CIRCLES

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.

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable,

the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at

once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently

serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every

department.

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. Every thing looks permanent until its secret is known. A rich

estate appears to women 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. Every thing 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

scepticism. 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.

Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass and material,

threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to

refine and raise thy theory of matter just as much.

There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man

supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth

in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be

otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never

opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is,

every man believes that he has a greater possibility.

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts

and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the

same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write,

whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but

yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see

so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that

wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will

not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a

weed by the wall.

The continual effort to raise himself above himself, to work a pitch

above his last height, betrays itself in a man’s relations. We thirst

for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of nature

is love; yet, if I have a friend I am tormented by my imperfections.

The love of me accuses the other party. If he were high enough to

slight me, then could I love him, and rise by my affection to new

heights. A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his

friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better. I

thought as I walked in the woods and mused on my friends, why should I

play with them this game of idolatry? I know and see too well, when not

voluntarily blind, the speedy limits of persons called high and worthy.

Rich, noble and great they are by the liberality of our speech, but

truth is sad. O blessed Spirit, whom I forsake for these, they are not

thou! Every personal consideration that we allow costs us heavenly

state. We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent

pleasure.

How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to interest us when we

find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once

come up with a man’s limitations, it is all over with him. Has he

talents? has he enterprise? has he knowledge? It boots not. Infinitely

alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to

swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care

not if you never see it again.

Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly discordant

facts, as expressions of one law. Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the

respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle

platonizes. By going one step farther back in thought, discordant

opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of one

principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still

higher vision.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all

things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a

great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There

is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there

is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of

fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the

thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals

of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization. Generalization

is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill

that attends it.

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have

his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will,

he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past

apprehension of truth, and his alert acceptance of it from whatever

quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to

society, his Christianity, his world, may at any time be superseded and

decease.

There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it

academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday

of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and

fragments. Then its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that

it must be true. It now shows itself ethical and practical. We learn

that God is; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows of him.

The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of

Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact that all nature

is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself. Much

more obviously is history and the state of the world at any one time

directly dependent on the intellectual classification then existing in

the minds of men. The things which are dear to men at this hour are so

on account of the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and

which cause the present order of things, as a tree bears its apples. A

new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system

of human pursuits.

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the

_termini_ which bound the common of silence on every side. The parties

are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express under

this Pentecost. To-morrow they will have receded from this high-water

mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping under the old

pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on our

walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from

the oppression of the last speaker, to oppress us with the greatness

and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another

redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men. O, what truths

profound and executable only in ages and orbs, are supposed in the

announcement of every truth! In common hours, society sits cold and

statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty,—knowing, possibly, that we can

be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but

prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god and converts the statues

into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which

shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and

saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which

loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday,—property, climate, breeding,

personal beauty and the like, have strangely changed their proportions.

All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literatures,

cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations and dance before

our eyes. And yet here again see the swift circumspection! Good as is

discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the

discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the

hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words

would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be

suffered.

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle through which a

new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a

platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase

by which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient learning,

install ourselves the best we can in Greek, in Punic, in Roman houses,

only that we may wiselier see French, English and American houses and

modes of living. In like manner we see literature best from the midst

of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion.

The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer

must have his diameter of the earth’s orbit as a base to find the

parallax of any star.

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not

in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of

Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline to

repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the power

of change and reform. But some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new

wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full of

daring thought and action. He smites and arouses me with his shrill

tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits, and I open my eye on my own

possibilities. He claps wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber

of the world, and I am capable once more of choosing a straight path in

theory and practice.

We have the same need to command a view of the religion of the world.

We can never see Christianity from the catechism:—from the pastures,

from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we

possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the

sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may chance to cast

a right glance back upon biography. Christianity is rightly dear to the

best of mankind; yet was there never a young philosopher whose breeding

had fallen into the Christian church by whom that brave text of Paul’s

was not specially prized:—“Then shall also the Son be subject unto Him

who put all things under him, that God may be all in all.” Let the

claims and virtues of persons be never so great and welcome, the

instinct of man presses eagerly onward to the impersonal and

illimitable, and gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of bigots

with this generous word out of the book itself.

