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Representative Men: Seven Lectures

by Ralph Waldo Emerson · English · Gutenberg #6312 · 352,293 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Representative Men: Seven Lectures

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson


        
Release date: August 1, 2004 [eBook #6312]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REPRESENTATIVE MEN: SEVEN LECTURES ***




Produced by Miranda van de Heijning, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
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REPRESENTATIVE MEN

SEVEN LECTURES

BY

RALPH WALDO EMERSON





  I. Uses of Great Men

 II. Plato; or, the Philosopher

    Plato; New Readings

III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic

 IV. Montaigne; or, the Skeptic

  V. Shakspeare; or, the Poet

 VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the World

VII. Goethe; or, the Writer




I. USES OF GREAT MEN.


It is natural to believe in great men. If the companions of our
childhood should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it
would not surprise us. All mythology opens with demigods, and the
circumstance is high and poetic; that is, their genius is paramount.
In the legends of the Gautama, the first men ate the earth, and found
it deliciously sweet.

Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The world is upheld by the
veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived
with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable
only in our belief in such society; and actually, or ideally, we manage
to live with superiors. We call our children and our lands by their
names. Their names are wrought into the verbs of language, their works
and effigies are in our houses, and every circumstance of the day
recalls an anecdote of them.

The search after the great is the dream of youth, and the most serious
occupation of manhood. We travel into foreign parts to find his
works,--if possible, to get a glimpse of him. But we are put off with
fortune instead. You say, the English are practical; the Germans are
hospitable; in Valencia, the climate is delicious; and in the hills
of Sacramento there is gold for the gathering. Yes, but I do not travel
to find comfortable, rich, and hospitable people, or clear sky, or
ingots that cost too much. But if there were any magnet that would
point to the countries and houses where are the persons who are
intrinsically rich and powerful, I would sell all, and buy it, and put
myself on the road to-day.

The race goes with us on their credit. The knowledge, that in the city
is a man who invented the railroad, raises the credit of all the
citizens. But enormous populations, if they be beggars, are disgusting,
like moving cheese, like hills of ants, or of fleas--the more, the
worse.

Our religion is the love and cherishing of these patrons. The gods of
fable are the shining moments of great men. We run all our vessels
into one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism,
Mahometism, are the necessary and structural action of the human mind.
The student of history is like a man going into a warehouse to buy
cloths or carpets. He fancies he has a new article. If he go to the
factory, he shall find that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls
and rosettes which are found on the interior walls of the pyramids of
Thebes. Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can
paint, or make, or think nothing but man. He believes that the great
material elements had their origin from his thought. And our philosophy
finds one essence collected or distributed.

If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds of service we derive from
others, let us be warned of the danger of modern studies, and begin
low enough. We must not contend against love, or deny the substantial
existence of other people. I know not what would happen to us. We have
social strengths. Our affection toward others creates a sort of vantage
or purchase which nothing will supply. I can do that by another which
I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself.
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man
seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good
of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest. The
stronger the nature, the more it is reactive. Let us have the quality
pure. A little genius let us leave alone. A main difference betwixt
men is, whether they attend their own affair or not. Man is that noble
endogenous plant which grows, like the palm, from within, outward. His
own affair, though impossible to others, he can open with celerity and
in sport. It is easy to sugar to be sweet, and to nitre to be salt.
We take a great deal of pains to waylay and entrap that which of itself
will fall into our hands. I count him a great man who inhabits a higher
sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty;
he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light, and in large
relations; whilst they must make painful corrections, and keep a
vigilant eye on many sources of error. His service to us is of like
sort. It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on
our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a
wise soul to convey his quality to other men. And every one can do his
best thing easiest--"_Peu de moyens, beaucoup d'effet._" He is great who
is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.

But he must be related to us, and our life receive from him some promise
of explanation. I cannot tell what I would know; but I have observed
there are persons, who, in their character and actions, answer questions
which I have not skill to put. One man answers some questions which
none of his contemporaries put, and is isolated. The past and passing
religions and philosophies answer some other question. Certain men
affect us as rich possibilities, but helpless to themselves and to
their times,--the sport, perhaps, of some instinct that rules in the
air;--they do not speak to our want. But the great are near: we know
them at sight. They satisfy expectation, and fall into place. What is
good is effective, generative; makes for itself room, food, and allies.
A sound apple produces seed,--a hybrid does not. Is a man in his place,
he is constructive, fertile, magnetic, inundating armies with his
purpose, which is thus executed. The river makes its own shores, and
each legitimate idea makes its own channels and welcome,--harvest for
food, institutions for expression, weapons to fight with, and disciples
to explain it. The true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the
adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his own
shoes.

Our common discourse respects two kinds of use of service from superior
men. Direct giving is agreeable to the early belief of men; direct
giving of material or metaphysical aid, as of health, eternal youth,
fine senses, arts of healing, magical power, and prophecy. The boy
believes there is a teacher who can sell him wisdom. Churches believe
in imputed merit. But, in strictness, we are not much cognizant of
direct serving. Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The
aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries
of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and
the effect remains. Right ethics are central, and go from the soul
outward. Gift is contrary to the law of the universe. Serving others
is serving us. I must absolve me to myself. "Mind thy affair," says
the spirit:--"coxcomb, would you meddle with the skies, or with other
people?" Indirect service is left. Men have a pictorial or
representative quality, and serve us in the intellect. Behmen and
Swedenborg saw that things were representative. Men are also
representative; first, of things, and secondly, of ideas.

As plants convert the minerals into food for animals, so each man
converts some raw material in nature to human use. The inventors of
fire, electricity, magnetism, iron; lead, glass, linen, silk, cotton;
the makers of tools; the inventor of decimal notation; the geometer;
the engineer; musician,--severally make an easy way for all, through
unknown and impossible confusions. Each man is, by secret liking,
connected with some district of nature, whose agent and interpreter
he is, as Linnaeus, of plants; Huber, of bees; Fries, of lichens; Van
Mons, of pears; Dalton, of atomic forms; Euclid, of lines; Newton, of
fluxions.

A man is a center for nature, running out threads of relation through
everything, fluid and solid, material and elemental. The earth rolls;
every clod and stone comes to the meridian; so every organ, function,
acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its relation to the brain. It waits
long, but its turn comes. Each plant has its parasite, and each created
thing its lover and poet. Justice has already been done to steam, to
iron, to wood, to coal, to loadstone, to iodine, to corn, and cotton;
but how few materials are yet used by our arts! The mass of creatures
and of qualities are still hid and expectant. It would seem as if each
waited, like the enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined
human deliverer. Each must be disenchanted, and walk forth to the day
in human shape. In the history of discovery, the ripe and latent truth
seems to have fashioned a brain for itself. A magnet must be made man,
in some Gilbert, or Swedenborg, or Oersted, before the general mind
can come to entertain its powers.

If we limit ourselves to the first advantages;--a sober grace adheres
to the mineral and botanic kingdoms, which, in the highest moments,
comes up as the charm of nature,--the glitter of the spar, the sureness
of affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness, heat and cold,
hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid, and gas, circle us
round in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable quarrel, beguile
the day of life. The eye repeats every day the finest eulogy on
things--"He saw that they were good." We know where to find them; and
these performers are relished all the more, after a little experience
of the pretending races. We are entitled, also, to higher advantages.
Something is wanting to science, until it has been humanized. The table
of logarithms is one thing, and its vital play, in botany, music,
optics, and architecture, another. There are advancements to numbers,
anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little suspected at first, when, by
union with intellect and will, they ascend into the life, and re-appear
in conversation, character and politics.

But this comes later. We speak now only of our acquaintance with them
in their own sphere, and the way in which they seem to fascinate and
draw to them some genius who occupies himself with one thing, all his
life long. The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of
the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial
side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and
necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other.
And to these, their ends, all things continually ascend. The gases
gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant,
and grows; arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives at the man,
and thinks. But also the constituency determines the vote of the
representative. He is not only representative, but participant. Like
can only be known by like. The reason why he knows about them is, that
he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part
of that thing. Animated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate zinc,
of zinc. Their quality makes this career; and he can variously publish
their virtues, because they compose him. Man, made of the dust of the
world, does not forget his origin; and all that is yet inanimate will
one day speak and reason. Unpublished nature will have its whole secret
told. Shall we say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innumerable
Werners, Von Buchs, and Beaumonts; and the laboratory of the atmosphere
holds in solution I know not what Berzeliuses and Davys?

Thus, we sit by the fire, and take hold on the poles of the earth.
This quasi omnipresence supplies the imbecility of our condition. In
one of those celestial days, when heaven and earth meet and adorn each
other, it seems a poverty that we can only spend it once; we wish for
a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its immense
beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good faith,
we are multiplied by our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors!
Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every
novel is debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane
borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all around
with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished
to add their point of light to our sky. Engineer, broker, jurist,
physician, moralist, theologian, and every man, inasmuch as he has any
science, is a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes
of our condition. These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must
extend the area of life, and multiply our relations. We are as much
gainers by finding a new property in the old earth, as by acquiring
a new planet.

We are too passive in the reception of these material or semi-material
aids. We must not be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one step,--we are
better served through our sympathy. Activity is contagious. Looking
where others look, and conversing with the same things, we catch the
charm which lured them. Napoleon said, "you must not fight too often
with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war." Talk much
with any man of vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of
looking at things in the same light, and, on each occurrence, we
anticipate his thought.

Men are helpful through the intellect and the affections. Other help,
I find a false appearance. If you affect to give me bread and fire,
I perceive that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves me
as it found me, neither better nor worse: but all mental and moral
force is a positive good. It goes out from you whether you will or
not, and profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear of
personal vigor of any kind, great power of performance, without fresh
resolution. We are emulous of all that man can do. Cecil's saying of
Sir Walter Raleigh, "I know that he can toil terribly," is an electric
touch. So are Clarendon's portraits,--of Hampden; "who was of an
industry and vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the most
laborious, and of parts not to be imposed on by the most subtle and
sharp, and of a personal courage equal to his best parts"--of Falkland;
"who was so severe an adorer of truth, that he could as easily have
given himself leave to steal, as to dissemble." We cannot read Plutarch,
without a tingling of the blood; and I accept the saying of the Chinese
Mencius: "As age is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the manners
of Loo are heard of, the stupid become intelligent, and the wavering,
determined."

This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to
touch the quick like our own companions, whose names may not last as
long. What is he whom I never think of? whilst in every solitude are
those who succor our genius, and stimulate us in wonderful manners.
There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that
other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What
has friendship so signaled as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue
is in us? We will never more think cheaply of ourselves, or of life.
We are piqued to some purpose, and the industry of the diggers on the
railroad will not again shame us.

Under this head, too, falls that homage, very pure, as I think, which
all ranks pay to the hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus,
down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear the
shouts in the street! The people cannot see him enough. They delight
in a man. Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! What eyes! Atlantean
shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal inward force to
guide the great machine! This pleasure of full expression to that
which, in their private experience, is usually cramped and obstructed,
runs, also, much higher, and is the secret of the reader's joy in
literary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse
the mountain of ore. Shakspeare's principal merit may be conveyed, in
saying that he, of all men, best understands the English language, and
can say what he will. Yet these unchoked channels and floodgates of
expression are only health or fortunate constitution. Shakspeare's
name suggests other and purely intellectual benefits.

Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with their medals, swords,
and armorial coats, like the addressing to a human being thoughts out
of a certain height, and presupposing his intelligence. This honor,
which is possible in personal intercourse scarcely twice in a lifetime,
genius perpetually pays; contented, if now and then, in a century, the
proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of matter are degraded
to a sort of cooks and confectioners, on the appearance of the
indicators of ideas. Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the
supersensible regions, and draws on their map; and, by acquainting us
with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These
are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have
conversed with is the show.

We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power and
beauty of the body; there is the like pleasure, and a higher benefit,
from witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as, feats of memory,
of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the
transmutings of the imagination, even versatility, and concentration,
as these acts expose the invisible organs and members of the mind,
which respond, member for member, to the parts of the body. For, we
thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their truest
marks, taught, with Plato, "to choose those who can, without aid from
the eyes, or any other sense, proceed to truth and to being." Foremost
among these activities, are the summersaults, spells, and resurrections,
wrought by the imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to multiply
ten times or a thousand times his force. It opens the delicious sense
of indeterminate size, and inspires an audacious mental habit. We are
as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a
word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our
heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the
Pit. And this benefit is real, because we are entitled to these
enlargements, and, once having passed the bounds, shall never again
be quite the miserable pedants we were.

The high functions of the intellect are so allied, that some imaginative
power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of
the first class, but especially in meditative men of an intuitive habit
of thought. This class serve us, so that they have the perception of
identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakespeare,
Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception
of these laws is a kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little,
through failure to see them.

Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight in reason degenerates
into idolatry of the herald. Especially when a mind of powerful method
has instructed men, we find the examples of oppression. The dominion
of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of Luther, of Bacon,
of Locke,--in religion the history of hierarchies, of saints, and the
sects which have taken the name of each founder, are in point. Alas!
every man is such a victim. The imbecility of men is always inviting
the impudence of power. It is the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle
and to bind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us from
itself. True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate, and add
new senses. If a wise man should appear in our village, he would create,
in those who conversed with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by
opening their eyes to unobserved advantages; he would establish a sense
of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be
cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guaranties of
condition. The rich would see their mistakes and poverty, the poor
their escapes and their resources.

But nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her remedy.
The soul is impatient of masters, and eager for change. Housekeepers
say of a domestic who has been valuable, "She has lived with me long
enough." We are tendencies, or rather, symptoms, and none of us
complete. We touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives. Rotation
is the law of nature. When nature removes a great man, people explore
the horizon for a successor; but none comes and none will. His class
is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the
next man will appear; not Jefferson, nor Franklin, but now a great
salesman; then a road-contractor; then a student of fishes; then a
buffalo-hunting explorer, or a semi-savage western general. Thus we
make a stand against our rougher masters; but against the best there
is a finer remedy. The power which they communicate is not theirs.
When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the
idea, to which, also, Plato was debtor.

I must not forget that we have a special debt to a single class. Life
is a scale of degrees. Between rank and rank of our great men are wide
intervals. Mankind have, in all ages, attached themselves to a few
persons, who, either by the quality of that idea they embodied, or by
the largeness of their reception, were entitled to the position of
leaders and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary
nature,--admit us to the constitution of things. We swim, day by day,
on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and
towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is a
sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, "Let there be an entrance opened
for me into realities; I have worn the fool's cap too long." We will
know the meaning of our economies and politics. Give us the cipher,
and, if persons and things are scores of a celestial music, let us
read off the strains. We have been cheated of our reason; yet there
have been sane men, who enjoyed a rich and related existence. What
they know, they know for us. With each new mind, a new secret of nature
transpires; nor can the Bible be closed, until the last great man is
born. These men correct the delirium of the animal spirits, make us
considerate, and engage us to new aims and powers. The veneration of
mankind selects these for the highest place. Witness the multitude of
statues, pictures, and memorials which recall their genius in every
city, village, house, and ship:--

  "Ever their phantoms arise before us.
  Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
  At bed and table they lord it o'er us,
  With looks of beauty, and words of good."

How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service rendered
by those who introduce moral truths into the general mind?--I am
plagued, in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. If I
work in my garden, and prune an apple-tree, I am well enough
entertained, and could continue indefinitely in the like occupation.
But it comes to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this precious
nothing done. I go to Boston or New York, and run up and down on my
affairs: they are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed by the
recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling advantage. I
remember the _peau d'ane_, on which whoso sat should have his desire,
but a piece of the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a convention of
philanthropists. Do what I can, I cannot keep my eyes off the clock. But
if there should appear in the company some gentle soul who knows little
of persons or parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that
disposes these particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which
checkmates every false player, bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises
me of my independence on any conditions of country, or time, or human
body, that man liberates me; I forget the clock.

I pass out of the sore relation to persons. I am healed of my hurts.
I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible
goods. Here is great competition of rich and poor. We live in a market,
where is only so much wheat, or wool, or land; and if I have so much
more, every other must have so much less. I seem to have no good,
without breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in the gladness of
another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority.
Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is
our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets,
envies, and hatreds of his competitors. But in these new fields there
is room: here are no self-esteems, no exclusions.

I admire great men of all classes, those who stand for facts, and for
thoughts; I like rough and smooth "Scourges of God," and "Darlings of
the human race." I like the first Caesar; and Charles V., of Spain;
and Charles XII., of Sweden; Richard Plantagenet; and Bonaparte, in
France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer, equal to his office;
captains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing firm on legs
of iron, well-born, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded with advantages,
drawing all men by fascination into tributaries and supporters of his
power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on
the work of the world. But I find him greater, when he can abolish
himself, and all heroes, by letting in this element of reason,
irrespective of persons; this subtilizer, and irresistible upward
force, into our thought, destroying individualism; the power so great,
that the potentate is nothing. Then he is a monarch, who gives a
constitution to his people; a pontiff, who preaches the equality of
souls, and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an
emperor, who can spare his empire.

But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three
points of service. Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe; but
wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her
poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully
through life, ignorant of the ruin, and incapable of seeing it, though
all the world point their finger at it every day. The worthless and
offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest,
invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never
get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their
contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in
heroes and archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare
contrivance that lodged the due inertia in every creature, the
conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or changed?
Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each, is the pride
of opinion, the security that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame,
not a mowing idiot, but uses what spark of perception and faculty is
left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over the absurdities
of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of absurdity. Not
one has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright thought that
made things cohere with this bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the
midst of this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure goes by, which
Thersites too can love and admire. This is he that should marshal us
the way we were going. There is no end to his aid. Without Plato, we
should almost lose our faith in the possibility of a reasonable book.
We seem to want but one, but we want one. We love to associate with
heroic persons, since our receptivity is unlimited; and, with the
great, our thoughts and manners easily become great. We are all wise
in capacity, though so few in energy. There needs but one wise man in
a company, and all are wise, so rapid is the contagion.

Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism, and
enable us to see other people and their works. But there are vices and
follies incident to whole populations and ages. Men resemble their
contemporaries, even more than their progenitors. It is observed in
old couples, or in persons who have been housemates for a course of
years, that they grow alike; and, if they should live long enough, we
should not be able to know them apart. Nature abhors these
complaisances, which threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens
to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes
on between men of one town, of one sect, of one political party; and
the ideas of the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it.
Viewed from any high point, the city of New York, yonder city of London,
the western civilization, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep
each other in countenance, and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of
the time. The shield against the stingings of conscience, is the
universal practice, or our contemporaries. Again; it is very easy to
be as wise and good as your companions. We learn of our contemporaries,
what they know, without effort, and almost through the pores of the
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or, as a wife arrives at the intellectual
and moral elevations of her husband. But we stop where they stop. Very
hardly can we take another step. The great, or such as hold of nature,
and transcend fashions, by their fidelity to universal ideas, are
saviors from these federal errors, and defend us from our
contemporaries. They are the exceptions which we want, where all grows
alike. A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism.

Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much conversation
with our mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that direction in
which he leads us. What indemnification is one great man for populations
of pigmies! Every mother wishes one son a genius, though all the rest
should be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the excess of influence
of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have
become underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon
is our help:--other great men, new qualities, counterweights and
checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness.
Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted,
yet he said of the good Jesus, even, "I pray you, let me never hear
that man's name again." They cry up the virtues of George
Washington,--"Damn George Washington!" is the poor Jacobin's whole
speech and confutation. But it is human nature's indispensable defense.
The centripetence augments the centrifugence. We balance one man with
his opposite, and the health of the state depends on the see-saw.

There is, however, a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius
is defended from approach by quantities of availableness. They are
very attractive, and seem at a distance our own: but we are hindered
on all sides from approach. The more we are drawn, the more we are
repelled. There is something not solid in the good that is done for
us. The best discovery the discoverer makes for himself. It has
something unreal for his companion, until he too has substantiated it.
It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he sends into nature
in certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men, and,
sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote
"Not transferable," and "Good for this trip only," on these garments
of the soul. There is somewhat deceptive about the intercourse of
minds. The boundaries are invisible, but they are never crossed. There
is such good will to impart, and such good will to receive, that each
threatens to become the other; but the law of individuality collects
its secret strength: you are you, and I am I, and so we remain.

For Nature wishes every thing to remain itself; and, whilst every
individual strives to grow and exclude, and to exclude and grow, to
the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being
on every other creature, Nature steadily aims to protect each against
every other. Each is self-defended. Nothing is more marked than the
power by which individuals are guarded from individuals, in a world
where every benefactor becomes so easily a malefactor, only by
continuation of his activity into places where it is not due; where
children seem so much at the mercy of their foolish parents, and where
almost all men are too social and interfering. We rightly speak of the
guardian angels of children. How superior in their security from
infusions of evil persons, from vulgarity and second thought! They
shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they behold. Therefore,
they are not at the mercy of such poor educators as we adults. If we
huff and chide them, they soon come not to mind it, and get a
self-reliance; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn the
limitation elsewhere.

We need not fear excessive influence. A more generous trust is
permitted. Serve the great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office
thou canst render. Be the limb of their body, the breath of their
mouth. Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou gain aught
wider and nobler? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism: the devotion may
easily be greater than the wretched pride which is guarding its own
skirts. Be another: not thyself, but a Platonist; not a soul, but a
Christian; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian; not a poet, but a
Shakspearian. In vain, the wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will
all the forces of inertia, fear, or love itself, hold thee there. On,
and forever onward! The microscope observes a monad or wheel-insect
among the infusories circulating in water. Presently, a dot appears
on the animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two perfect
animals. The ever-proceeding detachment appears not less in all thought,
and in society. Children think they cannot live without their parents.
But, long before they are aware of it, the black dot has appeared, and
the detachment taken place. Any accident will now reveal to them their
independence.

But great men:--the word is injurious. Is there caste? is there fate?
What becomes of the promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments
the superfoetation of nature. "Generous and handsome," he says, "is
your hero; but look at yonder poor Paddy, whose country is his
wheelbarrow; look at his whole nation of Paddies." Why are the masses,
from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea
dignifies a few leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love,
self-devotion; and they make war and death sacred;--but what for the
wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of man is every day's
tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we
should be low; for we must have society.

Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say, society is a Pestalozzian
school; all are teachers and pupils in turn. We are equally served by
receiving and by imparting. Men who know the same things, are not long
the best company for each other. But bring to each an intelligent
person of another experience, and it is as if you let off water from
a lake, by cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechanical advantage, and
great benefit it is to each speaker, as he can now paint out his thought
to himself. We pass very fast, in our personal moods, from dignity to
dependence. And if any appear never to assume the chair, but always
to stand and serve, it is because we do not see the company in a
sufficiently long period for the whole rotation of parts to come about.
As to what we call the masses, and common men;--there are no common
men. All men are at last of a size; and true art is only possible, on
the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair
play, and an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have won them!
But heaven reserves an equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy
until he has produced his private ray unto the concave sphere, and
beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.

The heroes of the hour are relatively great: of a faster growth; or
they are such, in whom, at the moment of success, a quality is ripe
which is then in request. Other days will demand other qualities. Some
rays escape the common observer, and want a finely adapted eye. Ask
the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not
the less great, but the more, that society cannot see them. Nature
never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret
to another soul.

One gracious fact emerges from these studies,--that there is true
ascension in our love. The reputations of the nineteenth century will
one day be quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of humanity is
the real subject whose biography is written in our annals. We must
infer much, and supply many chasms in the record. The history of the
universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all the
procession of famous men, is reason or illumination, or that essence
we were looking for; but is an exhibition, in some quarter, of new
possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense figure which these
flagrant points compose! The study of many individuals leads us to an
elemental region wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch
by their summits. Thought and feeling, that break out there, cannot
be impounded by any fence of personality. This is the key to the power
of the greatest men,--their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of
mind travels by night and by day, in concentric circles from its origin,
and publishes itself by unknown methods: the union of all minds appears
intimate: what gets admission to one, cannot be kept out of any other:
the smallest acquisition of truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so
much good to the commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of talent
and position vanish, when the individuals are seen in the duration
which is necessary to complete the career of each; even more swiftly
the seeming injustice disappears, when we ascend to the central identity
of all the individuals, and know that they are made of the same
substance which ordaineth and doeth.

The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The
qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and
pass away; the qualities remain on another brow. No experience is more
familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone; the world is not
therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems
turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred,
and you may still read them transferred to the walls of the world. For
a time, our teachers serve us personally, as metres or milestones of
progress. Once they were angels of knowledge, and their figures touched
the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture, and limits; and
they yielded their places to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names
remain so high, that we have not been able to read them nearer, and
age and comparison have not robbed them of a ray. But, at last, we
shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall content ourselves
with their social and delegated quality. All that respects the
individual is temporary and prospective, like the individual himself,
who is ascending out of his limits, into a catholic existence. We have
never come at the true and best benefit of any genius, so long as we
believe him an original force. In the moment when he ceases to help
us as a cause, he begins to help us move as an effect. Then he appears
as an exponent of a vaster mind and will. The opaque self becomes
transparent with the light of the First Cause.

Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say, great
men exist that there may be greater men. The destiny of organized
nature is amelioration, and who can tell its limits? It is for man to
tame the chaos; on every side, whilst he lives, to scatter the seeds
of science and of song, that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder,
and the germs of love and benefit may be multiplied.




II. PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER.


Among books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical compliment to
the Koran, when he said, "Burn the libraries; for, their value is in
this book." These sentences contain the culture of nations; these are
the corner-stone of schools; these are the fountain-head of literatures.
A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry,
language, rhetoric, ontology, morals, or practical wisdom. There was
never such range of speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are
still written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes he
among our originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all
these drift bowlders were detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-
two hundred years, every brisk young man, who says in succession fine
things to each reluctant generation,--Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus,
Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge,--is some reader of Plato,
translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the
men of grander proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune
(shall I say?) of coming after this exhausting generalizer. St.
Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are likewise
his debtors, and must say after him. For it is fair to credit the
broadest generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his thesis.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the
shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add
any idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, and the
thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity, and are tinged
with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out
of night, to be his men,--Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation
of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More,
John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth,
Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus, and Picus Mirandola.
Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws
all its philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly,
from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts. This citizen of a
town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads and
says, "how English!" a German--"how Teutonic!" an Italian--"how Roman
and how Greek!" As they say that Helen of Argos had that universal
beauty that everybody felt related to her, so Plato seems, to a reader
in New England, an American genius. His broad humanity transcends all
sectional lines.

This range of Plato instructs us what to think of the vexed question
concerning his reputed works,--what are genuine, what spurious. It is
singular that wherever we find a man higher, by a whole head, than any
of his contemporaries, it is sure to come into doubt, what are his
real works. Thus, Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, Shakspeare. For these men
magnetize their contemporaries, so that their companions can do for
them what they can never do for themselves; and the great man does
thus live in several bodies; and write, or paint, or act, by many
hands; and after some time, it is not easy to say what is the authentic
work of the master, and what is only of his school.

Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his own times. What is a
great man, but one of great affinities, who takes up into himself all
arts, sciences, all knowables, as his food? He can spare nothing; he
can dispose of everything. What is not good for virtue is good for
knowledge. Hence his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But the
inventor only knows how to borrow; and society is glad to forget the
innumerable laborers who ministered to this architect, and reserves
all its gratitude for him. When we are praising Plato, it seems we are
praising quotations from Solon, and Sophron, and Philolaus. Be it so.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all
forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation
from all his ancestors. And this grasping inventor puts all nations
under contribution.

Plato absorbed the learning of his times,--Philolaus, Timaeus,
Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what else; then his master, Socrates; and
finding himself still capable of a larger synthesis,--beyond all example
then or since,--he traveled into Italy, to gain what Pythagoras had
for him; then into Egypt, and perhaps still further east, to import
the other element, which Europe wanted, into the European mind. This
breadth entitles him to stand as the representative of philosophy. He
says, in the Republic, "Such a genius as philosophers must of necessity
have, is wont but seldom, in all its parts, to meet in one man; but
its different parts generally spring up in different persons." Every
man, who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground.
A philosopher must be more than a philosopher. Plato is clothed with
the powers of a poet, stands upon the highest place of the poet, and
(though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric expression) mainly
is not a poet, because he chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior
purpose.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell
you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their
house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know
their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most
resembles them. Plato, especially, has no external biography. If he
had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them
all into paint. As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher
converts the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual
performances.

He was born 430 A. C., about the time of the death of Pericles; was
of patrician connection in his times and city; and is said to have had
an early inclination for war; but in his twentieth year, meeting with
Socrates, was easily dissuaded from this pursuit, and remained for ten
years his scholar, until the death of Socrates. He then went to Megara;
accepted the invitations of Dion and of Dionysius, to the court of
Sicily; and went thither three times, though very capriciously treated.
He traveled into Italy; then into Egypt, where he stayed a long time;
some say three,--some say thirteen years. It is said, he went farther,
into Babylonia: this is uncertain. Returning to Athens, he gave lessons,
in the Academy, to those whom his fame drew thither; and died, as we
have received it, in the act of writing, at eighty-one years.

But the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the
supreme elevation of this man, in the intellectual history of our
race,--how it happens that, in proportion to the culture of men, they
become his scholars; that, as our Jewish Bible has implanted itself
in the table-talk and household life of every man and woman in the
European and American nations, so the writings of Plato have
pre-occupied every school of learning, every lover of thought, every
church, every poet,--making it impossible to think, on certain levels,
except through him. He stands between the truth and every man's mind,
and has almost impressed language, and the primary forms of thought,
with his name and seal. I am struck, in reading him, with the extreme
modernness of his style and spirit. Here is the germ of that Europe
we know so well, in its long history of arts and arms; here are all
its traits, already discernible in the mind of Plato,--and in none
before him. It has spread itself since into a hundred histories, but
has added no new element. This perpetual modernness is the measure of
merit, in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by
anything shortlived or local, but abode by real and abiding traits.
How Plato came thus to be Europe, and philosophy, and almost literature,
is the problem for us to solve.

This could not have happened, without a sound, sincere, and catholic
man, able to honor, at the same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind,
and fate, or the order of nature. The first period of a nation, as of
an individual, is the period of unconscious strength. Children cry,
scream and stamp with fury, unable to express their desires. As soon
as they can speak and tell their want, and the reason of it, they
become gentle. In adult life, whilst the perceptions are obtuse, men
and women talk vehemently and superlatively, blunder and quarrel; their
manners are full of desperation; their speech is full of oaths. As
soon as, with culture, things have cleared up a little, and they see
them no longer in lumps and masses, but accurately distributed, they
desist from that weak vehemence, and explain their meaning in detail.
If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still
be a beast in the forest. The same weakness and want, on a higher
plane, occurs daily in the education of ardent young men and women.
"Ah! you don't understand me; I have never met with any one who
comprehends me:" and they sigh and weep, write verses, and walk
alone,--fault of power to express their precise meaning. In a month
or two, through the favor of their good genius, they meet some one so
related as to assist their volcanic estate; and, good communication
being once established, they are thenceforward good citizens. It is
ever thus. The progress is to accuracy, to skill, to truth, from blind
force.

There is a moment, in the history of every nation, when, proceeding
out of this brute youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness,
and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant,
extends across the entire scale; and, with his feet still planted on
the immense forces of night, converses, by his eyes and brain, with
solar and stellar creation. That is the moment of adult health, the
culmination of power.

Such is the history of Europe, in all points; and such in philosophy.
Its early records, almost perished, are of the immigrations from Asia,
bringing with them the dreams of barbarians; a confusion of crude
notions of morals, and of natural philosophy, gradually subsiding,
through the partial insight of single teachers.

Before Pericles, came the Seven Wise Masters; and we have the beginnings
of geometry, metaphysics, and ethics: then the partialists,--deducing
the origin of things from flux or water, or from air, or from fire,
or from mind. All mix with these causes mythologic pictures. At last,
comes Plato, the distributor, who needs no barbaric paint, or tattoo,
or whooping; for he can define. He leaves with Asia the vast and
superlative; he is the arrival of accuracy and intelligence. "He shall
be as a god to me, who can rightly divide and define."

This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human
mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal
facts lie forever at the base: the one, and the two.--1. Unity, or
Identity; and, 2, Variety. We unite all things, by perceiving the law
which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences, and
the profound resemblances. But every mental act,--this very perception
of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. Oneness
and otherness. It is impossible to speak, or to think, without embracing
both.

The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many effects; then for the
cause of that; and again the cause, diving still into the profound;
self-assured that it shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient one,--a
one that shall be all. "In the midst of the sun is the light, in the
midst of the light is truth, and in the midst of truth is the
imperishable being, "say the Vedas. All philosophy, of east and west,
has the same centripetence. Urged by an opposite necessity, the mind
returns from the one, to that which is not one, but other or many;
from cause to effect; and affirms the necessary existence of variety,
the self-existence of both, as each is involved in the other. These
strictly-blended elements it is the problem of thought to separate,
and to reconcile. Their existence is mutually contradictory and
exclusive; and each so fast slides into the other, that we can never
say what is one, and what it is not. The Proteus is as nimble in the
highest as in the lowest grounds, when we contemplate the one, the
true, the good,--as in the surfaces and extremities of matter.  In all
nations, there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of
the fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion
lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds its highest expression
in the religious writings of the East, and chiefly, in the Indian
Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana.
Those writings contain little else than this idea, and they rise to
pure and sublime strains in celebrating it.

The Same, the Same! friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman,
the plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff; and the stuff is such,
and so much, that the variations of forms are unimportant. "You are
fit" (says the supreme Krishna to a sage) "to apprehend that you are
not distinct from me. That which I am, thou art, and that also is this
world, with its gods, and heroes, and mankind. Men contemplate
distinctions, because they are stupefied with ignorance." "The words
I and mine constitute ignorance. What is the great end of all, you
shall now learn from me. It is soul,--one in all bodies, pervading,
uniform, perfect, preeminent over nature, exempt from birth, growth,
and decay, omnipresent, made up of true knowledge, independent,
unconnected with unrealities, with name, species, and the rest, in
time past, present, and to come. The knowledge that this spirit, which
is essentially one, is in one's own, and in all other bodies, is the
wisdom of one who knows the unity of things. As one diffusive air,
passing through the perforations of a flute, is distinguished as the
notes of a scale, so the nature of the Great Spirit is single, though
its forms be manifold, arising from the consequences of acts. When the
difference of the investing form, as that of god, or the rest, is
destroyed, there is no distinction." "The whole world is but a
manifestation of Vishnu, who is identical with all things, and is to
be regarded by the wise, as not differing from, but as the same as
themselves. I neither am going nor coming; nor is my dwelling in any
one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am I, I."
As if he had said, "All is for the soul, and the soul is Vishnu; and
animals and stars are transient painting; and light is whitewash; and
durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment; and heaven itself
a decoy." That which the soul seeks is resolution into being, above
form, out of Tartarus, and out of heaven,--liberation from nature.

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are
absorbed, action tends directly backwards to diversity. The first is
the course of gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature.
Nature is the manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature
opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate
all things, all thought; the one, the many. One is being; the other,
intellect; one is necessity; the other, freedom; one, rest; the other,
motion; one, power; the other, distribution; one, strength; the other,
pleasure; one, consciousness; the other, definition; one, genius; the
other, talent, one, earnestness; the other, knowledge; one, possession;
the other, trade; one, caste; the other, culture; one king; the other,
democracy; and, if we dare carry these generalizations a step higher,
and name the last tendency of both, we might say, that the end of the
one is escape from organization,--pure science; and the end of the
other is the highest instrumentality, or use of means, or executive
deity.

Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or to
the second of these gods of the mind. By religion, he tends to unity;
by intellect, or by the senses, to the many. A too rapid unification,
and an excessive appliance to parts and particulars, are the twin
dangers of speculation.

To this partiality the history of nations corresponded. The country
of unity, of immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting
in abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the
idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes
this fate in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the
genius of Europe is active and creative; it resists caste by culture;
its philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions,
trade, freedom. If the East loved infinity, the West delighted in
boundaries.

European civility is the triumph of talent, the extension of system,
the sharpened understanding, adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight
in manifestation, in comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens, Greece,
had been working in this element with the joy of genius not yet chilled
by any foresight of the detriment of an excess. They saw before them
no sinister political economy; no ominous Malthus; no Paris or London;
no pitiless subdivision of classes,--the doom of the pinmakers, the
doom of the weavers, of dressers, of stockingers, of carders, of
spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no Indian caste, superinduced by
the efforts of Europe to throw it off. The understanding was in its
health and prime. Art was in its splendid novelty. They cut the
Pentelican marble as if it were snow, and their perfect works in
architecture and sculpture seemed things of course, not more difficult
than the completion of a new ship at the Medford yards, or new mills
at Lowell. These things are in course, and may be taken for granted.
The Roman legion, Byzantine legislation, English trade, the saloons
of Versailles, the cafes of Paris, the steam-mill, steamboat,
steam-coach, may all be seen in perspective; the town-meeting, the
ballot-box, the newspaper and cheap press.

Meantime, Plato, in Egypt, and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the
idea of one Deity, in which all things are absorbed. The unity of Asia,
and the detail of Europe; the infinitude of the Asiatic soul, and the
defining, result-loving, machine-making, surface-seeking, opera-going
Europe,--Plato came to join, and by contact to enhance the energy of
each. The excellence of Europe and Asia are in his brain. Metaphysics
and natural philosophy expressed the genius of Europe; he substructs
the religion of Asia, as the base.

In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two elements.
It is as easy to be great as to be small. The reason why we do not at
once believe in admirable souls, is because they are not in our
experience. In actual life, they are so rare, as to be incredible;
but, primarily, there is not only no presumption against them, but the
strongest presumption in favor of their appearance. But whether voices
were heard in the sky, or not; whether his mother or his father dreamed
that the infant man-child was the son of Apollo; whether a swarm of
bees settled on his lips, or not; a man who could see two sides of a
thing was born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature; the
upper and the under side of the medal of Jove; the union of
impossibilities, which reappears in every object; its real and its
ideal power,--was now, also, transferred entire to the consciousness
of a man.

The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract truth, he saved himself
by propounding the most popular of all principles, the absolute good,
which rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made transcendental
distinctions, he fortified himself by drawing all his illustrations
from sources disdained by orators, and polite conversers; from mares
and puppies; from pitchers and soup-ladles; from cooks and criers;
the shops of potters, horse-doctors, butchers, and fishmongers. He
cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two
poles of thought shall appear in his statement. His arguments and his
sentences are self-poised and spherical. The two poles appear; yes,
and become two hands, to grasp and appropriate their own.

Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is
transitional, alternating; or, shall I say, a thread of two strands.
The seashore, sea seen from shore, shore seen from sea; the taste of
two metals in contact; and our enlarged powers at the approach and at
the departure of a friend; the experience of poetic creativeness, which
is not found in staying at home, nor yet in traveling, but in
transitions from one to the other, which must therefore be adroitly
managed to present as much transitional surface as possible; this
command of two elements must explain the power and charm of Plato. Art
expresses the one, or the same by the different. Thought seeks to know
unity in unity; poetry to show it by variety; that is, always by an
object or symbol. Plato keeps the two vases, one of aether and one of
pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both. Things added to things,
as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language
are inexhaustibly attractive. Plato turns incessantly the obverse and
the reverse of the medal of Jove.

To take an example:--The physical philosophers have sketched each his
theory of the world; the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit;
theories mechanical and chemical in their genius. Plato, a master of
mathematics, studious of all natural laws and causes, feels these, as
second causes, to be no theories of the world, but bare inventories
and lists. To the study of nature he therefore prefixes the dogma,--"Let
us declare the cause which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and
compose the universe. He was good; and he who is good has no kind of
envy. Exempt from envy, he wished that all things should be as much
as possible like himself. Whosoever, taught by wise men, shall admit
this as the prime cause of the origin and foundation of the world,
will be in the truth." "All things are for the sake of the good, and
it is the cause of everything beautiful." This dogma animates and
impersonates his philosophy. The synthesis which makes the character
of his mind appears in all his talents. Where there is great compass
of wit, we usually find excellencies that combine easily in the living
man, but in description appear incompatible. The mind of Plato is not
to be exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but is to be apprehended by
an original mind in the exercise of its original power. In him the
freest abandonment is united with the precision of a geometer. His
daring imagination gives him the more solid grasp of facts; as the
birds of highest flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician
polish, his intrinsic elegance, edged by an irony so subtle that it
stings and paralyzes, adorn the soundest health and strength of frame.
According to the old sentence, "If Jove should descend to the earth,
he would speak in the style of Plato."

