics_ of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the

relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to the

mind, and build science upon ideas. In a cabinet of natural history, we

become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard

to the most unwieldly and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.

The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of

buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York

Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures

are imitations also,--faint copies of an invisible archetype. Nor has

science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks that

wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which

he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because

he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great

and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color,

fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or

analysis lay open. A perception of this mystery inspires the muse of

George Herbert, the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The

following lines are part of his little poem on Man.

“Man is all symmetry,

Full of proportions, one limb to another,

And to all the world besides.

Each part may call the farthest, brother;

For head with foot hath private amity,

And both with moons and tides.

“Nothing hath got so far

But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;

His eyes dismount the highest star;

He is in little all the sphere.

Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they

Find their acquaintance there.

“For us, the winds do blow,

The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;

Nothing we see, but means our good,

As our delight, or as our treasure;

The whole is either our cupboard of food,

Or cabinet of pleasure.

“The stars have us to bed:

Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws.

Music and light attend our head.

All things unto our flesh are kind,

In their descent and being; to our mind,

In their ascent and cause.

“More servants wait on man

Than he’ll take notice of. In every path,

He treads down that which doth befriend him

When sickness makes him pale and wan.

Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath

Another to attend him.”

The perception of this class of truths makes the attraction which draws

men to science, but the end is lost sight of in attention to the means.

In view of this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence of Plato,

that “poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.” Every surmise

and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we

learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences, which contain

glimpses of truth, to digested 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.

I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and

nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have always

been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both

history and prophecy.

‘The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the

element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of

events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of

the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries

are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation.

‘We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own and

disown our relation to it, by turns. We are, like Nebuchadnezzar,

dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can

set limits to the remedial force of spirit?

‘A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer,

and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations

should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and

infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of

fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.

‘Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by

spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him

sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The

laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externalized themselves

into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for

himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the

veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees, that the structure

still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted

him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly

his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower

of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at

himself and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt

him and it. He perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he

have elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not

conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is

Instinct.’ Thus my Orphic poet sang.

At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the

world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a

penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and

whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted,

and he is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power over it,

is through the understanding; as by manure; the economic use of fire,

wind, water, and the mariner’s needle; steam, coal, chemical

agriculture; the repairs of the human body by the dentist and the

surgeon. This is such a resumption of power, as if a banished king

should buy his territories inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once

into his throne. Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are not wanting

gleams of a better light,--occasional examples of the action of man upon

nature with his entire force,--with reason as well as understanding.

Such examples are; the traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity

of all nations; the history of Jesus Christ; the achievements of a

principle, as in religious and political revolutions, and in the

abolition of the Slave-trade; the miracles of enthusiasm, as those

reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers; many obscure and yet

contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal Magnetism;

prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children. These are

examples of Reason’s momentary grasp of the sceptre; the exertions of a

power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous

in-streaming causing power. The difference between the actual and the

ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that

the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, _vespertina cognitio_, but

that of God is a morning knowledge, _matutina cognitio_.

The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is

solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see

when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not

coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent

but opake. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in

heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a

naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as

much its demand, as perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without

the other. In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and

devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep. But in actual life, the

marriage is not celebrated. There are innocent men who worship God after

the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet

extended to the use of all their faculties. And there are patient

naturalists, but they freeze their subject under the wintry light of the

understanding. Is not prayer also a study of truth,--a sally of the soul

into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily, without learning

something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object

from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at

the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections,

then will God go forth anew into the creation.

It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for

objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the

common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman?

What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem

unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform

it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the fact is seen

under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We

behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true

poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to

our own door. You also are a man. Man and woman, and their social life,

poverty, labor, sleep, fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none

of these things is superficial, but that each phenomenon has its roots

in the faculties and affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract

question occupies your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to be

solved by your hands. It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to compare,

point by point, especially at remarkable crises in life, our daily

history, with the rise and progress of ideas in the mind.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the

endless inquiry of the intellect,--What is truth? and of the

affections,--What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated

Will. Then shall come to pass what my poet said; ‘Nature is not fixed

but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness

of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid, it is

volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond

its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the

world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are,

that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Cæsar could, you have

and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Cæsar called his

house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler’s trade; a hundred acres

of ploughed land; or a scholar’s garret. Yet line for line and point for

point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names.

Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to

the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A

correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests,

madhouses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no

more seen. The sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up, and

the wind exhale. As when the summer comes from the south; the snow-banks

melt, and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so shall the

advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, and carry with it

the beauty it visits, and the song which enchants it; it shall draw

beautiful faces, warm hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts, around

its way, until evil is no more seen. The kingdom of man over nature,

which cometh not with observation,--a dominion such as now is beyond his

dream of God,--he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man

feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.’