The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric

circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations which

apprise us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but

sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities, this chemistry and

vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to stand there for

their own sake, are means and methods only,—are words of God, and as

fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned his

craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective

affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is

only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to

like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need

not be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate

also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not through subtle

subterranean channels need friend and fact be drawn to their

counterpart, but, rightly considered, these things proceed from the

eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one

fact.

The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues,

and extinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man will not

be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much

deduction from his grandeur. But it behooves each to see, when he

sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and

pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can

well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead.

Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may

be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril.

In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me

that with every precaution you take against such an evil you put

yourself into the power of the evil. I suppose that the highest

prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a rushing from the

centre to the verge of our orbit? Think how many times we shall fall

back into pitiful calculations before we take up our rest in the great

sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides, your

bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and the low

have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as

you. “Blessed be nothing” and “The worse things are, the better they

are” are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.

One man’s justice is another’s injustice; one man’s beauty another’s

ugliness; one man’s wisdom another’s folly; as one beholds the same

objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying

debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very

remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that

second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which

debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor?

the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to

nature? For you, O broker, there is no other principle but arithmetic.

For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character,

the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty,

like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically

on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that,

though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these

debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate

himself to the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Does he

owe no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a

landlord’s or a banker’s?

There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of

society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery

that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed

such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices:—

“Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,

Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.”

It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our

contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by

day; but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost

time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what

remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a sort

of omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing of duration, but

sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to be

done, without time.

And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have

arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency of all

actions, and would fain teach us that _if we are true_, forsooth, our

crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall construct the temple

of the true God!

I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened by seeing the

predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature,

and not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of the

principle of good into every chink and hole that selfishness has left

open, yea into selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor

hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. But lest I should

mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind

the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value

on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I

pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an

endless seeker with no Past at my back.

Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake

could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of

fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of

circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central life is

somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and

contains all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life and

thought as Large and excellent as itself, but in vain, for that which

is made instructs how to make a better.

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things

renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into

the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only

disease; all others run into this one. We call it by many names,—fever,

intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime; they are all forms of old

age; they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness,

not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst

we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.

Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward,

counts itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction flowing

from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all,

they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the

actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them, then,

become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold

truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are

perfumed again with hope and power. This old age ought not to creep on

a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always

swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure

but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by

oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so

sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts.

People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there

any hope for them.

Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the

pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being. Of

lower states, of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat; but

the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements of

the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth is

divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for

_so to be_ is the sole inlet of _so to know_. The new position of the

advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new. It

carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is itself an

exhalation of the morning. I cast away in this new moment all my once

hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now, for the first time seem I

to know any thing rightly. The simplest words,—we do not know what they

mean except when we love and aspire.

The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the

old and trodden round, and power and courage to make a new road to new

and better goals. Character makes an overpowering present; a cheerful,

determined hour, which fortifies all the company by making them see

that much is possible and excellent that was not thought of. Character

dulls the impression of particular events. When we see the conqueror we

do not think much of any one battle or success. We see that we had

exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him. The great man is not

convulsible or tormentable; events pass over him without much

impression. People say sometimes, ‘See what I have overcome; see how

cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed over these black

events.’ Not if they still remind me of the black event. True conquest

is the causing the calamity to fade and disappear as an early cloud of

insignificant result in a history so large and advancing.

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget

ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our

sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in

short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without

enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment. The

great moments of history are the facilities of performance through the

strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion. “A man,” said

Oliver Cromwell, “never rises so high as when he knows not whither he

is going.” Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol are the

semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their

dangerous attraction for men. For the like reason they ask the aid of

wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames

and generosities of the heart.

XI.

INTELLECT

Go, speed the stars of Thought

On to their shining goals;—

The sower scatters broad his seed,

The wheat thou strew’st be souls.