With this palatial air, there is, for the direct aim of several of his
works, and running through the tenor of them all, a certain earnestness,
which mounts, in the Republic, and in the Phaedo, to piety. He has
been charged with feigning sickness at the time of the death of
Socrates. But the anecdotes that have come down from the times attest
his manly interference before the people in his master's behalf, since
even the savage cry of the assembly to Plato is preserved; and the
indignation towards popular government, in many of his pieces, expresses
a personal exasperation. He has a probity, a native reverence for
justice and honor, and a humanity which makes him tender for the
superstitions of the people. Add to this, he believes that poetry,
prophecy, and the high insight, arc from a wisdom of which man is not
master; that the gods never philosophize; but, by a celestial mania,
these miracles are accomplished. Horsed on these winged steeds, he
sweeps the dim regions, visits worlds which flesh cannot enter; he saw
the souls in pain; he hears the doom of the judge; he beholds the penal
metempsychosis; the Fates, with the rock and shears; and hears the
intoxicating hum of their spindle.

But his circumspection never forsook him. One would say, he had read
the inscription on the gates of Busyrane,--"Be bold;" and on the second
gate,--"Be bold, be bold and evermore be bold;" and then again he
paused well at the third gate,--"Be not too bold." His strength is
like the momentum of a falling planet; and his discretion, the return
of its due and perfect curve,--so excellent is his Greek love of
boundary, and his skill in definition. In reading logarithms, one is
not more secure, than in following Plato in his flights. Nothing can
be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are
playing in the sky. He has finished his thinking, before he brings it
to the reader; and he abounds in the surprises of a literary master.
He has that opulence which furnishes, at every turn, the precise weapon
he needs. As the rich man wears no more garments, drives no more horses,
sits in no more chambers, than the poor,--but has that one dress, or
equipage, or instrument, which is fit for the hour and the need; so
Plato, in his plenty, is never restricted, but has the fit word. There
is, indeed, no weapon in all the armory of wit which he did not possess
and use,--epic, analysis, mania, intuition, music, satire, and irony,
down to the customary and polite. His illustrations are poetry and his
jests illustrations. Socrates' profession of obstetric art is good
philosophy; and his finding that word "cookery," and "adulatory art,"
for rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us a substantial service still. No
orator can measure in effect with him who can give good nicknames.

What moderation, and understatement, and checking his thunder in mid
volley! He has good-naturedly furnished the courtier and citizen with
all that can be said against the schools. "For philosophy is an elegant
thing, if any one modestly meddles with it; but, if he is conversant
with it more than is becoming, it corrupts the man." He could well
afford to be generous,--he, who from the sunlike centrality and reach
of his vision, had a faith without cloud. Such as his perception, was
his speech: he plays with the doubt, and makes the most of it: he
paints and quibbles; and by and by comes a sentence that moves the sea
and land. The admirable earnest comes not only at intervals, in the
perfect yes and no of the dialogue, but in bursts of light. "I,
therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and consider how
I may exhibit my soul before the judge in a healthy condition.
Wherefore, disregarding the honors that most men value, and looking
to the truth, I shall endeavor in reality to live as virtuously as I
can and, when I die, to die so. And I invite all other men, to the
utmost of my power; and you, too, I in turn invite to this contest,
which, I affirm, surpasses all contests here."

He is a great average man one who, to the best thinking, adds a
proportion and equality in his faculties, so that men see in him their
own dreams and glimpses made available, and made to pass for what they
are. A great common sense is his warrant and qualification to be the
world's interpreter. He has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic
class have: but he has, also, what they have not,--this strong solving
sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and
build a bridge from the streets of cities to the Atlantis. He omits
never this graduation, but slopes his thought, however picturesque the
precipice on one side, to an access from the plain. He never writes
in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic rapture.

Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could prostrate himself on
the earth, and cover his eyes, whilst he adorned that which cannot be
numbered, or gauged, or known, or named: that of which everything can
be affirmed and denied: that "which is entity and nonentity." He called
it super-essential. He even stood ready, as in the Parmenides, to
demonstrate that it was so,--that this Being exceeded the limits of
intellect. No man ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable. Having
paid his homage, as for the human race, to the Illimitable, he then
stood erect, and for the human race affirmed, "And yet things are
knowable!"--that is, the Asia in his mind was first heartily
honored,--the ocean of love and power, before form, before will, before
knowledge, the Same, the Good, the One; and now, refreshed and empowered
by this worship, the instinct of Europe, namely, culture, returns; and
he cries, Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being
from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence
of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is
our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; a science
of quantities called mathematics; a science of qualities, called
chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it
Dialectic,--which is the intellect discriminating the false and the
true. It rests on the observation of identity and diversity; for, to
judge, is to unite to an object the notion which belongs to it. The
sciences, even the best,--mathematics, and astronomy, are like
sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to
make any use of them. Dialectic must teach the use of them. "This is
of that rank that no intellectual man will enter on any study for its
own sake, but only with a view to advance himself in that one sole
science which embraces all."

"The essence or peculiarity of man is to comprehend the whole; or that
which in the diversity of sensations, can be comprised under a rational
unity." "The soul which has never perceived the truth, cannot pass
into the human form." I announce to men the intellect. I announce the
good of being interpenetrated by the mind that made nature: this
benefit, namely, that it can understand nature, which it made and
maketh. Nature is good, but intellect is better: as the law-giver is
before the law-receiver. I give you joy, O sons of men: that truth is
altogether wholesome; that we have hope to search out what might be
the very self of everything. The misery of man is to be balked of the
sight of essence, and to be stuffed with conjecture: but the supreme
good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and all virtue and all
felicity depend on this science of the real: for courage is nothing
else than knowledge: the fairest fortune that can befall man, is to
be guided by his daemon to that which is truly his own. This also is
the essence of justice,--to attend every one his own; nay, the notion
of virtue is not to be arrived at, except through direct contemplation
of the divine essence. Courage, then, for "the persuasion that we must
search that which we do not know, will render us, beyond comparison,
better, braver, and more industrious, than if we thought it impossible
to discover what we do not know, and useless to search for it." He
secures a position not to be commanded, by his passion for reality;
valuing philosophy only as it is the pleasure of conversing with real
being.

Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said, "Culture." He saw the
institutions of Sparta, and recognized more genially, one would say,
than any since, the hope of education. He delighted in every
accomplishment, in every graceful and useful and truthful performance;
above all, in the splendors of genius and intellectual achievement.
"The whole of life, O Socrates," said Glauco, "is, with the wise the
measure of hearing such discourses as these." What a price he sets on
the feats of talent, on the powers of Pericles, of Isocrates, of
Parmenides! What price, above price on the talents themselves! He
called the several faculties, gods, in his beautiful personation. What
value he gives to the art of gymnastics in education; what to geometry;
what to music, what to astronomy, whose appeasing and medicinal power
he celebrates! In the Timseus, he indicates the highest employment of
the eyes. "By us it is asserted, that God invented and bestowed sight
on us for this purpose,--that, on surveying the circles of intelligence
in the heavens, we might properly employ those of our own minds, which,
though disturbed when compared with the others that are uniform, are
still allied to their circulations; and that, having thus learned, and
being naturally possessed of a correct reasoning faculty, we might,
by imitating the uniform revolutions of divinity, set right our own
wanderings and blunders." And in the Republic,--"By each of these
disciplines, a certain organ of the soul is both purified and
reanimated, which is blinded and buried by studies of another kind;
an organ better worth saving than ten thousand eyes, since truth is
perceived by this alone."

He said, Culture; but he first admitted its basis, and gave immeasurably
the first place to advantages of nature. His patrician tastes laid
stress on the distinctions of birth. In the doctrine of the organic
character and disposition is the origin of caste. "Such as were fit
to govern, into their composition the informing Deity mingled gold:
into the military, silver; iron and brass for husbandmen and
artificers." The East confirms itself, in all ages, in this faith. The
Koran is explicit on this point of caste. "Men have their metal, as
of gold and silver. Those of you who were the worthy ones in the state
of ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon
as you embrace it." Plato was not less firm. "Of the five orders of
things, only four can be taught in the generality of men." In the
Republic, he insists on the temperaments of the youth, as the first
of the first.

A happier example of the stress laid on nature, is in the dialogue
with the young Theages, who wishes to receive lessons from Socrates.
Socrates declares that, if some have grown wise by associating with
him, no thanks are due to him; but, simply, whilst they were with him,
they grew wise, not because of him; he pretends not to know the way
of it. "It is adverse to many, nor can those be benefited by associating
with me, whom the Daemons oppose, so that it is not possible for me
to live with these. With many, however, he does not prevent me from
conversing, who yet are not at all benefited by associating with me.
Such, O Theages, is the association with me; for, if it pleases the
God, you will make great and rapid proficiency: you will not, if he
does not please. Judge whether it is not safer to be instructed by
some one of those who have power over the benefit which they impart
to men, than by me, who benefit or not, just as it may happen." As if
he had said, "I have no system. I cannot be answerable for you. You
will be what you must. If there is love between us, inconceivably
delicious and profitable will our intercourse be; if not, your time
is lost, and you will only annoy me. I shall seem to you stupid, and
the reputation I have, false. Quite above us, beyond the will of you
or me, is this secret affinity or repulsion laid. All my good is
magnetic, and I educate, not by lessons, but by going about my
business."

He said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he failed not to add, "There
is also the divine." There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly
tends to convert itself into a power, and organizes a huge
instrumentality of means. Plato, lover of limits, loved the illimitable,
saw the enlargement and nobility which come from truth itself, and
good itself, and attempted, as if on the part of the human intellect,
once for all, to do it adequate homage,--homage fit for the immense
soul to receive, and yet homage becoming the intellect to render. He
said, then, "Our faculties run out into infinity, and return to us
thence. We can define but a little way; but here is a fact which will
not be skipped, and which to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All things
are in a scale; and, begin where we will, ascend and ascend. All things
are symbolical; and what we call results are beginnings."

A key to the method and completeness of Plato is his twice bisected
line. After he has illustrated the relation between the absolute good
and true, and the forms of the intelligible world, he says:--"Let there
be a line cut in two, unequal parts. Cut again each of these two
parts,--one representing the visible, the other the intelligible
world,--and these two new sections, representing the bright part and
the dark part of these worlds, you will have, for one of the sections
of the visible world,--images, that is, both shadows and reflections;
for the other section, the objects of these images,-that is, plants,
animals, and the works of art and nature. Then divide the intelligible
world in like manner; the one section will be of opinions and
hypotheses, and the other section, of truths." To these four sections,
the four operations of the soul correspond,--conjecture, faith,
understanding, reason. As every pool reflects the image of the sun,
so every thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the
supreme Good. The universe is perforated by a million channels for his
activity. All things mount and mount.

All his thought has this ascension; in Phaedrus, teaching that "beauty
is the most lovely of all things, exciting hilarity, and shedding
desire and confidence through the universe, wherever it enters; and
it enters, in some degree, into all things; but that there is another,
which is as much more beautiful than beauty, as beauty is than chaos;
namely, wisdom, which our wonderful organ of sight cannot reach unto,
but which, could it be seen, would ravish us with its perfect reality."
He has the same regard to it as the source of excellence in works of
art. "When an artificer, in the fabrication of any work, looks to that
which always subsists according to the same; and, employing a model
of this kind, expresses its idea and power in his work; it must follow,
that his production should be beautiful. But when he beholds that which
is born and dies, it will be far from beautiful."

Thus ever: the Banquet is a teaching in the same spirit, familiar now
to all the poetry, and to all the sermons of the world, that the love
of the sexes is initial; and symbolizes, at a distance, the passion
of the soul for that immense lake of beauty it exists to seek. This
faith in the Divinity is never out of mind, and constitutes the
limitation of all his dogmas. Body cannot teach wisdom;--God only. In
the same mind, he constantly affirms that virtue cannot be taught;
that it is not a science, but an inspiration; that the greatest goods
are produced to us through mania, and are assigned to us by a divine
gift.

This leads me to that central figure, which he has established in his
Academy, as the organ through which every considered opinion shall be
announced, and whose biography he has likewise so labored, that the
historic facts are lost in the light of Plato's mind. Socrates and
Plato are the double star, which the most powerful instruments will
not entirely separate. Socrates, again, in his traits and genius, is
the best example of that synthesis which constitutes Plato's
extraordinary power. Socrates, a man of humble stem, but honest enough;
of the commonest history; of a personal homeliness so remarkable, as
to be a cause of wit in others,--the rather that his broad good nature
and exquisite taste for a joke invited the sally, which was sure to
be paid. The players personated him on the stage; the potters copied
his ugly face on their stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, adding to his
humor a perfect temper, and a knowledge of his man, be he who he might
whom he talked with, which laid the companion open to certain defeat
in any debate,--and in debate he immoderately delighted. The young men
are prodigiously fond of him, and invite him to their feasts, whither
he goes for conversation. He can drink, too; has the strongest head
in Athens; and, after leaving the whole party under the table, goes
away, as if nothing had happened, to begin new dialogues with somebody
that is sober. In short, he was what our country-people call an old
one.

He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was monstrously fond of
Athens, hated trees, never willingly went beyond the walls, knew the
old characters, valued the bores and philistines, thought everything
in Athens a little better than anything in any other place. He was
plain as a Quaker in habit and speech, affected low phrases, and
illustrations from cocks and quails, soup-pans and sycamore-spoons,
grooms and farriers, and unnameable offices,--especially if he talked
with any superfine person. He had a Franklin-like wisdom. Thus, he
showed one who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia, that it was no
more than his daily walk within doors, if continuously extended, would
easily reach.

Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears,--an immense talker,--the
rumor ran, that, on one or two occasions, in the war with Boeotia, he
had shown a determination which had covered the retreat of a troop;
and there was some story that, under cover of folly, he had, in the
city government, when one day he chanced to hold a seat there, evinced
a courage in opposing singly the popular voice, which had well-nigh
ruined him. He is very poor; but then he is hardy as a soldier, and
can live on a few olives; usually, in the strictest sense, on bread
and water, except when entertained by his friends. His necessary
expenses were exceedingly small, and no one could live as he did. He
wore no undergarment; his upper garment was the same for summer and
winter; and he went barefooted; and it is said that, to procure the
pleasure, which he loves, of talking at his ease all day with the most
elegant and cultivated young men, he will now and then return to his
shop, and carve statues, good or bad, for sale. However that be, it
is certain that he had grown to delight in nothing else than this
conversation; and that, under his hypocritical pretense of knowing
nothing, he attacks and brings down all the fine speakers, all the
fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives, or strangers from Asia
Minor and the islands. Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so
honest, and really curious to know; a man who was willingly confuted,
if he did not speak the truth, and who willingly confuted others,
asserting what was false; and not less pleased when confuted than when
confuting; for he thought not any evil happened to men, of such a
magnitude as false opinion respecting the just and unjust. A pitiless
disputant, who knows nothing, but the bounds of whose conquering
intelligence no man had ever reached; whose temper was imperturbable;
whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so careless
and ignorant as to disarm the weariest, and draw them, in the
pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts and confusion. But he always
knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape; he drives
them to terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hippiases and
Gorgiases, with their grand reputations, as a boy tosses his balls.
The tyrannous realist!-Meno has discoursed a thousand times, at length,
on virtue, before many companies, and very well, as it appeared to
him; but, at this moment, he cannot even tell what it is,--this
cramp-fish of a Socrates has so bewitched him.

This hard-headed humorist, whose strange conceits, drollery, and
_bon-hommie_, diverted the young patricians, whilst the rumor of
his sayings and quibbles gets abroad every day, turns out, in a sequel,
to have a probity as invincible as his logic and to be either insane,
or, at least, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his religion.
When accused before the judges of subverting the popular creed, he
affirms the immortality of the soul, the future reward and punishment;
and, refusing to recant, in a caprice of the popular government, was
condemned to die, and sent to the prison. Socrates entered the prison,
and took away all ignominy from the place, which could not be a prison,
whilst he was there. Crito bribed the jailor; but Socrates would not
go out by treachery. "Whatever inconvenience ensue, nothing is to be
preferred before justice. These things I hear like pipes and drums,
whose sound makes me deaf to everything you say." The fame of this
prison, the fame of the discourses there, and the drinking of the
hemlock, are one of the most precious passages in the history of the
world.

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr,
the keen street and market debater with the sweetest saint known to
any history at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of Plato, so
capacious of these contrasts; and the figure of Socrates, by a
necessity, placed itself in the foreground of the scene, as the fittest
dispenser of the intellectual treasurers he had to communicate. It was
a rare fortune, that this Aesod of the mob, and this robed scholar,
should meet, to make each other immortal in their mutual faculty. The
strange synthesis, in the character of Socrates, capped the synthesis
in the mind of Plato. Moreover, by this means, he was able, in the
direct way, and without envy, to avail himself of the wit and weight
of Socrates, to which unquestionably his own debt was great; and these
derived again their principal advantage from the perfect art of Plato.

It remains to say, that the defect of Plato in power is only that which
results inevitably from his quality. He is intellectual in his aim;
and, therefore, in expression, literary. Mounting into heaven, driving
into the pit, expounding the laws of the state, the passion of love,
the remorse of crime, the hope of the parting soul,--he is literary,
and never otherwise. It is almost the sole deduction from the merit
of Plato, that his writings have not,--what is, no doubt, incident
to this regnancy of intellect in his work,--the vital authority which
the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews
possess. There is an interval; and to cohesion, contact is necessary.

I know not what can be said in reply to this criticism, but that we
have come to a fact in the nature of things: an oak is not an orange.
The qualities of sugar remain with sugar, and those of salt, with salt.

In the second place, he has not a system. The dearest defenders and
disciples are at fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his
theory is not complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means this,
and another, that: he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse
of it in another place. He is charged with having failed to make the
transition from ideas to matter. Here is the world, sound as a nut,
perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an
end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the
theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. Plato would willingly
have a Platonism, a known and accurate expression for the world, and
it should be accurate. It shall be the world passed through the mind
of Plato,--nothing less. Every atom shall have the Platonic tinge;
every atom, every relation or quality you knew before, you shall know
again and find here, but now ordered; not nature, but art. And you
shall feel that Alexander indeed overran, with men and horses, some
countries of the planet; but countries, and things of which countries
are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of men, have
passed through this man as bread into his body, and become no longer
bread, but body: so all this mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has
clapped copyright on the world. This is the ambition of individualism.
But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor has good will to
eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting,
gets strangled: the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth.
There he perishes: unconquered nature lives on, and forgets him. So
it fares with all: so must it fare with Plato. In view of eternal
nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercitations. He argues
on this side, and on that. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple,
could never tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be
quoted on both sides of every great question from him.

These things we are forced to say, if we must consider the effort of
Plato, or of any philosopher, to dispose of Nature,--which will not
be disposed of. No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success
in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains. But there is an
injustice in assuming this ambition for Plato. Let us not seem to treat
with flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion to their
intellect, have admitted his transcendent claims. The way to know him,
is to compare him, not with nature, but with other men. How many ages
have gone by, and he remains unapproached! A chief structure of human
wit, like Karnac, or the mediaeval cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains,
it requires all the breadth of human faculty to know it. I think it
is truliest seen, when seen with the most respect. His sense deepens,
his merits multiply, with study. When we say, here is a fine collection
of fables; or, when we praise the style; or the common sense; or
arithmetic; we speak as boys, and much of our impatient criticism of
the dialectic, I suspect, is no better. The criticism is like our
impatience of miles when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that
a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards. The great-eyed
Plato proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our life.



PLATO: NEW READINGS


The publication, in Mr. Bohn's "Serial Library," of the excellent
translations of Plato, which we esteem one of the chief benefits the
cheap press has yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a few
more notes of the elevation and bearings of this fixed star; or, to
add a bulletin, like the journals, of Plato at the latest dates.

Modern science, by the extent of its generalization, has learned to
indemnify the student of man for the defects of individuals, by tracing
growth and ascent in races; and, by the simple expedient of lighting
up the vast background, generates a feeling of complacency and hope.
The human being has the saurian and the plant in his rear. His arts
and sciences, the easy issue of his brain, look glorious when
prospectively beheld from the distant brain of ox, crocodile, and fish.
It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her,
when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men,
as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was nowise discontented with
the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree. These were
a clear amelioration of trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for
further proceeding. With this artist time and space are cheap, and she
is insensible of what you say of tedious preparation. She waited
tranquilly the flowing periods of paleontology, for the hour to be
struck when man should arrive. Then periods must pass before the motion
of the earth can be suspected; then before the map of the instincts
and the cultivable powers can be drawn. But as of races, so the
succession of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato has the
fortune, in the history of mankind, to mark an epoch.

Plato's fame does not stand on a syllogism, or on any masterpieces of
the Socratic, or on any thesis, as, for example, the immortality of
the soul. He is more than an expert, or a school-man, or a geometer,
or the prophet of a peculiar message. He represents the privilege of
the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to
successive platforms, and so disclosing, in every fact, a germ of
expansion. These expansions are in the essence of thought. The
naturalist would never help us to them by any discoveries of the extent
of the universe, but is as poor, when cataloguing the resolved nebula
of Orion, as when measuring the angles of an acre. But the Republic
of Plato, by these expansions, may be said to require, and so to
anticipate, the astronomy of Laplace. The expansions are organic. The
mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates
the rose. In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing them, we only
say, here was a more complete man, who could apply to nature the whole
scale of the senses, the understanding, and the reason. These
expansions, or extensions, consist in continuing the spiritual sight
where the horizon falls on our natural vision, and, by this second
sight, discovering the long lines of law which shoot in every direction.
Everywhere he stands on a path which has no end, but runs continuously
round the universe. Therefore, every word becomes an exponent of nature.
Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior senses.
His perception of the generation of contraries, of death out of life,
and life out of death,--that law by which, in nature, decomposition
is recomposition, and putrefaction and cholera are only signals of a
new creation; his discernment of the little in the large, and the large
in the small; studying the state in the citizen, and the citizen in
the state; and leaving it doubtful whether he exhibited the Republic
as an allegory on the education of the private soul; his beautiful
definitions of ideas, of time, of form, of figure, of the line,
sometimes hypothetically given, as his defining of virtue, courage,
justice, temperance; his love of the apologue, and his apologues
themselves; the cave of Trophonius; the ring of Gyges; the charioteer
and two horses; the golden, silver, brass, and iron temperaments;
Theuth and Thamus; and the visions of Hades and the Fates--fables which
have imprinted themselves in the human memory like the signs of the
zodiac; his soliform eye and his boniform soul; his doctrine of
assimilation; his doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of the
laws of return, or reaction, which secure instant justice throughout
the universe, instanced everywhere, but specially in the doctrine,
"what comes from God to us, returns from us to God," and in Socrates'
belief that the laws below are sisters of the laws above.

More striking examples are his moral conclusions. Plato affirms the
coincidence of science and virtue; for vice can never know itself and
virtue; but virtue knows both itself and vice. The eye attested that
justice was best, as long as it was profitable; Plato affirms that it
is profitable throughout; that the profit is intrinsic, though the
just conceal his justice from gods and men; that it is better to suffer
injustice, than to do it; that the sinner ought to covet punishment;
that the lie was more hurtful than homicide; and that ignorance, or
the involuntary lie, was more calamitous than involuntary homicide;
that the soul is unwillingly deprived of true opinions; and that no
man sins willingly; that the order of proceeding of nature was from
the mind to the body; and, though a sound body cannot restore an unsound
mind, yet a good soul can, by its virtue, render the body the best
possible. The intelligent have a right over the ignorant, namely, the
right of instructing them. The right punishment of one out of tune,
is to make him play in tune; the fine which the good, refusing to
govern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by a worse man; that his
guards shall not handle gold and silver, but shall be instructed that
there is gold and silver in their souls, which will make men willing
to give them everything which they need. This second sight explains
the stress laid on geometry. He saw that the globe of earth was not
more lawful and precise than was the supersensible; that a celestial
geometry was in place there, as a logic of lines and angles here below;
that the world was throughout mathematical; the proportions are constant
of oxygen, azote, and lime; there is just so much water, and slate,
and magnesia; not less are the proportions constant of moral elements.

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and falsehood, delighted in revealing
the real at the base of the accidental; in discovering connection,
continuity, and representation, everywhere; hating insulation; and
appears like the god of wealth among the cabins of vagabonds, opening
power and capability in everything he touches. Ethical science was new
and vacant, when Plato could write thus:--"Of all whose arguments are
left to the men of the present time, no one has ever yet condemned
injustice, or praised justice, otherwise than as respects the repute,
honors, and emoluments arising therefrom; while, as respects either
of them in itself, and subsisting by its own power in the soul of the
possessor, and concealed both from gods and men, no one has yet
sufficiently investigated, either in poetry or prose writings,--how,
namely, that the one is the greatest of all the evils that the soul
has within it, and justice the greatest good."

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform, and
self-existent, forever discriminating them from the notions of the
understanding, marks an era in the world. He was born to behold the
self-evolving power of spirit, endless generator of new ends; a power
which is the key at once to the centrality and the evanescence of
things. Plato is so centered, that he can well spare all his dogmas.
Thus the fact of knowledge and ideas reveals to him the fact of
eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he offers as the most
probable particular explication. Call that fanciful,--it matters not;
the connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still
real, and the explication must be not less magnificent.

He has indicated every eminent point in speculation. He wrote on the
scale of the mind itself, so that all things have symmetry in his
tablet. He put in all the past, without weariness, and descended into
detail with a courage like that he witnessed in nature. One would say,
that his forerunners had mapped out each a farm, or a district, or an
island, in intellectual geography, but that Plato first drew the sphere.
He domesticates the soul in nature; man is the microcosm. All the
circles of the visible heaven represent as many circles in the rational
soul. There is no lawless particle, and there is nothing casual in the
action of the human mind. The names of things, too, are fatal, following
the nature of things. All the gods of the Pantheon are, by their names,
significant of a profound sense. The gods are the ideas. Pan is speech,
or manifestation; Saturn, the contemplative; Jove, the regal soul; and
Mars, passion. Venus is proportion; Calliope, the soul of the world;
Aglaia, intellectual illustration.

These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had appeared often to pious and
to poetic souls; but this well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes
with command, gathers them all up into rank and gradation, the Euclid
of holiness, and marries the two parts of nature. Before all men, he
saw the intellectual values of the moral sentiment. He describes his
own ideal, when he paints in Timaeus a god leading things from disorder
into order. He kindled a fire so truly in the center, that we see the
sphere illuminated, and can distinguish poles, equator, and lines of
latitude, every arc and node; a theory so averaged, so modulated, that
you would say, the winds of ages had swept through this rhythmic
structure, and not that it was the brief extempore blotting of one
short-lived scribe. Hence it has happened that a very well-marked
class of souls, namely those who delight in giving a spiritual, that
is, an ethico-intellectual expression to every truth by exhibiting an
ulterior end which is yet legitimate to it, are said to Platonize.
Thus, Michel Angelo is a Platonist, in his sonnets. Shakspeare is a
Platonist, when he writes, "Nature is made better by no mean, but
nature makes that mean," or,

   "He that can endure
   To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,
   Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
   And earns a place in the story."