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.

AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY, AT CAMBRIDGE,

AUGUST 31, 1837.

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,

I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary

is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for

games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies,

and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy,

like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our

contemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our

holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of

letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such,

it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the

time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be, something else;

when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its

iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with

something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of

dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands,

draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life,

cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events,

actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can

doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the

constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers

announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?

In this hope, I accept the topic which not only usage, but the nature of

our association, seem to prescribe to this day,--the AMERICAN SCHOLAR.

Year by year, we come up hither to read one more chapter of his

biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on

his character, and his hopes.

It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an

unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into

men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was

divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One

Man,--present to all particular men only partially, or through one

faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man.

Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man

is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the

_divided_ or social state, these functions are parcelled out to

individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst

each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to

possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all

the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this

fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so

minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and

cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members

have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking

monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter,

who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by

any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his

cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on

the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work,

but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to

dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the

mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of the ship.

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated

intellect. In the right state, he is, _Man Thinking_. In the degenerate

state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker,

or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office is

contained. Him nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory

pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites. Is not,

indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the

student’s behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true

master? But the old oracle said, ‘All things have two handles: beware of

the wrong one.’ In life, too often, the scholar errs with mankind and

forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and consider him

in reference to the main influences he receives.

I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon

the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset,

night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every

day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is

he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value

in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is

never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but

always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his

own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find,--so

entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system

shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without

circumference,--in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to

render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the

young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it

finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three,

then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying

instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies,

discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote

things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently learns, that,

since the dawn of history, there has been a constant accumulation and

classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving

that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law

which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that

geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of

planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method

throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy,

identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before

each refractory fact; one after another, reduces all strange

constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on

for ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of

nature, by insight.

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is

suggested, that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is

flower; relation, sympathy, stiring in every vein. And what is that

root? Is not that the soul of his soul?--A thought too bold,--a dream

too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of

more earthly natures,--when he has learned to worship the soul, and to

see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings

of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever expanding

knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see, that nature is the

opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and

one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the

laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his

attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own

mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, “Know

thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become at last one

maxim.

II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, the

mind of the Past,--in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of

institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the

influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth,--learn the

amount of this influence more conveniently,--by considering their value

alone.

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into

him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of

his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out

from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from

him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him,

poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and

it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in

proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it

soar, so long does it sing.

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of

transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the

distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be.

But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a

perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the

conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book

of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a

remote posterity, as to cotemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each

age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation

for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the

act of creation,--the act of thought,--is transferred to the record. The

poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is

divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is

settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship

of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a

tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open

to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received

this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged.

Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by

Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out

from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young

men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views,

which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that

Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they

wrote these books.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the

book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature

and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with

the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the

emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What

is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect?

They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than

to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a

satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is

the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains

within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn.

The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In

this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a

favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is

progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution

of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say

they,--let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not

forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his

forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever

talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is

not his;--cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are

creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words;

manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority,

but springing spontaneous from the mind’s own sense of good and fair.

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from

another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without

periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice

is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by

over-influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The

English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly

subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books

are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the

hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their

readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they

must,--when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining,--we

repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps

to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The

Arabian proverb says, “A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh

fruitful.”

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best

books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and

the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of

Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy,--with a

pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of

all _time_ from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of

our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three

hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which

I also had wellnigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence

afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we

should suppose some preëstablished harmony, some foresight of souls that

were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like

the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young

grub they shall never see.

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of

instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that, as the human body

can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth

of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and

heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information than by the

printed page. I only would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that

diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He

that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the

wealth of the Indies.” There is then creative reading as well as

creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the

page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.

Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as

broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the

seer’s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so

is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning

will read, in his Plato or Shakspeare, only that least part,--only the

authentic utterances of the oracle;--all the rest he rejects, were it

never so many times Plato’s and Shakspeare’s.

Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise

man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading.

Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach

elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill,

but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to

their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts

of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which

apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary

foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least

sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will

recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.

III. There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should be a

recluse, a valetudinarian,--as unfit for any handiwork or public labor,

as a penknife for an axe. The so-called ‘practical men’ sneer at

speculative men, as if, because they speculate or _see_, they could do

nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy,--who are always, more

universally than any other class, the scholars of their day,--are

addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they

do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often

virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, there are advocates for their

celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just

and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential.

Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into

truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we

cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no

scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition

through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is

action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose

words are loaded with life, and whose not.

The world,--this shadow of the soul, or _other me_, lies wide around.

Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me

acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I

grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to

suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss

be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its fear; I

dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of

life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I

vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion.

I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his

nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and

rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are

instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every

opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power.

It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid

products. A strange process too, this, by which experience is converted

into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The

manufacture goes forward at all hours.

The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now matters of

calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so

with our recent actions,--with the business which we now have in hand.

On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet

circulate through it. We no more feel or know it, than we feel the feet,

or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of

life,--remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some

contemplative hour, it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit,

to become a thought of the mind. Instantly, it is raised, transfigured;

the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an object of

beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the

impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly,

it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation,

the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom.

So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not,

sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by

soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, school and

playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little

maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky,

are gone already; friend and relative, profession and party, town and

country, nation and world, must also soar and sing.

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has

the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe

of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger and

pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust one vein

of thought, much like those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood by

carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe,

went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and discovered that they

had whittled up the last of their pine-trees. Authors we have, in

numbers, who have written out their vein, and who, moved by a

commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper

into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish their

merchantable stock.

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of

action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors;

in town,--in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank

intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end

of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and

embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much

he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech.

Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and

copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar.

Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the

workyard made.

But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than

books, is, that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in

nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath;

in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night;

in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and

every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity,--these “fits of

easy transmission and reflection,” as Newton called them, are the law of

nature because they are the law of spirit.

The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other. When

the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints,

when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness,--he

has always the resource _to live_. Character is higher than intellect.

Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats

to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong

to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truth? He can still

fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act.

Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his

affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those ‘far

from fame,’ who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his

constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be

measured by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him, that

the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the

sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in

seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those, on whom systems of

education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to

destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage

nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and

Skakspeare.

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the

dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in

the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And

labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this

limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity

sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.

* * * * *

I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books,

and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.

They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in

self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to

guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow,

unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in

their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of

all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But

he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars

of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such,--watching

days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old

records;--must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period

of his preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness

in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him

aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for

the dead. Worse yet, he must accept,--how often! poverty and solitude.

For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the

fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of

making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart,

the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and

tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the

state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and

especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what

offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of

human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations,

and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the

world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. He is to resist the vulgar

prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and

communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and

the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all

emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the

world of actions,--these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new

verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men

and events of to-day,--this he shall hear and promulgate.

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in

himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows

the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great

decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or

man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if

all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole

question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in

listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun

is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to

be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction,

let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of

neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time,--happy enough, if

he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly.

Succcess treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that

prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in

going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the

secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his

private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he

speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The

poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and

recording them, is found to have recorded that, which men in crowded

cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the

fitness of his frank confessions,--his want of knowledge of the persons

he addresses,--until he finds that he is the compliment of his

hearers;--that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their

own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest

presentiment, to his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most

public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part

of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.

In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar

be,--free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, “without

any hindrance that does not arise out of his own constitution.” Brave;

for fear is a thing, which a scholar by his very function puts behind

him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his

tranquillity, amid, dangerous times, arise from the presumption, that,

like children and women, his is a protected class; or if he seek a

temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed

questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes,

peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep

his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse.

Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look into its eye and search

its nature, inspect its origin,--see the whelping of this lion,--which

lies no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect

comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet

on the other side, and can henceforth defy it, and pass on superior. The

world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what

stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by

sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have

already dealt it its mortal blow.

Yes, we are the cowed,--we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion

that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long

time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it

is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and

sin, it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in

proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows

before him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who can alter

matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the

world who give the color of their present thought to all nature and all

art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the

matter, that this thing which they do, is the apple which the ages have

desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest.

The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is

the head of the table. Linnæus makes botany the most alluring of

studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy,

chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his, who works in it

with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him

whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic

follow the moon.

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed,--darker

than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my

audience in stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground

of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man

has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light,

that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no

account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day are bugs, are spawn,

and are called ‘the mass’ and ‘the herd.’ In a century, in a millennium,

one or two men; that is to say,--one or two approximations to the right

state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their

own green and crude being,--ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so

_that_ may attain to its full stature. What a testimony,--full of

grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by

the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his

chief. The poor and the low find some amends to their immense moral

capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social inferiority.

They are content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great

person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which

it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun

themselves in the great man’s light, and feel it to be their own

element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod selves upon

the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood to

make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and conquer. He

lives for us, and we live in him.

