TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been
placed at the end of the chapter.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
NATURAL HISTORY OF
INTELLECT
_AND OTHER PAPERS_
BY
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
[Illustration: (Publisher colophon)]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1893
Copyright, 1893,
BY EDWARD W. EMERSON.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company
PREFATORY NOTE.
The first two pieces in this volume are lectures from the “University
Courses” on philosophy, given at Harvard College in 1870 and 1871,
by persons not members of the Faculty. “The Natural History of the
Intellect” was the subject which Emerson chose. He had from his
early youth cherished the project of a new method in metaphysics,
proceeding by observation of the mental facts, without attempting an
analysis and coördination of them, which must, from the nature of the
case, be premature. With this view, he had, at intervals from 1848
to 1866, announced courses on the “Natural History of Intellect,”
“The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy,” and “Philosophy for the
People.” He would, he said, give anecdotes of the spirit, a calendar
of mental moods, without any pretense of system.
None of these attempts, however, disclosed any novelty of method,
or, indeed, after the opening statement of his intention, any marked
difference from his ordinary lectures. He had always been writing
anecdotes of the spirit, and those which he wrote under this heading
were used by him in subsequently published essays so largely that
I find very little left for present publication. The lecture which
gives its name to the volume was the first of the earliest course,
and it seems to me to include all that distinctly belongs to the
particular subject.
The lecture on “Memory” is from the same course; that on “Boston”
from the course on “Life and Literature,” in 1861. The other pieces
are reprints from the “North American Review” and the “Dial.”
J. E. CABOT.
_September 9, 1893._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT 7
MEMORY 55
BOSTON 73
MICHAEL ANGELO 97
MILTON 121
PAPERS FROM THE DIAL 147
I. THOUGHTS ON MODERN LITERATURE 149
II. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 168
III. PRAYERS 177
IV. AGRICULTURE OF MASSACHUSETTS 183
V. EUROPE AND EUROPEAN BOOKS 187
VI. PAST AND PRESENT 197
VII. A LETTER 206
VIII. THE TRAGIC 216
NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT.
[Illustration: (decorative banner)]
NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT.
I have used such opportunity as I have had, and lately[1] in London
and Paris, to attend scientific lectures; and in listening to
Richard Owen’s masterly enumeration of the parts and laws of the
human body, or Michael Faraday’s explanation of magnetic powers,
or the botanist’s descriptions, one could not help admiring the
irresponsible security and happiness of the attitude of the
naturalist; sure of admiration for his facts, sure of their
sufficiency. They ought to interest you; if they do not, the fault
lies with you.
Then I thought—could not a similar enumeration be made of the
laws and powers of the Intellect, and possess the same claims on
the student? Could we have, that is, the exhaustive accuracy of
distribution which chemists use in their nomenclature and anatomists
in their descriptions, applied to a higher class of facts; to those
laws, namely, which are common to chemistry, anatomy, astronomy,
geometry, intellect, morals, and social life;—laws of the world?
Why not? These powers and laws are also facts in a Natural History.
They also are objects of science, and may be numbered and recorded,
like stamens and vertebræ. At the same time they have a deeper
interest, as in the order of nature they lie higher and are nearer
to the mysterious seat of power and creation.
For at last, it is only that exceeding and universal part which
interests us, when we shall read in a true history what befalls in
that kingdom where a thousand years is as one day, and see that what
is set down is true through all the sciences; in the laws of thought
as well as of chemistry.
In all sciences the student is discovering that nature, as he calls
it, is always working, in wholes and in every detail, after the laws
of the human mind. Every creation, in parts or in particles, is on
the method and by the means which our mind approves as soon as it is
thoroughly acquainted with the facts; hence the delight. No matter
how far or how high science explores, it adopts the method of the
universe as fast as it appears; and this discloses that the mind as
it opens, the mind as it shall be, comprehends and works thus; that
is to say, the Intellect builds the universe and is the key to all it
contains. It is not then cities or mountains, or animals, or globes
that any longer command us, but only man; not the fact, but so much
of man as is in the fact.
In astronomy, vast distance, but we never go into a foreign
system. In geology, vast duration, but we are never strangers. Our
metaphysic should be able to follow the flying force through all
transformations, and name the pair identical through all variety.
I believe in the existence of the material world as the expression
of the spiritual or the real, and in the impenetrable mystery which
hides (and hides through absolute transparency) the mental nature,
I await the insight which our advancing knowledge of material laws
shall furnish.
Every object in nature is a word to signify some fact in the mind.
But when that fact is not yet put into English words, when I look
at the tree or the river and have not yet definitely made out what
they would say to me, they are by no means unimpressive. I wait for
them, I enjoy them before they yet speak. I feel as if I stood by an
ambassador charged with the message of his king, which he does not
deliver because the hour when he should say it is not yet arrived.