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and 'tis the magnitude only of Shakspeare's
proper genius that hinders him from being classed as the most eminent
of this school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose poem of "Conjugal
Love," is a Platonist.

His subtlety commended him to men of thought. The secret of his popular
success is the moral aim, which endeared him to mankind. "Intellect,"
he said, "is king of heaven and of earth;" but, in Plato, intellect
is always moral. His writings have also the sempiternal youth of poetry.
For their arguments, most of them, might have been couched in sonnets;
and poetry has never soared higher than in the Timaeus and the Phaedrus.
As the poet, too, he is only contemplative. He did not, like Pythagoras,
break himself with an institution. All his painting in the Republic
must be esteemed mythical, with intent to bring out, sometimes in
violent colors, his thought. You cannot institute, without peril of
charlatan.

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege for the best (which, to
make emphatic, he expressed by community of women), as the premium
which he would set on grandeur. There shall be exempts of two kinds:
first, those who by demerit have put themselves below
protection,--outlaws; and secondly, those who by eminence of nature
and desert are out of the reach of your rewards; let such be free of
the city, and above the law. We confide them to themselves; let them
do with us as they will. Let none presume to measure the irregularities
of Michel Angelo and Socrates by village scales.

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a little mathematical
dust in our eyes. I am sorry to see him, after such noble superiorities,
permitting the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence a little with
the baser sort, as people allow themselves with their dogs and cats.




III. SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC.

Among eminent persons, those who are most dear to men are not the class
which the economists call producers; they have nothing in their hands;
they have not cultivated corn, nor made bread; they have not led out
a colony, nor invented a loom. A higher class, in the estimation and
love of this city-building, market-going race of mankind, are the
poets, who, from the intellectual kingdom, feed the thought and
imagination with ideas and pictures which raise men out of the world
of corn and money, and console them for the shortcomings of the day,
and the meannesses of labor and traffic. Then, also, the philosopher
has his value, who flatters the intellect of this laborer, by engaging
him with subtleties which instruct him in new faculties. Others may
build cities; he is to understand them, and keep them in awe. But there
is a class who lead us into another region,--the world of morals, or
of will. What is singular about this region of thought, is, its claim.
Wherever the sentiment of right comes in, it takes precedence of
everything else. For other things, I make poetry of them; but the moral
sentiment makes poetry of me.

I have sometimes thought that he would render the greatest service to
modern criticism, who shall draw the line of relation that subsists
between Shakespeare and Swedenborg. The human mind stands ever in
perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally
of each without the other. The reconciler has not yet appeared. If we
tire of the saints, Shakespeare is our city of refuge. Yet the instincts
presently teach, that the problem of essence must take precedence of
all others,--the questions of Whence? What? and Whither? and the
solution of these must be in a life, and not in a book. A drama or
poem is a proximate or oblique reply; but Moses, Menu, Jesus, work
directly on this problem. The atmosphere of moral sentiment is a region
of grandeur which reduces all material magnificence to toys, yet opens
to every wretch that has reason, the doors of the universe. Almost
with a fierce haste it lays its empire on the man. In the language of
the Koran, "God said, the heaven and the earth, and all that is between
them, think ye that we created them in jest, and that ye shall not
return to us?" It is the kingdom of the will, and by inspiring the
will, which is the seat of personality, seems to convert the universe
into a person:--

  "The realms of being to no other bow,
  Not only all are thine, but all are Thou."

All men are commanded by the saint. The Koran makes a distinct class
of those who are by nature good, and whose goodness has an influence
on others, and pronounces this class to be the aim of creation: the
other classes are admitted to the feast of being, only as following
in the train of this. And the Persian poet exclaims to a soul of this
kind:

  "Go boldly forth, and feast on being's banquet;
  Thou art the called,--the rest admitted with thee."

The privilege of this caste is an access to the secrets and structure
of nature, by some higher method than by experience. In common parlance,
what one man is said to learn by experience, a man of extraordinary
sagacity is said, without experience, to divine. The Arabians say,
that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Seena, the Philosopher,
conferred together; and, on parting, the philosopher said, "All that
he sees, I know;" and the mystic said, "All that he knows, I see." If
one should ask the reason of this intuition, the solution would lead
us into that property which Plato denoted as Reminiscence, and which
is implied by the Bramins in the tenet of Transmigration. The soul
having been often born, or, as the Hindoos say, "traveling the path
of existence through thousands of births," having beheld the things
which are here, those which are in heaven, and those which are beneath,
there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge: no wonder
that she is able to recollect, in regard to any one thing, what formerly
she knew. "For, all things in nature being linked and related, and
the soul having heretofore known all, nothing hinders but that any man
who has recalled to mind, or, according to the common phrase, has
learned one thing only, should of himself recover all his ancient
knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he have but courage,
and faint not in the midst of his researches. For inquiry and learning
is reminiscence all." How much more, if he that inquires be a holy and
godlike soul! For, by being assimilated to the original soul, by whom,
and after whom, all things subsist, the soul of man does then easily
flow into all things, and all things flow into it: they mix: and he
is present and sympathetic with their structure and law.

This path is difficult, secret, and beset with terror. The ancients
called it ecstasy or absence,--a getting out of their bodies to think.
All religious history contains traces of the trance of saints,--a
beatitude, but without any sign of joy, earnest, solitary, even sad;
"the flight," Plotinus called it, "of the alone to the alone." The
trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal,
Guion, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes
to mind, is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes in
terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver. "It o'erinforms
the tenement of clay," and drives the man mad; or, gives a certain
violent bias, which taints his judgment. In the chief examples of
religious illumination, somewhat morbid, has mingled, in spite of the
unquestionable increase of mental power. Must the highest good drag
after it a quality which neutralizes and discredits it?--

                                "Indeed it takes
  From our achievements, when performed at height,
  The pith and marrow of our attribute."

Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses so much earth and
so much fire, by weight and metre, to make a man, and will not add a
pennyweight, though a nation is perishing for a leader? Therefore, the
men of God purchased their science by folly or pain. If you will have
pure carbon, carbuncle, or diamond, to make the brain transparent, the
trunk and organs shall be so much the grosser: instead of porcelain,
they are potter's earth, clay, or mud.

In modern times, no such remarkable example of this introverted mind
has occurred, as in Emanuel Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, in 1688.
This man, who appeared to his contemporaries a visionary, and elixir
of moonbeams, no doubt led the most real life of any man then in the
world: and now, when the royal and ducal Frederics, Cristierns, and
Brunswicks, of that day, have slid into oblivion, he begins to spread
himself into the minds of thousands. As happens in great men, he seemed,
by the variety and amount of his powers, to be a composition of several
persons,--like the giant fruits which are matured in gardens by the
union of four or five single blossoms. His frame is on a larger scale,
and possesses the advantage of size. As it is easier to see the
reflection of the great sphere in large globes, though defaced by some
crack or blemish, than in drops of water, so men of large calibre,
though with some eccentricity or madness, like Pascal or Newton, help
us more than balanced mediocre minds.

His youth and training could not fail to be extraordinary. Such a boy
could not whistle or dance, but goes grubbing into mines and mountains,
prying into chemistry and optics, physiology, mathematics, and
astronomy, to find images fit for the measure of his versatile and
capacious brain. He was a scholar from a child, and was educated at
Upsala. At the age of twenty-eight, he was made Assessor of the Board
of Mines, by Charles XII. In 1716, he left home for four years, and
visited the universities of England, Holland, France, and Germany. He
performed a notable feat of engineering in 1718, at the siege of
Fredericshall, by hauling two galleys, five boats, and a sloop, some
fourteen English miles overland, for the royal service. In 1721 he
journeyed over Europe, to examine mines and smelting works. He
published, in 1716, his Daedalus Hyperboreus, and, from this time, for
the next thirty years, was employed in the composition and publication
of his scientific works. With the like force, he threw himself into
theology. In 1743, when he was fifty-four years old, what is called
his illumination began. All his metallurgy, and transportation of ships
overland, was absorbed into this ecstasy. He ceased to publish any
more scientific books, withdrew from his practical labors, and devoted
himself to the writing and publication of his voluminous theological
works, which were printed at his own expense, or at that of the Duke
of Brunswick, or other prince, at Dresden, Liepsic, London, or
Amsterdam. Later, he resigned his office of Assessor: the salary
attached to this office continued to be paid to him during his life.
His duties had brought him into intimate acquaintance with King Charles
XII., by whom he was much consulted and honored. The like favor was
continued to him by his successor. At the Diet of 1751, Count Hopken
says, the most solid memorials on finance were from his pen. In Sweden,
he appears to have attracted a marked regard. His rare science and
practical skill, and the added fame of second sight and extraordinary
religious knowledge and gifts, drew to him queens, nobles, clergy,
shipmasters, and people about the ports through which he was wont to
pass in his many voyages. The clergy interfered a little with the
importation and publication of his religious works; but he seems to
have kept the friendship of men in power. He was never married. He had
great modesty and gentleness of bearing. His habits were simple; he
lived on bread, milk, and vegetables; and he lived in a house situated
in a large garden; he went several times to England, where he does not
seem to have attracted any attention whatever from the learned or the
eminent; and died at London, March 29, 1772, of apoplexy, in his
eighty-fifth year. He is described, when in London, as a man of quiet,
clerical habit, not averse to tea and coffee, and kind to children.
He wore a sword when in full velvet dress, and, whenever he walked
out, carried a gold-headed cane. There is a common portrait of him in
antique coat and wig, but the face has a wandering or vacant air.

The genius which was to penetrate the science of the age with a far
more subtle science; to pass the bounds of space and time; venture
into the dim spirit-realm, and attempt to establish a new religion in
the world,--began its lessons in quarries and forges, in the
smelting-pot and crucible, in ship-yards and dissecting-rooms. No one
man is perhaps able to judge of the merits of his works on so many
subjects. One is glad to learn that his books on mines and metals are
held in the highest esteem by those who understand these matters. It
seems that he anticipated much science of the nineteenth century;
anticipated, in astronomy, the discovery of the seventh planet,--but,
unhappily, not also of the eighth; anticipated the views of modern
astronomy in regard to the generation of earth by the sun; in magnetism,
some important experiments and conclusions of later students; in
chemistry, the atomic theory; in anatomy, the discoveries of
Schlichting, Monro, and Wilson; and first demonstrated the office of
the lungs. His excellent English editor magnanimously lays no stress
on his discoveries, since he was too great to care to be original; and
we are to judge, by what he can spare, of what remains.

A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by
them, and requires a long local distance to be seen; suggest, as
Aristotle, Bacon, Selden, Humboldt, that a certain vastness of learning,
or _quasi_ omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is possible.
His superb speculations, as from a tower, over nature and arts, without
ever losing sight of the texture and sequence of things, almost realizes
his own picture, in the "Principia," of the original integrity of man.
Over and above the merit of his particular discoveries, is the capital
merit of his self-equality. A drop of water has the properties of the
sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well
as of a flute; strength of a host, as well as of a hero; and, in
Swedenborg, those who are best acquainted with modern books, will most
admire the merit of mass. One of the missouriums and mastodons of
literature, he is not to be measured by whole colleges of ordinary
scholars. His stalwart presence would flutter the gowns of an
university. Our books are false by being fragmentary; their sentences
are _bon mots_, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions
of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to
their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,--being some
curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and
purposely framed to excite a surprise, as jugglers do by concealing
their means. But Swedenborg is systematic, and respective of the world
in every sentence; all the means are orderly given; his faculties work
with astronomic punctuality, and this admirable writing is pure from all
pertness or egotism.

Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of great ideas. 'Tis hard to
say what was his own: yet his life was dignified by noblest pictures
of the universe. The robust Aristotelian method, with its breadth and
adequateness, shaming our sterile and linear logic by its genial
radiation, conversant with series and degree, with effects and ends,
skilful to discriminate power from form, essence from accident, and
opening by its terminology and definition, high roads into nature, had
trained a race of athletic philosophers. Harvey had shown the
circulation of the blood; Gilbert had shown that the earth was a magnet;
Descartes, taught by Gilbert's magnet, with its vortex, spiral, and
polarity, had filled Europe with the leading thought of vortical motion,
as the secret of nature. Newton, in the year in which Swedenborg was
born, published the "Principia," and established the universal gravity.
Malpighi, following the high doctrines of Hippocrates, Leucippus, and
Lucretius, had given emphasis to the dogma that nature works in
leasts,--"_tota in minimis existit natura_." Unrivalled dissectors,
Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek, Winslow, Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius,
Boerhaave, had left nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in
human or comparative anatomy; Linnaeus, his contemporary, was affirming,
in his beautiful science, that "Nature is always like herself;" and,
lastly, the nobility of method, the largest application of principles,
had been exhibited by Leibnitz and Christian Wolff, in cosmology;
whilst Locke and Grotius had drawn the moral argument. What was left
for a genius of the largest calibre, but to go over their ground, and
verify and unite? It is easy to see, in these minds, the original of
Swedenborg's studies, and the suggestion of his problems. He had a
capacity to entertain and vivify these volumes of thought. Yet the
proximity of these geniuses, one or other of whom had introduced all
his leading ideas, makes Swedenborg another example of the difficulty,
even in a highly fertile genius, of proving originality, the first
birth and annunciation of one of the laws of nature.