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power

because it is as good as money,--the “spoils,” so called, “of office.”

And why not? for they aspire to the highest, and this, in their

sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them, and they shall quit

the false good, and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks

and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication

of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor,

for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strown

along the ground. The private life of one man shall be a more

illustrious monarchy,--more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and

serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For

a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men.

Each philosopher, each bard, each actor, has only done for me, as by a

delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The books which once we

valued more than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is

that but saying, that we have come up with the point of view which the

universal mind took through the eyes of one scribe; we have been that

man, and have passed on. First, one; then, another; we drain all

cisterns, and, waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better

and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever.

The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person, who shall set a barrier

on any one side to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one

central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the

capes of Sicily; and, now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the

towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a

thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.

* * * * *

But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the Scholar.

I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say, of nearer

reference to the time and to this country.

Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which

predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the

genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or

Philosophical age. With the views I have intimated of the oneness or the

identity of the mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell on

these differences. In fact, I believe each individual passes through all

three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective. I

deny not, however, that a revolution in the leading idea may be

distinctly enough traced.

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil?

We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we

cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure

consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is

infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness,--

“Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

It is so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be

blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth

dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class, as a mere

announcement of the fact, that they find themselves not in the state of

mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy

dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there is any

period one would desire to be born in,--is it not the age of Revolution;

when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being

compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope;

when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich

possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good

one, if we but know what to do with it.

I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they

glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science,

through church and state.

One of these signs is the fact, that the same movement which effected

the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state, assumed

in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect. Instead of the

sublime and beautiful; the near, the low, the common, was explored and

poetized. That, which had been negligently trodden under foot by those

who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into

far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts.

The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of

the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time.

It is a great stride. It is a sign,--is it not? of new vigor, when the

extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the

hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic;

what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provençal

minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the

familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the

antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The

meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the

news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the

body;--show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the

sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it

does lurk, in these surburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every

trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an

eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the leger, referred to the

like cause by which light undulates and poets sing;--and the world lies

no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order;

there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and

animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.

This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, and, in a

newer time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This idea they have

differently followed and with various success. In contrast with their

writing, the style of Pope, of Johnson, of Gibbon, looks cold and

pedantic. This writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that

things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The

near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to

all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in

discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns,

has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.

There is one man of genius, who has done much for this philosophy of

life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated;--I mean

Emanuel Swedenborg. The most imaginative of men, yet writing with the

precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely

philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such an

attempt, of course, must have difficulty, which no genius could

surmount. But he saw and showed the connection between nature and the

affections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual character

of the visible, audible, tangible world. Especially did his shade-loving

muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature; he showed the

mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul material forms, and

has given in epical parables a theory of insanity, of beasts, of unclean

and fearful things.

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political

movement, is, the new importance given to the single person. Every thing

that tends to insulate the individual,--to surround him with barriers of

natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man

shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state;--tends

to true union as well as greatness. “I learned,” said the melancholy

Pestalozzi, “that no man in God’s wide earth is either willing or able

to help any other man.” Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar

is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time,

all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must

be an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than

another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the

man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet

how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason;

it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and

Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by

all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American

Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The

spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid,

imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe

thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already

the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low

objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and

the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon

our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars

of God, find the earth below not in unison with these,--but are

hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which

business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust,--some

of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and

thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the

career, do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself

indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come

round to him. Patience,--patience;--with the shades of all the good and

great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite

life; and for work, the study and the communication of principles, the

making those instincts prevalent, the conversation of the world. Is it

not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit;--not to be

reckoned one character;--not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man

was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or

the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our

opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so,

brothers and friends,--please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on

our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own

minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for

doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man

shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of

men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself

inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

AN ADDRESS

DELIVERED BEFORE THE SENIOR CLASS IN DIVINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, SUNDAY

EVENING, JULY 15, 1838.

ADDRESS.

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of

life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire

and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet

with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night

brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the

transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man

under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night

bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the

crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily.

The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the

never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward, has not

yielded yet one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the

perfection of this world, in which our senses converse. How wide; how

rich; what invitation from every property it gives to every faculty of

man! In its fruitful soils; in its navigable sea; in its mountains of

metal and stone; in its forests of all woods; in its animals; in its

chemical ingredients; in the powers and path of light, heat, attraction,

and life, it is well worth the pith and heart of great men to subdue and

enjoy it. The planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the astronomers,

the builders of cities, and the captains, history delights to honor.