Whilst we converse with truths as thoughts, they exist also as
plastic forces; as the soul of a man, the soul of a plant, the genius
or constitution of any part of nature, which makes it what it is. The
thought which was in the world, part and parcel of the world, has
disengaged itself and taken an independent existence.
* * * * *
My belief in the use of a course on philosophy is that the student
shall learn to appreciate the miracle of the mind; shall learn its
subtle but immense power, or shall begin to learn it; shall come to
know that in seeing and in no tradition he must find what truth is;
that he shall see in it the source of all traditions, and shall see
each one of them as better or worse statement of its revelations;
shall come to trust it entirely, as the only true; to cleave to
God against the name of God. When he has once known the oracle he
will need no priest. And if he finds at first with some alarm how
impossible it is to accept many things which the hot or the mild
sectarian may insist on his believing, he will be armed by his
insight and brave to meet all inconvenience and all resistance it may
cost him. He from whose hand it came will guide and direct it.
Yet these questions which really interest men, how few can answer.
Here are learned faculties of law and divinity, but would questions
like these come into mind when I see them? Here are learned academies
and universities, yet they have not propounded these for any prize.
Seek the literary circles, the stars of fame, the men of splendor,
of bon-mots, will they afford me satisfaction? I think you could
not find a club of men acute and liberal enough in the world. Bring
the best wits together, and they are so impatient of each other,
so vulgar, there is so much more than their wit,—such follies,
gluttonies, partialities, age, care, and sleep, that you shall have
no academy.
There is really a grievous amount of unavailableness about men of
wit. A plain man finds them so heavy, dull and oppressive, with bad
jokes and conceit and stupefying individualism, that he comes to
write in his tablets, Avoid the great man as one who is privileged
to be an unprofitable companion. For the course of things makes the
scholars either egotists or worldly and jocose. In so many hundreds
of superior men hardly ten or five or two from whom one can hope for
a reasonable word.
Go into the scientific club and hearken. Each savant proves in his
admirable discourse that he and he only knows now or ever did know
anything on the subject: “Does the gentleman speak of anatomy? Who
peeped into a box at the Custom House and then published a drawing
of my rat?” Or is it pretended discoveries of new strata that are
before the meeting? This professor hastens to inform us that he knew
it all twenty years ago, and is ready to prove that he knew so much
then that all further investigation was quite superfluous;—and poor
nature and the sublime law, which is all that our student cares to
hear of, are quite omitted in this triumphant vindication.
Was it better when we came to the philosophers, who found everybody
wrong; acute and ingenious to lampoon and degrade mankind? And then
was there ever prophet burdened with a message to his people who did
not cloud our gratitude by a strange confounding in his own mind of
private folly with his public wisdom?
But if you like to run away from this besetting sin of sedentary men,
you can escape all this insane egotism by running into society, where
the manners and estimate of the world have corrected this folly, and
effectually suppressed this overweening self-conceit. Here each is
to make room for others, and the solidest merits must exist only for
the entertainment of all. We are not in the smallest degree helped.
Great is the dazzle, but the gain is small. Here they play the game
of conversation, as they play billiards, for pastime and credit.
Yes, ’tis a great vice in all countries, the sacrifice of scholars to
be courtiers and diners-out, to talk for the amusement of those who
wish to be amused, though the stars of heaven must be plucked down
and packed into rockets to this end. What with egotism on one side
and levity on the other we shall have no Olympus.
But there is still another hindrance, namely, practicality. We must
have a special talent, and bring something to pass. Ever since the
Norse heaven made the stern terms of admission that a man must do
something excellent with his hands or feet, or with his voice, eyes,
ears, or with his whole body, the same demand has been made in Norse
earth.
Yet what we really want is not a haste to act, but a certain piety
toward the source of action and knowledge. In fact we have to say
that there is a certain beatitude—I can call it nothing less—to which
all men are entitled, tasted by them in different degrees, which is
a perfection of their nature, and to which their entrance must be in
every way forwarded. Practical men, though they could lift the globe,
cannot arrive at this. Something very different has to be done,—the
availing ourselves of every impulse of genius, an emanation of the
heaven it tells of, and the resisting this conspiracy of men and
material things against the sanitary and legitimate inspirations of
the intellectual nature.
What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle
at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking
of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure
of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.
* * * * *
The laws and powers of the Intellect have, however, a stupendous
peculiarity, of being at once observers and observed. So that it is
difficult to hold them fast, as objects of examination, or hinder
them from turning the professor out of his chair. The wonder of the
science of Intellect is that the substance with which we deal is of
that subtle and active quality that it intoxicates all who approach
it. Gloves on the hands, glass guards over the eyes, wire-gauze
masks over the face, volatile salts in the nostrils, are no defence
against this virus, which comes in as secretly as gravitation into
and through all barriers.
Let me have your attention to this dangerous subject, which we will
cautiously approach on different sides of this dim and perilous lake,
so attractive, so delusive. We have had so many guides and so many
failures. And now the world is still uncertain whether the pool has
been sounded or not.
