The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second;
and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It
is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine
described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere
and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the
copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already
deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every
human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action
admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth
that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in
nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another
dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens....
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.
Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe, seen by God, is a
transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and
holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws
after it this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into
another idea; they will disappear. The Greek sculpture is all melted
away as if it had been statues of ice; here and there a solitary
figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of snow left
in cold dells and mountain clefts in June and July. For the genius
that created it creates now somewhat else. The Greek letters last a
little longer, but are already passing under the same sentence and
tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation of new thought
opens for all that is old. The new continents are built out of the
ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the decomposition of
the foregoing. New arts destroy the old. See the investment of capital
in aqueducts, made useless by hydraulics; fortifications by gunpowder;
roads and canals by railways; sails by steam; steam by electricity.
You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many
ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which
builds is better than that which is built. The hand that built can
topple it down much faster. Better than the hand and nimbler was the
invisible thought which wrought through it; and thus ever behind the
coarse effect is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself
the effect of a finer cause. Everything looks permanent until its
secret is known. A rich estate appears to women and children a firm
and lasting fact; to a merchant, one easily created out of any
materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, good grounds,
seem a fixture like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a
large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop. Nature
looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the
rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so
immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable?
Permanence is a word of degrees. Everything is medial. Moons are no
more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he
look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all
his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new
idea which commands his own. The life of man is a self-evolving
circle, which from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides
outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent
to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go,
depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. For it is the
inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular
wave of circumstance,--as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a
local usage, a religious rite,--to heap itself on that ridge and to
solidify and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong it
bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on
the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt
again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in
its first and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast
force and to immense and innumerable expansions.
Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series,--every general
law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to
disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no
circumference to us. The man finishes his story,--how good! how final!
how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo! on the
other side rises also a man and draws a circle around the circle we
had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our
first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is
forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do by
themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be
escaped, will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle
that seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example
of a bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a
power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of
the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet
depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a
suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next
age.
Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder; the steps are actions,
the new prospect is power. Every several result is threatened and
judged by that which follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by
the new; it is only limited by the new. The new statement is always
hated by the old, and to those dwelling in the old, comes like an
abyss of skepticism. But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye
and it are effects of one cause; then its innocency and benefit
appear, and presently, all its energy spent, it pales and dwindles
before the revelation of the new hour.