But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the

universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at

once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and

What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never

to be quenched. Behold these outrunning laws, which our imperfect

apprehension can see tend this way and that, but not come full circle.

Behold these infinite relations, so like, so unlike; many, yet one. I

would study, I would know, I would admire forever. These works of

thought have been the entertainments of the human spirit in all ages.

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his

heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in

what is above him. He learns that his being is without bound; that, to

the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and

weakness. That which he venerates is still his own, though he has not

realized it yet. _He ought._ He knows the sense of that grand word,

though his analysis fails to render account of it. When in innocency, or

when by intellectual perception, he attains to say,--‘I love the Right;

Truth is beautiful within and without forevermore. Virtue, I am thine:

save me: use me: thee will I serve, day and night, in great, in small,

that I may be not virtuous, but virtue;’--then is the end of the

creation answered, and God is well pleased.

The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of

certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play,

covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish. The

child amidst his baubles, is learning the action of light, motion,

gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human life, love, fear,

justice, appetite, man, and God, interact. These laws refuse to be

adequately stated. They will not be written out on paper, or spoken by

the tongue. They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly

in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our own remorse. The

moral traits which are all globed into every virtuous act and

thought,--in speech, we must sever, and describe or suggest by painful

enumeration of many particulars. Yet, as this sentiment is the essence

of all religion, let me guide your eye to the precise objects of the

sentiment, by an enumeration of some of those classes of facts in which

this element is conspicuous.

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of

the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of

time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus; in the soul

of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He

who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is

by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts

on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the

safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into

that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself,

and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. A man in the view of

absolute goodness, adores, with total humanity. Every step so downward,

is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs,

correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with

thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is, at last,

as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made the Providence to himself,

dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is

always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will

speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie,--for example,

the taint of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable

appearance,--will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and

all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak

the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very

roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear

you witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to

the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we

associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity,

the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into

hell.

These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed, that the

world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one

mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star,

in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that will, is

everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so, and not

otherwise. Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it

is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death

or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a

man hath, so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of this same

spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its

different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on

the several shores which it washes. All things proceed out of the same

spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends,

he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from

these ends, he bereaves himself of power, or auxiliaries; his being

shrinks out of all remote channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a

point, until absolute badness is absolute death.

The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which

we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness.

Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air.

It is the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine

and rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent

song of the stars is it. By it, is the universe made safe and habitable,

not by science or power. Thought may work cold and intransitive in

things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of

virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign

over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to

break out into joy.

This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It

makes him illimitable. Through it, the soul first knows itself. It

corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by

following the great, and hopes to derive advantages _from another_,--by

showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally

with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Reason. When he says, “I

ought;” when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the

good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from

Supreme Wisdom.--Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship;

for he can never go behind this sentiment. In the sublimest flights of

the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown.

This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, and successively

creates all forms of worship. The principle of veneration never dies

out. Man fallen into superstition, into sensuality, is never quite

without the visions of the moral sentiment. In like manner, all the

expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to

their purity. The expressions of this sentiment affect us more than all

other compositions. The sentences of the oldest time, which ejaculate

this piety, are still fresh and fragrant. This thought dwelled always

deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not

alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in

Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to oriental

genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men

found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon

mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history

of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion.

Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day,

before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is

guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It

cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not

instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What

he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as

his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing. On the contrary, the

absence of this primary faith is the presence of degradation. As is the

flood so is the ebb. Let this faith depart, and the very words it spake,

and the things it made, become false and hurtful. Then falls the church,

the state, art, letters, life. The doctrine of the divine nature being

forgotten, a sickness infects and dwarfs the constitution. Once man was

all; now he is an appendage, a nuisance. And because the indwelling

Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers

this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two

persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury. The doctrine

of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices,

usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul. Miracles, prophecy,

poetry; the ideal life, the holy life, exist as ancient history merely;

they are not in the belief, nor in the aspiration of society; but, when

suggested, seem ridiculous. Life is comic or pitiful, as soon as the

high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and

can only attend to what addresses the senses.

These general views, which, whilst they are general, none will contest,

find abundant illustration in the history of religion, and especially in

the history of the Christian church. In that, all of us have had our

birth and nurture. The truth contained in that, you, my young friends,

are now setting forth to teach. As the Cultus, or established worship of

the civilized world, it has great historical interest for us. Of its

blessed words, which have been the consolation of humanity, you need not

that I should speak. I shall endeavor to discharge my duty to you, on

this occasion, by pointing out two errors in its administration, which

daily appear more gross from the point of view we have just now taken.