My contribution will be simply historical. I write anecdotes of the
intellect; a sort of Farmer’s Almanac of mental moods. I confine my
ambition to true reporting of its play in natural action, though I
should get only one new fact in a year.
I cannot myself use that systematic form which is reckoned essential
in treating the science of the mind. But if one can say so without
arrogance, I might suggest that he who contents himself with dotting
a fragmentary curve, recording only what facts he has observed,
without attempting to arrange them within one outline, follows a
system also,—a system as grand as any other, though he does not
interfere with its vast curves by prematurely forcing them into a
circle or ellipse, but only draws that arc which he clearly sees, or
perhaps at a later observation a remote curve of the same orbit, and
waits for a new opportunity, well-assured that these observed arcs
will consist with each other.
I confess to a little distrust of that completeness of system which
metaphysicians are apt to affect. ’Tis the gnat grasping the world.
All these exhaustive theories appear indeed a false and vain attempt
to introvert and analyze the Primal Thought. That is upstream, and
what a stream! Can you swim up Niagara Falls?
We have invincible repugnance to introversion, to study of the eyes
instead of that which the eyes see; and the belief of men is that
the attempt is unnatural and is punished by loss of faculty. I share
the belief that the natural direction of the intellectual powers is
from within outward, and that just in proportion to the activity
of thoughts on the study of outward objects, as architecture, or
farming, or natural history, ships, animals, chemistry,—in that
proportion the faculties of the mind had a healthy growth; but a
study in the opposite direction had a damaging effect on the mind.
Metaphysic is dangerous as a single pursuit. We should feel more
confidence in the same results from the mouth of a man of the
world. The inward analysis must be corrected by rough experience.
Metaphysics must be perpetually reinforced by life; must be the
observations of a working-man on working-men; must be biography,—the
record of some law whose working was surprised by the observer in
natural action.
I think metaphysics a grammar to which, once read, we seldom return.
’Tis a Manila full of pepper, and I want only a teaspoonful in a
year. I admire the Dutch, who burned half the harvest to enhance the
price of the remainder.
I want not the logic but the power, if any, which it brings into
science and literature; the man who can humanize this logic, these
syllogisms, and give me the results. The adepts value only the pure
geometry, the aerial bridge ascending from earth to heaven with
arches and abutments of pure reason. I am fully contented if you tell
me where are the two termini.
My metaphysics are to the end of use. I wish to know the laws of this
wonderful power, that I may domesticate it. I observe with curiosity
its risings and settings, illumination and eclipse; its obstructions
and its provocations, that I may learn to live with it wisely, court
its aid, catch sight of its splendor, feel its approach, hear and
save its oracles and obey them. But this watching of the mind, in
season and out of season, to see the mechanics of the thing, is a
little of the detective. The analytic process is cold and bereaving
and, shall I say it? somewhat mean, as spying. There is something
surgical in metaphysics as we treat it. Were not an ode a better
form? The poet sees wholes and avoids analysis; the metaphysician,
dealing as it were with the mathematics of the mind, puts himself out
of the way of the inspiration; loses that which is the miracle and
creates the worship.
I think that philosophy is still rude and elementary. It will one
day be taught by poets. The poet is in the natural attitude; he is
believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons
for believing.
* * * * *
What I am now to attempt is simply some sketches or studies for
such a picture; _Mémoires pour servir_ toward a Natural History of
Intellect.
First I wish to speak of the excellence of that element, and the
great auguries that come from it, notwithstanding the impediments
which our sensual civilization puts in the way.
Next I treat of the identity of the thought with Nature; and I add a
rude list of some by-laws of the mind.
Thirdly I proceed to the fountains of thought in Instinct and
Inspiration, and I also attempt to show the relation of men of
thought to the existing religion and civility of the present time.
I. We figure to ourselves Intellect as an ethereal sea, which ebbs
and flows, which surges and washes hither and thither, carrying its
whole virtue into every creek and inlet which it bathes. To this sea
every human house has a water front. But this force, creating nature,
visiting whom it will and withdrawing from whom it will, making
day where it comes and leaving night when it departs, is no fee or
property of man or angel. It is as the light, public and entire to
each, and on the same terms.
What but thought deepens life, and makes us better than cow or cat?
The grandeur of the impression the stars and heavenly bodies make on
us is surely more valuable than our exact perception of a tub or a
table on the ground.
To Be is the unsolved, unsolvable wonder. To Be, in its two
connections of inward and outward, the mind and nature. The wonder
subsists, and age, though of eternity, could not approach a solution.
But the suggestion is always returning, that hidden source publishing
at once our being and that it is the source of outward nature. Who
are we and what is Nature have one answer in the life that rushes
into us.