He named his favorite views, the doctrine of Forms, the doctrine of
Series and Degrees, the doctrine of Influx, the doctrine of
Correspondence. His statement of these doctrines deserves to be studied
in his books. Not every man can read them, but they will reward him
who can. His theologic works are valuable to illustrate these. His
writings would be a sufficient library to a lonely and athletic student;
and the "Economy of the Animal Kingdom" is one of those books which,
by the sustained dignity of thinking, is an honor to the human race.
He had studied spars and metals to some purpose. His varied and solid
knowledge makes his style lustrous with points and shooting spicula
of thought, and resembling one of those winter mornings when the air
sparkles with crystals. The grandeur of the topics makes the grandeur
of the style. He was apt for cosmology, because of that native
perception of identity which made mere size of no account to him. In
the atom of magnetic iron, he saw the quality which would generate the
spiral motion of sun and planet.

The thoughts in which he lived were, the universality of each law in
nature; the Platonic doctrine of the scale or degrees; the version or
conversion of each into other, and so the correspondence of all the
parts; the fine secret that little explains large, and large, little;
the centrality of man in nature, and the connection that subsists
throughout all things: he saw that the human body was strictly
universal, or an instrument through which the soul feeds and is fed
by the whole of matter: so that he held, in exact antagonism to the
skeptics, that, "the wiser a man is, the more will he be a worshipper
of the Deity." In short, he was a believer in the Identity-philosophy,
which he held not idly, as the dreamers of Berlin or Boston, but which
he experimented with and established through years of labor, with the
heart and strength of the rudest Viking that his rough Sweden ever
sent to battle.

This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, and derives perhaps
its best illustration from the newest. It is this: that nature iterates
her means perpetually on successive planes. In the old aphorism, nature
is always self-similar. In the plant, the eye or germinative point
opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of transforming
the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed.
The whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without
end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture, and food, determining
the form it shall assume. In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or
a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a new spine, with a
limited power of modifying its form,--spine on spine, to the end of
the world. A poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake,
being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, constitute a
right angle; and, between the lines of this mystical quadrant, all
animate beings find their place; and he assumes the hair-worm, the
span-worm, or the snake, as the type of prediction of the spine.
Manifestly, at the end of the spine, nature puts out smaller spines,
as arms; at the end of the arms, new spines, as hands; at the other
end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet. At the top of the
column, she puts out another spine, which doubles or loops itself over,
as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms the skull, with extremities
again; the hands being now the upper jaw, the feet the lower jaw, the
fingers and toes being represented this time by upper and lower teeth.
This new spine is destined to high uses. It is a new man on the
shoulders of the last. It can almost shed its trunk, and manage to
live alone, according to the Platonic idea in the Timaeus. Within it,
on a higher plane, all that was done in the trunk repeats itself.
Nature recites her lesson once more in a higher mood. The mind is a
finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing,
excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the
brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring,
comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is
the mystery of generation repeated. In the brain are male and female
faculties; here is marriage, here is fruit. And there is no limit to
this ascending scale, but series on series. Everything, at the end of
one use, is taken up into the next, each series punctually repeating
every organ and process of the last. We are adapted to infinity. We
are hard to please, and love nothing which ends; and in nature is no
end; but everything, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior,
and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial
natures. Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly
repeating a simple air or theme now high, now low, in solo, in chorus,
ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with
the chant.

Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is good, but grandeur, when we
find chemistry only an extension of the law of masses into particles,
and that the atomic theory shows the action of chemistry to be
mechanical also. Metaphysics shows us a sort of gravitation, operative
also in the mental phenomena; and the terrible tabulation of the French
statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to
exact numerical rations. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty
thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty
thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or
marries his grandmother. What we call gravitation, and fancy ultimate,
is one fork of a mightier stream, for which we have yet no name.
Astronomy is excellent; but it must come up into life to have its full
value, and not remain there in globes and spaces. The globule of blood
gyrates around its own axis in the human veins, as the planet in the
sky; and the circles of intellect relate to those of the heavens. Each
law of nature has the like universality; eating, sleep or hybernation,
rotation, generation, metamorphosis, vortical motion, which is seen
in eggs as in planets. These grand rhymes or returns in nature,--the
dear, best-known face startling us at every turn, under a mask so
unexpected that we think it the face of a stranger, and, carrying up
the semblance into divine forms,--delighted the prophetic eye of
Swedenborg; and he must be reckoned a leader in that revolution, which,
by giving to science an idea, has given to an aimless accumulation of
experiments, guidance and form, and a beating heart.

I own, with some regret, that his printed works amount to about fifty
stout octaves, his scientific works being about half of the whole
number; and it appears that a mass of manuscript still unedited remains
in the royal library at Stockholm. The scientific works have just now
been translated into English, in an excellent edition.

Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the ten years from 1734
to 1744, and they remained from that time neglected; and now, after
their century is complete, he has at last found a pupil in Mr.
Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic critic, with a co-equal vigor of
understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon's, who has
produced his master's buried books to the day, and transferred them,
with every advantage, from their forgotten Latin into English, to go
round the world in our commercial and conquering tongue. This startling
reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred years, in his pupil, is
not the least remarkable fact in his history. Aided, it is said, by
the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and also by his literary skill, this
piece of poetic justice is done. The admirable preliminary discourses
with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes, throw all the
contemporary philosophy of England into shade, and leave me nothing
to say on their proper grounds.

The "Animal Kingdom" is a book of wonderful merits. It was written
with the highest end,--to put science and the soul, long estranged
from each other, at one again. It was an anatomist's account of the
human body, in the highest style of poetry. Nothing can exceed the
bold and brilliant treatment of a subject usually so dry and repulsive.
He saw nature "wreathing through an everlasting spiral, with wheels
that never dry, on axles that never creak," and sometimes sought "to
uncover those secret recess is where nature is sitting at the fires
in the depths of her laboratory;" whilst the picture comes recommended
by the hard fidelity with which it is based on practical anatomy. It
is remarkable that this sublime genius decides, peremptorily for the
analytic, against the synthetic method; and, in a book whose genius
is a daring poetic synthesis, claims to confine himself to a rigid
experience.

He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature and how wise was that old
answer of Amasis to him who bade him drink up the sea,--"Yes, willingly,
if you will stop the rivers that flow in." Few knew as much about
nature and her subtle manners, or expressed more subtly her goings.
He thought as large a demand is made on our faith by nature, as by
miracles. "He noted that in her proceeding from first principles through
her several subordinations, there was no state through which she did
not pass, as if her path lay through all things." "For as often as she
betakes herself upward from visible phenomena, or, in other words,
withdraws herself inward, she instantly, as it were, disappears, while
no one knows what has become of her, or whither she is gone; so that
it is necessary to take science as a guide in pursuing her steps."

The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an end or final cause,
gives wonderful animation, a sort of personality to the whole writing.
This book announces his favorite dogmas. The ancient doctrines of
Hippocrates, that the brain is a gland; and of Leucippus, that the
atom may be known by the mass; or, in Plato, the macrocosm by the
microcosm; and, in the verses of Lucretius,--

  Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis
  Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis
  Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari
  Sanguinis inter se multis coeuntibus guttis;
  Ex aurique putat micis consistere posse
  Aurum, et de terris terram concrescere parvis;
  Ignibus ex igneis, humorem humoribus esse.
                                          Lib. I. 835.

  "The principle of all things entrails made
  Of smallest entrails; bone, of smallest bone,
  Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one;
  Gold, of small grains; earth, of small sands compacted
  Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted:"

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim, that "nature exists entirely
in leasts,"--is a favorite thought of Swedenborg. "It is a constant
law of the organic body, that large, compound, or visible forms exist
and subsist from smaller, simpler, and ultimately from invisible forms,
which act similarly to the larger ones, but more perfectly and more
universally, and the least forms so perfectly and universally, as to
involve an idea representative of their entire universe." The unities
of each organ are so many little organs, homogeneous with their
compound; the unities of the tongue are little tongues; those of the
stomach, little stomachs; those of the heart are little hearts. This
fruitful idea furnishes a key to every secret. What was too small for
the eye to detect was read by the aggregates; what was too large, by
the units. There is no end to his application of the thought. "Hunger
is an aggregate of very many little hungers, or losses of blood by the
little veins all over the body." It is the key to his theology, also.
"Man is a kind of very minute heaven, corresponding to the world of
spirits and to heaven. Every particular idea of man, and every
affection, yea, every smallest spark of his affection, is an image and
effigy of him. A spirit may be known from only a single thought. God
is the grand man."  The hardihood and thoroughness of his study of
nature required a theory of forms, also. "Forms ascend in order from
the lowest to the highest. The lowest form is angular, or the
terrestrial and corporeal. The second and next higher form is the
circular, which is also called the perpetual-angular, because the
circumference of a circle is a perpetual angle. The form above this
is the spiral, parent and measure of circular forms; its diameters are
not rectilinear, but variously circular, and have a spherical surface
for center; therefore it is called the perpetual-circular. The form
above this is the vortical, or perpetual-spiral; next, the
perpetual-vortical, or celestial; last, the perpetual-celestial, or
spiritual."

Was it strange that a genius so bold should take the last step,
also,--conceive that he might attain the science of all sciences, to
unlock the meaning of the world? In the first volume of the "Animal
Kingdom," he broaches the subject, in a remarkable note.--

"In our doctrine of Representations and Correspondences, we shall treat
of both these symbolical and typical resemblances, and of the
astonishing things which occur, I will not say, in the living body
only, but throughout nature, and which correspond so entirely to supreme
and spiritual things, that one would swear that the physical world was
purely symbolical of the spiritual world; insomuch, that if we choose
to express any natural truth in physical and definite vocalterms, and
to convert these terms only into the corresponding and spiritual terms,
we shall by this means elicit a spiritual truth, or theological dogma,
in place of the physical truth or precept; although no mortal would
have predicted that anything of the kind could possibly arise by bare
literal transposition; inasmuch as the one precept, considered
separately from the other, appears to have absolutely no relation to
it. I intend, hereafter, to communicate a number of examples of such
correspondences, together with a vocabulary containing the terms of
spiritual things, as well as of the physical things for which they are
to be substituted. This symbolism pervades the living body."

The fact, thus explicitly stated, is implied in all poetry, in allegory,
in fable, in the use of emblems, and in the structure of language.
Plato knew of it, as is evident from his twice bisected line, in the
sixth book of the Republic. Lord Bacon had found that truth and nature
differed only as seal and print; and he instanced some physical
proportions, with their translation into a moral and political sense.
Behmen, and all mystics, imply this law in their dark riddle-writing.
The poets, in as far as they are poets, use it; but it is known to
them only, as the magnet was known for ages, as a toy. Swedenborg first
put the fact into a detached and scientific statement, because it was
habitually present to him, and never not seen. It was involved, as we
explained already, in the doctrine of identity and iteration, because
the mental series exactly tallies with the material series. It required
an insight that could rank things in order and series; or, rather, it
required such rightness of position, that the poles of the eye should
coincide with the axis of the world. The earth has fed its mankind
through five or six millenniums, and they had sciences, religions,
philosophies; and yet had failed to see the correspondence of meaning
between every part and every other part. And, down to this hour,
literature has no book in which the symbolism of things is
scientifically opened. One would say, that, as soon as men had the
first hint that every sensible object,--animal, rock, river, air,--nay,
space and time, subsists not for itself, nor finally to a material
end, but as a picture-language, to tell another story of beings and
duties, other science would be put by, and a science of such grand
presage would absorb all faculties; that each man would ask of all
objects, what they mean: Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my
joy and grief, in this center? Why hear I the same sense from countless
differing voices, and read one never quite expressed fact in endless
picture-language? Yet, whether it be that these things will not be
intellectually learned, or, that many centuries must elaborate and
compose so rare and opulent a soul,--there is no comet, rock-stratum,
fossil, fish, quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, for itself, does not
interest more scholars and classifiers than the meaning and upshot of
the frame of things.

But Swedenborg was not content with the culinary use of the world. In
his fifty-fourth year, these thoughts held him fast, and his profound
mind admitted the perilous opinion, too frequent in religious history,
that he was an abnormal person, to whom was granted the privilege of
conversing with angels and spirits; and this ecstasy connected itself
with just this office of explaining the moral import of the sensible
world. To a right perception, at once broad and minute, of the order
of nature, he added the comprehension of the moral laws in their widest
social aspects; but whatever he saw, through some excessive
determination to form, in his constitution, he saw not abstractly, but
in pictures, heard it in dialogues, constructed it in events. When he
attempted to announce the law most sanely, he was forced to couch it
in parable.

Modern psychology offers no similar example of a deranged balance. The
principal powers continued to maintain a healthy action; and, to a
reader who can make due allowance in the report for the reporter's
peculiarities, the results are still instructive, and a more striking
testimony to the sublime laws he announced, than any that balanced
dulness could afford. He attempts to give some account of the modus
of the new state, affirming that "his presence in the spiritual world
is attended with a certain separation, but only as to the intellectual
part of his mind, not as to the will part;" and he affirms that "he
sees, with the internal sight, the things that are in another life,
more clearly than he sees the things which are here in the world."