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye

the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its

beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history,

he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you

and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes

forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of

sublime emotion, ‘I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me,

speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest

as I now think.’ But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory

suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no

doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the

Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s

lips, and said, in the next age, ‘This was Jehovah come down out of

heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.’ The idioms of his

language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his

truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes.

Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of

Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a

miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle

shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by

Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not

one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

He felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit tenderness at

postponing their initial revelations, to the hour and the man that now

is; to the eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was he a true man.

Having seen that the law in us is commanding, he would not suffer it to

be commanded. Boldly, with hand, and heart, and life, he declared it was

God. Thus is he, as I think, the only soul in history who has

appreciated the worth of man.

1. In this point of view we become sensible of the first defect of

historical Christianity. Historical Christianity has fallen into the

error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears

to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the

soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It

has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the _person_ of

Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the

full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of

spontaneous love. But by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which

indolence and fear have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of

man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with expressions, which

were once sallies of admiration and love, but are now petrified into

official titles, kills all generous sympathy and liking. All who hear

me, feel, that the language that describes Christ to Europe and America,

is not the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good and noble

heart, but is appropriated and formal,--paints a demigod as the

Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. Accept the

injurious impositions of our early catechetical instruction, and even

honesty and self-denial were but splendid sins, if they did not wear the

Christian name. One would rather be

‘A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,’

than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into nature, and

finding not names and places, not land and professions, but even virtue

and truth foreclosed and monopolized. You shall not be a man even. You

shall not own the world; you shall not dare, and live after the infinite

Law that is in you, and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven

and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms; but you must subordinate

your nature to Christ’s nature; you must accept our interpretations; and

take his portrait as the vulgar draw it.

That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is excited in

me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. That which shows God in

me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a

wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the

long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decease

forever.

The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect, of my

strength. They admonish me, that the gleams which flash across my mind,

are not mine, but God’s; that they had the like, and were not

disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I love them. Noble provocations

go out from them, inviting me to resist evil; to subdue the world; and

to Be. And thus by his holy thoughts, Jesus serves us, and thus only. To

aim to convert a man by miracles, is a profanation of the soul. A true

conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made, by the

reception of beautiful sentiments. It is true that a great and rich

soul, like his, falling among the simple, does so preponderate, that, as

his did, it names the world. The world seems to them to exist for him,

and they have not yet drunk so deeply of his sense, as to see that only

by coming again to themselves, or to God in themselves, can they grow

forevermore. It is a low benefit to give me something; it is a high

benefit to enable me to do somewhat of myself. The time is coming when

all men will see, that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting,

overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a

goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be

and to grow.

The injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching is not less flagrant to

Jesus, than to the souls which it profanes. The preachers do not see

that they make his gospel not glad, and shear him of the locks of beauty

and the attributes of heaven. When I see a majestic Epaminondas, or

Washington; when I see among my contemporaries, a true orator, an

upright judge, a dear friend; when I vibrate to the melody and fancy of

a poem; I see beauty that is to be desired. And so lovely, and with yet

more entire consent of my human being, sounds in my ear the severe music

of the bards that have sung of the true God in all ages. Now do not

degrade the life and dialogues of Christ out of the circle of this

charm, by insulation and peculiarity. Let them lie as they befel, alive

and warm, part of human life, and of the landscape, and of the cheerful

day.

2. The second defect of the traditionary and limited way of using the

mind of Christ is a consequence of the first; this, namely; that the

Moral Nature, that Law of laws, whose revelations introduce

greatness,--yea, God himself, into the open soul, is not explored as the

fountain of the established teaching in society. Men have come to speak

of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were

dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher; and the goodliest of

institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.

It is very certain that it is the effect of conversation with the beauty

of the soul, to beget a desire and need to impart to others the same

knowledge and love. If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a

burden on the man. Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is

told: somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on

canvas; sometimes with chisel on stone; sometimes in towers and aisles

of granite, his soul’s worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of

indefinite music; but clearest and most permanent, in words.

The man enamored of this excellency, becomes its priest or poet. The

office is coeval with the world. But observe the condition, the

spiritual limitation of the office. The spirit only can teach. Not any

profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but

only he can give, who has; he only can create, who is. The man on whom

the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach.

Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his

door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues. But

the man who aims to speak as books enable, as synods use, as the fashion

guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him hush.