In my thought I seem to stand on the bank of a river and watch the
endless flow of the stream, floating objects of all shapes, colors
and natures; nor can I much detain them as they pass, except by
running beside them a little way along the bank. But whence they come
or whither they go is not told me. Only I have a suspicion that, as
geologists say every river makes its own valley, so does this mystic
stream. It makes its valley, makes its banks and makes perhaps the
observer too. Who has found the boundaries of human intelligence?
Who has made a chart of its channel or approached the fountain of
this wonderful Nile?
I am of the oldest religion. Leaving aside the question which
was prior, egg or bird, I believe the mind is the creator of the
world, and is ever creating;—that at last Matter is dead Mind; that
mind makes the senses it sees with; that the genius of man is a
continuation of the power that made him and that has not done making
him.
I dare not deal with this element in its pure essence. It is too
rare for the wings of words. Yet I see that Intellect is a science
of degrees, and that as man is conscious of the law of vegetable and
animal nature, so he is aware of an Intellect which overhangs his
consciousness like a sky, of degree above degree, of heaven within
heaven.
Every just thinker has attempted to indicate these degrees, these
steps on the heavenly stair, until he comes to light where language
fails him. Above the thought is the higher truth,—truth as yet
undomesticated and therefore unformulated.
* * * * *
It is a steep stair down from the essence of Intellect pure to
thoughts and intellections. As the sun is conceived to have made our
system by hurling out from itself the outer rings of diffuse ether
which slowly condensed into earths and moons, by a higher force of
the same law the mind detaches minds, and a mind detaches thoughts or
intellections. These again all mimic in their sphericity the first
mind, and share its power.
Life is incessant parturition. There are viviparous and oviparous
minds; minds that produce their thoughts complete men, like armed
soldiers, ready and swift to go out to resist and conquer all the
armies of error, and others that deposit their dangerous unripe
thoughts here and there to lie still for a time and be brooded in
other minds, and the shell not be broken until the next age, for them
to begin, as new individuals, their career.
The perceptions of a soul, its wondrous progeny, are born by the
conversation, the marriage of souls; so nourished, so enlarged.
They are detached from their parent, they pass into other minds;
ripened and unfolded by many they hasten to incarnate themselves
in action, to take body, only to carry forward the will which sent
them out. They take to themselves wood and stone and iron; ships
and cities and nations and armies of men and ages of duration; the
pomps of religion, the armaments of war, the codes and heraldry
of states; agriculture, trade, commerce;—these are the ponderous
instrumentalities into which the nimble thoughts pass, and which they
animate and alter, and presently, antagonized by other thoughts which
they first aroused, or by thoughts which are sons and daughters of
these, the thought buries itself in the new thought of larger scope,
whilst the old instrumentalities and incarnations are decomposed and
recomposed into new.
Our eating, trading, marrying, and learning are mistaken by us for
ends and realities, whilst they are properly symbols only; when we
have come, by a divine leading, into the inner firmament, we are
apprised of the unreality or representative character of what we
esteemed final.
So works the poor little blockhead manikin. He must arrange and
dignify his shop or farm the best he can. At last he must be able
to tell you it, or write it, translate it all clumsily enough into
the new sky-language he calls thought. He cannot help it, the
irresistible meliorations bear him forward.
II. Whilst we consider this appetite of the mind to arrange its
phenomena, there is another fact which makes this useful. There is in
nature a parallel unity which corresponds to the unity in the mind
and makes it available. This methodizing mind meets no resistance in
its attempts. The scattered blocks, with which it strives to form a
symmetrical structure, fit. This design following after finds with
joy that like design went before. Not only man puts things in a row,
but things belong in a row.
It is certain that however we may conceive of the wonderful little
bricks of which the world is builded, we must suppose a similarity
and fitting and identity in their frame. It is necessary to suppose
that every hose in nature fits every hydrant; so only is combination,
chemistry, vegetation, animation, intellection possible. Without
identity at base, chaos must be forever.
And as mind, our mind or mind like ours reappears to us in our study
of nature, nature being everywhere formed after a method which we can
well understand, and all the parts, to the most remote, allied or
explicable,—therefore our own organization is a perpetual key, and a
well-ordered mind brings to the study of every new fact or class of
facts a certain divination of that which it shall find.
This reduction to a few laws, to one law, is not a choice of the
individual, it is the tyrannical instinct of the mind. There is
no solitary flower and no solitary thought. It comes single like
a foreign traveller,—but find out its name and it is related to a
powerful and numerous family. Wonderful is their working and relation
each to each. We hold them as lanterns to light each other and our
present design. Every new thought modifies, interprets old problems.
The retrospective value of each new thought is immense, like a torch
applied to a long train of gunpowder. To be isolated is to be sick,
and in so far, dead. The life of the All must stream through us to
make the man and the moment great.
Well, having accepted this law of identity pervading the universe,
we next perceive that whilst every creature represents and obeys
it, there is diversity, there is more or less of power; that the
lowest only means incipient form, and over it is a higher class in
which its rudiments are opened, raised to higher powers; that there
is development from less to more, from lower to superior function,
steadily ascending to man.
If man has organs for breathing, for sight, for locomotion, for
taking food, for digesting, for protection by house-building, by
attack and defence, for reproduction and love and care of his young,
you shall find all the same in the muskrat. There is a perfect
correspondence; or ’tis only man modified to live in a mud-bank. A
fish in like manner is man furnished to live in the sea; a thrush, to
fly in the air; and a mollusk is a cheap edition with a suppression
of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for
shelving in an oyster-bank or among the sea-weed.
If we go through the British Museum or the Jardin des Plantes in
Paris, or any cabinet where is some representation of all the
kingdoms of nature, we are surprised with occult sympathies; we
feel as if looking at our own bone and flesh through coloring and
distorting glasses. Is it not a little startling to see with what
genius some people take to hunting, with what genius some people
fish,—what knowledge they still have of the creature they hunt?
The robber, as the police-reports say, must have been intimately
acquainted with the premises. How lately the hunter was the poor
creature’s organic enemy; a presumption _inflamed_, as the lawyers
say, by observing how many faces in the street still remind us of
visages in the forest,—the escape from the quadruped type not yet
perfectly accomplished.
* * * * *
From whatever side we look at Nature we seem to be exploring the
figure of a disguised man. How obvious is the momentum in our mental
history! The momentum, which increases by exact laws in falling
bodies, increases by the same rate in the intellectual action. Every
scholar knows that he applies himself coldly and slowly at first to
his task, but, with the progress of the work, the mind itself becomes
heated, and sees far and wide as it approaches the end, so that it is
the common remark of the student, Could I only have begun with the
same fire which I had on the last day, I should have done something.
The affinity of particles accurately translates the affinity of
thoughts, and what a modern experimenter calls “the contagious
influence of chemical action” is so true of mind that I have only
to read the law that its application may be evident: “A body in
the act of combination or decomposition enables another body, with
which it may be in contact, to enter into the same state.” And if one
remembers how contagious are the moral states of men, how much we are
braced by the presence and actions of any Spartan soul; it does not
need vigor of our own kind, but the spectacle of vigor of any kind,
any prodigious power of performance wonderfully arms and recruits us.
There are those who disputing will make you dispute, and the nervous
and hysterical and animalized will produce a like series of symptoms
in you, though no other persons ever evoke the like phenomena, and
though you are conscious that they do not properly belong to you, but
are a sort of extension of the diseases of this particular person
into you.
The idea of vegetation is irresistible in considering mental
activity. Man seems a higher plant. What happens here in mankind
is matched by what happens out there in the history of grass and
wheat. This curious resemblance repeats, in the mental function,
the germination, growth, state of melioration, crossings, blight,
parasites, and in short all the accidents of the plant. Under every
leaf is the bud of a new leaf, and not less under every thought is a
newer thought. The plant absorbs much nourishment from the ground in
order to repair its own waste by exhalation, and keep itself good.
Increase its food and it becomes fertile. The mind is first only
receptive. Surcharge it with thoughts in which it delights and it
becomes active. The moment a man begins not to be convinced, that
moment he begins to convince.
In the orchard many trees send out a moderate shoot in the first
summer heat, and stop. They look all summer as if they would
presently burst into bud again, but they do not. The fine tree
continues to grow. The same thing happens in the man. Every man has
material enough in his experience to exhaust the sagacity of Newton
in working it out. We have more than we use. I never hear a good
speech at caucus or at cattle-show but it helps me, not so much by
adding to my knowledge as by apprising me of admirable uses to which
what I know can be turned. The commonest remark, if the man could
only extend it a little, would make him a genius; but the thought is
prematurely checked, and grows no more. All great masters are chiefly
distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps
a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken their first
step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of
your first.
The botanist discovered long ago that Nature loves mixtures, and that
nothing grows well on the crab-stock, but the blood of two trees
being mixed a new and excellent fruit is produced. And not less in
human history aboriginal races are incapable of improvement; the
dull, melancholy Pelasgi arrive at no civility until the Phœnicians
and Ionians come in. The Briton, the Pict, is nothing until the
Roman, the Saxon, the Norman, arrives.
It is observed that our mental processes go forward even when they
seem suspended. Scholars say that if they return to the study of a
new language after some intermission, the intelligence of it is more
and not less. A subject of thought to which we return from month to
month, from year to year, has always some ripeness of which we can
give no account. We say the book grew in the author’s mind.
In unfit company the finest powers are paralyzed. No ambition,
no opposition, no friendly attention and fostering kindness,
no wine, music or exhilarating aids, neither warm fireside nor
fresh air, walking or riding, avail at all to resist the palsy of
mis-association. Genius is mute, is dull; there is no genius. Ask of
your flowers to open when you have let in on them a freezing wind.