To this holy office, you propose to devote yourselves. I wish you may

feel your call in throbs of desire and hope. The office is the first in

the world. It is of that reality, that it cannot suffer the deduction of

any falsehood. And it is my duty to say to you, that the need was never

greater of new revelation than now. From the views I have already

expressed, you will infer the sad conviction, which I share, I believe,

with numbers, of the universal decay and now almost death of faith in

society. The soul is not preached. The Church seems to totter to its

fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion, any complaisance would

be criminal, which told you, whose hope and commission it is to preach

the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached.

It is time that this ill-suppressed murmur of all thoughtful men against

the famine of our churches; this moaning of the heart because it is

bereaved of the consolation, the hope, the grandeur, that come alone out

of the culture of the moral nature; should be heard through the sleep

of indolence, and over the din of routine. This great and perpetual

office of the preacher is not discharged. Preaching is the expression of

the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life. In how many

churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is

an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind;

that he is drinking forever the soul of God? Where now sounds the

persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises my heart, and so affirms

its own origin in heaven? Where shall I hear words such as in elder ages

drew men to leave all and follow,--father and mother, house and land,

wife and child? Where shall I hear these august laws of moral being so

pronounced, as to fill my ear, and I feel ennobled by the offer of my

uttermost action and passion? The test of the true faith, certainly,

should be its power to charm and command the soul, as the laws of nature

control the activity of the hands,--so commanding that we find pleasure

and honor in obeying. The faith should blend with the light of rising

and of setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird, and the

breath of flowers. But now the priest’s Sabbath has lost the splendor of

nature; it is unlovely; we are glad when it is done; we can make, we do

make, even sitting in our pews, a far better, holier, sweeter, for

ourselves.

Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper

defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin,

which do not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain to wrap our

cloaks about us, and secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not.

I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to

church no more. Men go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else had

no soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow-storm was falling

around us. The snow-storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and

the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the

window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived

in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was

married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he

had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital

secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not

learned. Not one fact in all his experience, had he yet imported into

his doctrine. This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and

bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head

aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a

surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all.

Not a line did he draw out of real history. The true preacher can be

known by this, that he deals out to the people his life,--life passed

through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be

told from his sermon, what age of the world he fell in; whether he had a

father or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he

was a citizen or a countryman; or any other fact of his biography. It

seemed strange that the people should come to church. It seemed as if

their houses were very unentertaining, that they should prefer this

thoughtless clamor. It shows that there is a commanding attraction in

the moral sentiment, that can lend a faint tint of light to dulness and

ignorance, coming in its name and place. The good hearer is sure he has

been touched sometimes; is sure there is somewhat to be reached, and

some word that can reach it. When he listens to these vain words, he

comforts himself by their relation to his remembrance of better hours,

and so they clatter and echo unchallenged.

I am not ignorant that when we preach unworthily, it is not always quite

in vain. There is a good ear, in some men, that draws supplies to

virtue out of very indifferent nutriment. There is poetic truth

concealed in all the common-places of prayer and of sermons, and though

foolishly spoken, they may be wisely heard; for, each is some select

expression that broke out in a moment of piety from some stricken or

jubilant soul, and its excellency made it remembered. The prayers and

even the dogmas of our church, are like the zodiac of Denderah, and the

astronomical monuments of the Hindoos, wholly insulated from anything

now extant in the life and business of the people. They mark the height

to which the waters once rose. But this docility is a check upon the

mischief from the good and devout. In a large portion of the community,

the religious service gives rise to quite other thoughts and emotions.

We need not chide the negligent servant. We are struck with pity,

rather, at the swift retribution of his sloth. Alas for the unhappy man

that is called to stand in the pulpit, and _not_ give bread of life.

Everything that befalls, accuses him. Would he ask contributions for the

missions, foreign or domestic? Instantly his face is suffused with

shame, to propose to his parish, that they should send money a hundred

or a thousand miles, to furnish such poor fare as they have at home, and

would do well to go the hundred or the thousand miles to escape. Would

he urge people to a godly way of living;--and can he ask a

fellow-creature to come to Sabbath meetings, when he and they all know

what is the poor uttermost they can hope for therein? Will he invite

them privately to the Lord’s Supper? He dares not. If no heart warm this

rite, the hollow, dry, creaking formality is too plain, than that he can

face a man of wit and energy, and put the invitation without terror. In

the street, what has he to say to the bold village blasphemer? The

village blasphemer sees fear in the face, form, and gait of the

minister.

Let me not taint the sincerity of this plea by any oversight of the

claims of good men. I know and honor the purity and strict conscience of

numbers of the clergy. What life the public worship retains, it owes to

the scattered company of pious men, who minister here and there in the

churches, and who, sometimes accepting with too great tenderness the

tenet of the elders, have not accepted from others, but from their own

heart, the genuine impulses of virtue, and so still command our love and

awe, to the sanctity of character. Moreover, the exceptions are not so

much to be found in a few eminent preachers, as in the better hours, the

truer inspirations of all,--nay, in the sincere moments of every man.