The mechanical laws might as easily be shown pervading the kingdom
of mind as the vegetative. A man has been in Spain. The facts and
thoughts which the traveller has found in that country gradually
settle themselves into a determinate heap of one size and form and
not another. That is what he knows and has to say of Spain; he cannot
say it truly until a sufficient time for the arrangement of the
particles has elapsed.
* * * * *
These views of the source of thought and the mode of its
communication lead us to a whole system of ethics, strict as any
department of human duty, and open to us the tendencies and duties of
men of thought in the present time.
Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanent wise man, but
men capable of wisdom, who being put into certain company or other
favorable conditions become wise, as glasses rubbed acquire power for
a time.
An individual body is the momentary arrest or fixation of certain
atoms, which, after performing compulsory duty to this enchanted
statue, are released again to flow in the currents of the world.
An individual mind in like manner is a fixation or momentary eddy
in which certain services and powers are taken up and minister in
petty niches and localities, and then, being released, return to the
unbounded soul of the world.
In this eternal resurrection and rehabilitation of transitory
persons, who and what are they? ’Tis only the source that we can
see;—the eternal mind, careless of its channels, omnipotent in
itself, and continually ejaculating its torrent into every artery
and vein and veinlet of humanity. Wherever there is health, that
is, consent to the cause and constitution of the universe, there is
perception and power.
Each man is a new power in Nature. He holds the keys of the world
in his hands. No quality in Nature’s vast magazines he cannot
touch, no truth he cannot see. Silent, passive, even sulkily Nature
offers every morning her wealth to man. She is immensely rich; he
is welcome to her entire goods, but she speaks no word, will not so
much as beckon or cough; only this, she is careful to leave all her
doors ajar,—towers, hall, storeroom and cellar. If he takes her hint
and uses her goods she speaks no word; if he blunders and starves
she says nothing. To the idle blockhead Nature is poor, sterile,
inhospitable. To the gardener her loam is all strawberries, pears,
pineapples. To the miller her rivers whirl the wheel and weave
carpets and broadcloth. To the sculptor her stone is soft; to the
painter her plumbago and marl are pencils and chromes. To the poet
all sounds and words are melodies and rhythms. In her hundred-gated
Thebes every chamber is a new door.
But he enters the world by one key. Herein is the wealth of each.
His equipment, though new, is complete; his prudence is his own; his
courage, his charity, are his own. He has his own defences and his
own fangs; his perception and his own mode of reply to sophistries.
Whilst he draws on his own he cannot be overshadowed or supplanted.
There are two mischievous superstitions, I know not which does the
most harm, one, that “I am wiser than you,” and the other that “You
are wiser than I.” The truth is that every man is furnished, if he
will heed it, with wisdom necessary to steer his own boat,—if he will
not look away from his own to see how his neighbor steers his.
Every man is a new method and distributes things anew. If he could
attain full size he would take up, first or last, atom by atom, all
the world into a new form. And our deep conviction of the riches
proper to every mind does not allow us to admit of much looking over
into one another’s virtues. Let me whisper a secret; nobody ever
forgives any admiration in you of them, any overestimate of what they
do or have. I acquiesce to be that I am, but I wish no one to be
civil to me.
Strong men understand this very well. Power fraternizes with power,
and wishes you not to be like him but like yourself. Echo the leaders
and they will fast enough see that you have nothing for them. They
came to you for something they had not.
There is always a loss of truth and power when a man leaves working
for himself to work for another. Absolutely speaking I can only work
for myself. All my good is magnetic, and I educate not by lessons
but by going about my business. When, moved by love, a man teaches
his child or joins with his neighbor in any act of common benefit,
or spends himself for his friend, or rushes at immense personal
sacrifice on some public, self-immolating act, it is not done for
others, but to fulfil a high necessity of his proper character. The
benefit to others is contingent and not contemplated by the doer.
The one thing not to be forgiven to intellectual persons is that
they believe in the ideas of others. From this deference comes the
imbecility and fatigue of their society, for of course they cannot
affirm these from the deep life; they say what they would have you
believe, but what they do not quite know. Profound sincerity is the
only basis of talent as of character. The temptation is to patronize
Providence, to fall into the accepted ways of talking and acting of
the good sort of people.
Each has a certain aptitude for knowing or doing somewhat which, when
it appears, is so adapted and aimed on that, that it seems a sort
of obtuseness to everything else. Well, this aptitude, if he would
obey it, would prove a telescope to bring under his clear vision what
was blur to everybody else. ’Tis a wonderful instrument, an organic
sympathy with the whole frame of things. There is no property or
relation in that immense arsenal of forces which the earth is, but
some man is at last found who affects this, delights to unfold and
work it, as if he were the born publisher and demonstrator of it.
As a dog has a sense that you have not, to find the track of his
master or of a fox, and as each tree can secrete from the soil the
elements that form a peach, a lemon, or a cocoa-nut, according to its
kind, so individual men have secret senses, each some incommunicable
sagacity. And men are primary or secondary as their opinions and
actions are organic or not.
I know well what a sieve every ear is. Teach me never so much and I
hear or retain only that which I wish to hear, what comports with
my experience and my desire. Many eyes go through the meadow, but
few see the flowers. A hunter finds plenty of game on the ground you
have sauntered over with idle gun. White huckleberries are so rare
that in miles of pasture you shall not find a dozen. But a girl who
understands it will find you a pint in a quarter of an hour.
Though the world is full of food we can take only the crumbs fit for
us. The air rings with sounds, but only a few vibrations can reach
our tympanum. Perhaps creatures live with us which we never see,
because their motion is too swift for our vision. The sun may shine,
or a galaxy of suns; you will get no more light than your eye will
hold. What can Plato or Newton teach, if you are deaf or incapable?
A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are
put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is
no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the
power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can
use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power
to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,—congestion of the
brain, apoplexy and strangulation.
III. In reckoning the sources of our mental power it were fatal
to omit that one which pours all the others into its mould;—that
unknown country in which all the rivers of our knowledge have their
fountains, and which, by its qualities and structure, determines
both the nature of the waters and the direction in which they flow.
The healthy mind lies parallel to the currents of nature and sees
things in place, or makes discoveries. Newton did not exercise more
ingenuity but less than another to see the world. Right thought comes
spontaneously, comes like the morning wind; comes daily, like our
daily bread, to humble service; comes duly to those who look for
it. It does not need to pump your brains and force thought to think
rightly. O no, the ingenious person is warped by his ingenuity and
mis-sees.
Instinct is our name for the potential wit. Each man has a feeling
that what is done anywhere is done by the same wit as his. All men
are his representatives, and he is glad to see that his wit can work
at this or that problem as it ought to be done, and better than he
could do it. We feel as if one man wrote all the books, painted,
built, in dark ages; and we are sure that it can do more than ever
was done. It was the same mind that built the world. That is Instinct.
Ask what the Instinct declares, and we have little to say. He is no
newsmonger, no disputant, no talker. ’Tis a taper, a spark in the
great night. Yet a spark at which all the illuminations of human arts
and sciences were kindled. This is that glimpse of inextinguishable
light by which men are guided; though it does not show objects, yet
it shows the way. This is that sense by which men feel when they are
wronged, though they do not see how. This is that source of thought
and feeling which acts on masses of men, on all men at certain times,
with resistless power. Ever at intervals leaps a word or fact to
light which is no man’s invention, but the common instinct, making
the revolutions that never go back.
This is Instinct, and Inspiration is only this power excited,
breaking its silence; the spark bursting into flame. Instinct is a
shapeless giant in the cave, massive, without hands or fingers or
articulating lips or teeth or tongue; Behemoth, disdaining speech,
disdaining particulars, lurking, surly, invincible, disdaining
thoughts, always whole, never distributed, aboriginal, old as nature,
and saying, like poor Topsy, “never was born, growed.” Indifferent to
the dignity of its function, it plays the god in animal nature as in
human or as in the angelic, and spends its omniscience on the lowest
wants. The old Hindoo Gautama says, “Like the approach of the iron to
the loadstone is the approach of the new-born child to the breast.”
There is somewhat awful in that first approach.
The Instinct begins at this low point, at the surface of the earth,
and works for the necessities of the human being; then ascends step
by step to suggestions which are when expressed the intellectual and
moral laws.
The mythology cleaves close to nature; and what else was it they
represented in Pan, god of shepherds, who was not yet completely
finished in godlike form, blocked rather, and wanting the
extremities; had emblematic horns and feet? Pan, that is, All. His
habit was to dwell in mountains, lying on the ground, tooting like a
cricket in the sun, refusing to speak, clinging to his behemoth ways.
He could intoxicate by the strain of his shepherd’s pipe,—silent yet
to most, for his pipes make the music of the spheres, which because
it sounds eternally is not heard at all by the dull, but only by the
mind. He wears a coat of leopard spots or stars. He could terrify
by earth-born fears called _panics_. Yet was he in the secret of
nature and could look both before and after. He was only seen under
disguises, and was not represented by any outward image; a terror
sometimes, at others a placid omnipotence.
Such homage did the Greek, delighting in accurate form, not fond of
the extravagant and unbounded, pay to the inscrutable force we call
Instinct, or nature when it first becomes intelligent.
The action of the Instinct is for the most part negative, regulative,
rather than initiative or impulsive. But it has a range as wide as
human nature, running over all the ground of morals, of intellect,
and of sense. In its lower function, when it deals with the apparent
world, it is common-sense. It requires the performance of all
that is needful to the animal life and health. Then it requires a
proportion between a man’s acts and his condition, requires all that
is called humanity; that symmetry and connection which is imperative
in all healthily constituted men, and the want of which the rare and
brilliant sallies of irregular genius cannot excuse.