But with whatever exception, it is still true, that tradition

characterizes the preaching of this country; that it comes out of the

memory, and not out of the soul; that it aims at what is usual, and not

at what is necessary and eternal; that thus, historical Christianity

destroys the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration

of the moral nature of man, where the sublime is, where are the

resources of astonishment and power. What a cruel injustice it is to

that Law, the joy of the whole earth, which alone can make thought dear

and rich; that Law whose fatal sureness the astronomical orbits poorly

emulate, that it is travestied and depreciated, that it is behooted and

behowled, and not a trait, not a word of it articulated. The pulpit in

losing sight of this Law, loses its reason, and gropes after it knows

not what. And for want of this culture, the soul of the community is

sick and faithless. It wants nothing so much as a stern, high, stoical,

Christian discipline, to make it know itself and the divinity that

speaks through it. Now man is ashamed of himself; he skulks and sneaks

through the world, to be tolerated, to be pitied, and scarcely in a

thousand years does any man dare to be wise and good, and so draw after

him the tears and blessings of his kind.

Certainly there have been periods when, from the inactivity of the

intellect on certain truths, a greater faith was possible in names and

persons. The Puritans in England and America, found in the Christ of the

Catholic Church, and in the dogmas inherited from Rome, scope for their

austere piety, and their longings for civil freedom. But their creed is

passing away, and none arises in its room. I think no man can go with

his thoughts about him, into one of our churches, without feeling, that

what hold the public worship had on men is gone, or going. It has lost

its grasp on the affection of the good, and the fear of the bad. In the

country, neighborhoods, half parishes are _signing off_, to use the

local term. It is already beginning to indicate character and religion

to withdraw from the religious meetings. I have heard a devout person,

who prized the Sabbath, say in bitterness of heart, “On Sundays, it

seems wicked to go to church.” And the motive, that holds the best

there, is now only a hope and a waiting. What was once a mere

circumstance, that the best and the worst men in the parish, the poor

and the rich, the learned and the ignorant, young and old, should meet

one day as fellows in one house, in sign of an equal right in the soul,

has come to be a paramount motive for going thither.

My friends, in these two errors, I think, I find the causes of a

decaying church and a wasting unbelief. And what greater calamity can

fall upon a nation, than the loss of worship? Then all things go to

decay. Genius leaves the temple, to haunt the senate, or the market.

Literature becomes frivolous. Science is cold. The eye of youth is not

lighted by the hope of other worlds, and age is without honor. Society

lives to trifles, and when men die, we do not mention them.

And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these desponding days can be

done by us? The remedy is already declared in the ground of our

complaint of the Church. We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In

the soul, then, let the redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes,

there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. When a man comes, all

books are legible, all things transparent, all religions are forms. He

is religious. Man is the wonderworker. He is seen amid miracles. All men

bless and curse. He saith yea and nay, only. The stationariness of

religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the

Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by

representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the

falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show

us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake. The true

Christianity,--a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man,--is lost.

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old

and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this

saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot

see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society wiser

than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser

than the whole world. See how nations and races flit by on the sea of

time, and leave no ripple to tell where they floated or sunk, and one

good soul shall make the name of Moses, or of Zeno, or of Zoroaster,

reverend forever. None assayeth the stern ambition to be the Self of the

nation, and of nature, but each would be an easy secondary to some

Christian scheme, or sectarian connection, or some eminent man. Once

leave your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take secondary

knowledge, as St. Paul’s, or George Fox’s, or Swedenborg’s, and you get

wide from God with every year this secondary form lasts, and if, as now,

for centuries,--the chasm yawns to that breath, that men can scarcely be

convinced there is in them anything divine.

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good

models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare

to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you shall find who

will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and

Prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, ‘I also am a man.’

Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to

hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him,

and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is

natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of

another man’s.

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,--cast behind you all

conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first

and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money, are

nothing to you,--are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot

see,--but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too

anxious to visit periodically all families and each family in your

parish connection,--when you meet one of these men or women, be to them

a divine man; be to them thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations

find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted

out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted,

and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own

heart, you shall gain more confidence in other men. For all our

penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to

be doubted, that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the

few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up

into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few

interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with

souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told

us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we inly were. Discharge

to men the priestly office, and, present or absent, you shall be

followed with their love as by an angel.