* * * * *
If we could retain our early innocence we might trust our feet
uncommanded to take the right path to our friend in the woods. But we
have interfered too often; the feet have lost, by our distrust, their
proper virtue, and we take the wrong path and miss him. ’Tis the
barbarian instinct within us which culture deadens.
We find ourselves expressed in nature, but we cannot translate it
into words. But Perception is the armed eye. A civilization has tamed
and ripened this savage wit, and he is a Greek. His Aye and No have
become nouns and verbs and adverbs. Perception differs from Instinct
by adding the Will. Simple percipiency is the virtue of space, not of
man.
The senses minister to a mind they do not know. At a moment in
our history the mind’s eye opens and we become aware of spiritual
facts, of rights, of duties, of thoughts,—a thousand faces of one
essence. We call the essence Truth; the particular aspects of it
we call thoughts. These facts, this essence, are not new; they are
old and eternal, but our seeing of them is new. Having seen them
we are no longer brute lumps whirled by Fate, but we pass into the
council-chamber and government of nature. In so far as we see them we
share their life and sovereignty.
The point of interest is here, that these gates, once opened, never
swing back. The observers may come at their leisure, and do at last
satisfy themselves of the fact. The thought, the doctrine, the
right hitherto not affirmed is published in set propositions, in
conversation of scholars and philosophers, of men of the world, and
at last in the very choruses of songs. The young hear it, and as they
have never fought it, never known it otherwise, they accept it, vote
for it at the polls, embody it in the laws. And the perception thus
satisfied reacts on the senses, to clarify them, so that it becomes
more indisputable.
* * * * *
This is the first property of the Intellect I am to point out; the
mind detaches. A man is intellectual in proportion as he can make an
object of every sensation, perception and intuition; so long as he
has no engagement in any thought or feeling which can hinder him from
looking at it as somewhat foreign.
A man of talent has only to name any form or fact with which we are
most familiar, and the strong light which he throws on it enhances it
to all eyes. People wonder they never saw it before. The detachment
consists in seeing it under a new order, not under a personal but
under a universal light. To us it had economic, but to the universe
it has poetic relations, and it is as good as sun and star now.
Indeed this is the measure of all intellectual power among men, the
power to complete this detachment, the power of genius to hurl a new
individual into the world.
An intellectual man has the power to go out of himself and see
himself as an object; therefore his defects and delusions interest
him as much as his successes. He not only wishes to succeed in life,
but he wishes in thought to know the history and destiny of a man;
whilst the cloud of egotists drifting about are only interested in a
success to their egotism.
The senses report the new fact or change; the mind discovers some
essential copula binding this fact or change to a class of facts or
changes, and enjoys the discovery as if coming to its own again. A
perception is always a generalization. It lifts the object, whether
in material or moral nature, into a type. The animal, the low degrees
of intellect, know only individuals. The philosopher knows only laws.
That is, he considers a purely mental fact, part of the soul itself.
We say with Kenelm Digby, “All things that she knoweth are herself,
and she is all that she knoweth.” Insight assimilates the thing
seen. Is it only another way of affirming and illustrating this to
say that it sees nothing alone, but sees each particular object in
just connections,—sees all in God? In all healthy souls is an inborn
necessity of presupposing for each particular fact a prior Being
which compels it to a harmony with all other natures. The game of
Intellect is the perception that whatever befalls or can be stated
is a universal proposition; and contrariwise, that every general
statement is poetical again by being particularized or impersonated.
A single thought has no limit to its value; a thought, properly
speaking,—that is a truth held not from any man’s saying so, or
any accidental benefit or recommendation it has in our trade or
circumstance, but because we have perceived it is a fact in the
nature of things, and in all times and places will and must be
the same thing,—is of inestimable value. Every new impression on
the mind is not to be derided, but is to be accounted for, and,
until accounted for, registered as an indisputable addition to our
catalogue of natural facts.
The first fact is the fate in every mental perception,—that my
seeing this or that, and that I see it so or so, is as much a fact
in the natural history of the world as is the freezing of water at
thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit. My percipiency affirms the presence
and perfection of law, as much as all the martyrs. A perception, it
is of a necessity older than the sun and moon, and the Father of
the Gods. It is there with all its destinies. It is its nature to
rush to expression, to rush to embody itself. It is impatient to
put on its sandals and be gone on its errand, which is to lead to a
larger perception, and so to new action. For thought exists to be
expressed. That which cannot externize itself is not thought.
Do not trifle with your perceptions, or hold them cheap. They are
your door to the seven heavens, and if you pass it by you will miss
your way. Say, what impresses me ought to impress me. I am bewildered
by the immense variety of attractions and cannot take a step; but
this one thread, fine as gossamer, is yet real; and I hear a whisper,
which I dare trust, that it is the thread on which the earth and the
heaven of heavens are strung.