Having adopted the belief that certain books of the Old and New
Testaments were exact allegories, or written in the angelic and ecstatic
mode, he employed his remaining years in extricating from the literal,
the universal sense. He had borrowed from Plato the fine fable of "a
most ancient people, men better than we, and dwelling nigher to the
gods;" and Swedenborg added, that they used the earth symbolically;
that these, when they saw terrestrial objects, did not think at all
about them, but only about those which they signified. The
correspondence between thoughts and things henceforward occupied him.
"The very organic form resembles the end inscribed on it." A man is
in general, and in particular, an organizd justice or injustice,
selfishness or gratitude. And the cause of this harmony he assigned
in the Arcana: "The reason why all and single things, in the heavens
and on earth, are representative, is because they exist from an influx
of the Lord, through heaven." This design of exhibiting such
correspondences, which, if adequately executed, would be the poem of
the world, in which all history and science would play an essential
part, was narrowed and defeated by the exclusively theologic direction
which his inquiries took. His perception of nature is not human and
universal, but is mystical and Hebraic. He fastens each natural object
to a theologic notion:--a horse signifies carnal understanding; a tree,
perception; the moon, faith; a cat means this; an ostrich, that; an
artichoke, this other; and poorly tethers every symbol to a several
ecclesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus is not so easily caught. In
nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable parts, as each particle
of matter circulates in turn through every system. The central identity
enables any one symbol to express successively all the qualities and
shades of the real being. In the transmission of the heavenly waters,
every hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges herself speedily on the
hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist.
Everything must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our
condition to understand anything rightly.

His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his interpretation of nature,
and the dictionary of symbols is yet to be written. But the interpreter,
whom mankind must still expect, will find no predecessor who has
approached so near to the true problem.

Swedenborg styles himself, in the title-page of his books, "Servant
of the Lord Jesus Christ;" and by force of intellect, and in effect,
he is the last Father in the Church, and is not likely to have a
successor. No wonder that his depth of ethical wisdom should give him
influence as a teacher. To the withered traditional church yielding
dry catechisms, he let in nature again, and the worshiper, escaping
from the vestry of verbs and texts, is surprised to find himself a
party to the whole of his religion. His religion thinks for him, and
is of universal application. He turns it on every side; it fits every
part of life, interprets and dignifies every circumstance. Instead of
a religion which visited him diplomatically three or four times,--
when he was born, when he married, when he fell sick, and when he died,
and for the rest never interfered with him,--here was a teaching which
accompanied him all day, accompanied him even into sleep and dreams;
into his thinking, and showed him through what a long ancestry his
thoughts descend; into society, and showed by what affinities he was
girt to his equals and his counterparts; into natural objects, and
showed their origin and meaning, what are friendly, and what are
hurtful; and opened the future world, by indicating the continuity of
the same laws. His disciples allege that their intellect is invigorated
by the study of his books.

There is no such problem for criticism as his theological writings,
their merits are so commanding; yet such grave deductions must be made.
Their immense and sandy diffuseness is like the prairie, or the desert,
and their incongruities are like the last deliration. He is
superfluously explanatory, and his feelings of the ignorance of men,
strangely exaggerated. Men take truths of this nature very fast. Yet
he abounds in assertions; he is a rich discoverer, and of things which
most import us to know. His thought dwells in essential resemblances,
like the resemblance of a house to the man who built it. He saw things
in their law, in likeness of function, not of structure. There is an
invariable method and order in his delivery of his truth, the habitual
proceeding of the mind from inmost to outmost. What earnestness and
weightiness,--his eye never roving, without one swell of vanity, or
one look to self, in any common form of literary pride! a theoretic
or speculative man, but whom no practical man in the universe could
affect to scorn. Plato is a gownsman; his garment, though of purple,
and almost skywoven, is an academic robe, and hinders action with its
voluminous folds. But this mystic is awful to Caesar. Lycurgus himself
would bow.

The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correction of popular errors, the
announcement of ethical laws, take him out of comparison with any other
modern writer, and entitle him to a place, vacant for some ages, among
the lawgivers of mankind. That slow but commanding influence which he
has acquired, like that of other religious geniuses, must be excessive
also, and have its tides, before it subsides into a permanent amount.
Of course, what is real and universal cannot be confined to the circle
of those who sympathize strictly with his genius, but will pass forth
into the common stock of wise and just thinking. The world has a sure
chemistry, by which it attracts what is excellent in its children, and
lets fall the infirmities and limitations of the grandest mind.

That metempsychosis which is familiar in the old mythology of the
Greeks, collected in Ovid, and in the Indian Transmigration, and is
there objective, or really takes place in bodies by alien will,--in
Swedenborg's mind, has a more philosophic character. It is subjective,
or depends entirely upon the thought of the person. All things in the
universe arrange themselves to each person anew, according to his
ruling love. Man is such as his affection and thought are. Man is man
by virtue of willing, not by virtue of knowing and understanding. As
he is, so he sees. The marriages of the world are broken up. Interiors
associate all in the spiritual world. Whatever the angels looked upon
was to them celestial. Each Satan appears to himself a man; to those
as bad as he, a comely man; to the purified, a heap of carrion. Nothing
can resist states; everything gravitates; like will to like; what we
call poetic justice takes effect on the spot. We have come into a world
which is a living poem. Every thing is as I am. Bird and beast is not
bird and beast, but emanation and effluvia of the minds and wills of
men there present. Every one makes his own house and state. The ghosts
are tormented with the fear of death, and cannot remember that they
have died. They who are in evil and falsehood are afraid of all others.
Such as have deprived themselves of charity, wander and flee; the
societies which they approach discover their quality, and drive them
away. The covetous seem to themselves to be abiding in cells where
their money is deposited, and these to be infested with mice. They who
place merit in good works seem to themselves to cut wood. "I asked
such, if they were not wearied? They replied, that they have not yet
done work enough to merit heaven."

He delivers golden sayings, which express with singular beauty the
ethical laws; as when he uttered that famed sentence, that, "in heaven
the angels are advancing continually to the springtime of their youth,
so that the oldest angel appears the youngest:" "The more angels, the
more room:" "The perfection of man is the love of use:" "Man, in his
perfect form, is heaven:" "What is from Him, is Him:" "Ends always
ascend as nature descends:" And the truly poetic account of the writing
in the inmost heaven, which, as it consists of inflexions according
to the form of heaven, can be read without instruction He almost
justifies his claim to preternatural vision, by strange insights of
the structure of the human body and mind. "It is never permitted to
any one, in heaven, to stand behind another and look at the back of
his head; for then the influx which is from the Lord is disturbed."
The angels, from the sound of the voice, know a man's love; from the
articulation of the sound, his wisdom; and from the sense of the words,
his science.

In the "Conjugal Love," he has unfolded the science of marriage. Of
this book, one would say, that, with the highest elements, it has
failed of success. It came near to be the Hymn of Love, which Plato
attempted in the "Banquet;" the love, which, Dante says, Casella sang
among the angels in Paradise; and which, as rightly celebrated, in its
genesis, fruition, and effect, might well entrance the souls, as it
would lay open the genesis of all institutions, customs, and manners.
The book had been grand, if the Hebraism had been omitted, and the law
stated without Gothicism, as ethics, and with that scope for ascension
of state which the nature of things requires. It is a fine Platonic
development of the science of marriage; teaching that sex is universal,
and not local; virility in the male qualifying every organ, act, and
thought; and the feminine in woman. Therefore, in the real or spiritual
world, the nuptial union is not momentary, but incessant and total;
and chastity not a local, but a universal virtue; unchastity being
discovered as much in the trading, or planting, or speaking, or
philosophizing, as in generation; and that, though the virgins he saw
in heaven were beautiful, the wives were incomparably more beautiful,
and went on increasing in beauty evermore.

Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned his theory to a temporary form.
He exaggerates the circumstance of marriage; and, though he finds false
marriages on the earth, fancies a wiser choice in heaven. But of
progressive souls, all loves and friendships are momentary. Do you
love me? means, Do you see the same truth? If you do, we are happy
with the same happiness; but presently one of us passes into the
perception of new truth;--we are divorced, and no tension in nature
can hold us to each other. I know how delicious is this cup of love,--I
existing for you, you existing for me; but it is a child's clinging
to his toy; an attempt to eternize the fireside and nuptial chamber;
to keep the picture-alphabet through which our first lessons are
prettily conveyed. The Eden of God is bare and grand: like the outdoor
landscape, remembered from the evening fireside, it seems cold and
desolate, whilst you cower over the coals; but, once abroad again, we
pity those who can forego the magnificence of nature, for candle-light
and cards. Perhaps the true subject of the "Conjugal Love" is
conversation, whose laws are profoundly eliminated. It is false, if
literally applied to marriage. For God is the bride or bridegroom of
the soul. Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the communion of all
souls. We meet, and dwell an instant under the temple of one thought,
and part as though we parted not, to join another thought in other
fellowships of joy. So far from there being anything divine in the low
and proprietary sense of, Do you love me? it is only when you leave
and lose me, by casting yourself on a sentiment which is higher than
both of us, that I draw near, and find myself at your side; and I am
repelled, if you fix your eye on me, and demand love. In fact, in the
spiritual world, we change sexes every moment. You love the worth in
me; then I am your husband: but it is not me, but the worth, that fixes
the love; and that worth is a drop of the ocean of worth that is beyond
me. Meantime, I adore the greater worth in another, and so become his
wife. He aspires to a higher worth in another spirit, and is wife of
receiver of that influence.

Whether a self-inquisitorial habit, that he grew into, from jealousy
of the sins to which men of thought are liable, he has acquired, in
disentangling and demonstrating that particular form of moral disease,
an acumen which no conscience can resist. I refer to his feeling of
the profanation of thinking to what is good "from scientifics." "To
reason about faith, is to doubt and deny." He was painfully alive to
the difference between knowing and doing, and this sensibility is
incessantly expressed. Philosophers are, therefore, vipers, cockatrices,
asps, hemorrhoids, presters, and flying serpents; literary men are
conjurers and charlatans.

But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that here we find the seat
of his own pain. Possibly Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted
faculties. Success, or a fortunate genius, seems to depend on a happy
adjustment of heart and brain; on a due proportion, hard to hit, of
moral and mental power, which, perhaps, obeys the law of those chemical
ratios which make a proportion in volumes necessary to combination,
as when gases will combine in certain fixed rates, but not at any rate.
It is hard to carry a full cup: and this man, profusely endowed in
heart and mind, early fell into dangerous discord with himself. In his
Animal Kingdom, he surprises us, by declaring that he loved analysis,
and not synthesis; and now, after his fiftieth year, he falls into
jealousy of his intellect; and, though aware that truth is not solitary,
nor is goodness solitary, but both must ever mix and marry, he makes
war on his mind, takes the part of the conscience against it, and, on
all occasions, traduces and blasphemes it. The violence is instantly
avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love is unlovely, when truth, the half
part of heaven, is denied, as much as when a bitterness in men of
talent leads to satire, and destroys the judgment. He is wise, but
wise in his own despite. There is an air of infinite grief, and the
sound of wailing, all over and through this lurid universe. A vampyre
sits in the seat of the prophet, and turns with gloomy appetite to the
images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not more readily weave its nest,
or a mole bore into the ground, than this seer of souls substructs a
new hell and pit, each more abominable than the last, round every new
crew of offenders. He was let down through a column that seemed of
brass, but it was formed of angelic spirits, that he might descend
safely amongst the unhappy, and witness the vastation of souls; and
heard there, for a long continuance, their lamentations; he saw their
tormentors, who increase and strain pangs to infinity; he saw the hell
of the jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the hell of the lascivious;
the hell of robbers, who kill and boil men; the infernal tun of the
deceitful; the excrementitious hells; the hell of the revengeful, whose
faces resembled a round, broad-cake, and their arms rotate like a
wheel. Except Rabelais and Dean Swift, nobody ever had such science
of filth and corruption.

These books should be used with caution. It is dangerous to sculpture
these evanescing images of thought. True in transition, they become
false if fixed. It requires, for his just apprehension, almost a genius
equal to his own. But when his visions become the stereotyped language
of multitudes of persons, of all degrees of age and capacity, they are
perverted. The wise people of the Greek race were accustomed to lead
the most intelligent and virtuous young men, as part of their education,
through the Eleusinian mysteries, wherein, with much pomp and
graduation, the highest truths known to ancient wisdom were taught.
An ardent and contemplative young man, at eighteen or twenty years,
might read once these books of Swedenborg, these mysteries of love and
conscience, and then throw them aside forever. Genius is ever haunted
by similar dreams, when the hells and the heavens are opened to it.
But these pictures are to be held as mystical, that is, as a quite
arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth--not as the truth. Any
other symbol would be as good: then this is safely seen.

Swedenborg's system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is
dynamic, not vital, and lacks power to generate life. There is no
individual in it. The universe is a gigantic crystal, all those atoms
and laminae lie in uninterrupted order, and with unbroken unity, but
cold and still. What seems an individual and a will, is none. There
is an immense chain of intermediation, extending from center to
extremes, which bereaves every agency of all freedom and character.
The universe, in his poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only
reflects the mind of the magnetizer. Every thought comes into each
mind by influence from a society of spirits that surround it, and into
these from a higher society, and so on. All his types mean the same
few things. All his figures speak one speech. All his interlocutors
Swedenborgize. Be they who they may, to this complexion must they come
at last. This Charon ferries them all over in his boat; kings,
counselors, cavaliers, doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane,
King George II., Mahomet, or whosoever, and all gather one grimness
of hue and style. Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle seer sticks
a little at saying he talked with Cicero, and, with a touch of human
relenting, remarks, "one whom it was given me to believe was Cicero;"
and when the _soi disant_ Roman opens his mouth, Rome and eloquence
have ebbed away,--it is plain theologic Swedenborg, like the rest. His
heavens and hells are dull; fault of want of individualism. The
thousand-fold relation of men is not there. The interest that attaches
in nature to each man, because he is right by his wrong, and wrong by
his right, because he defies all dogmatizing and classification, so
many allowances, and contingencies, and futurities, are to be taken
into account, strong by his vices, often paralyzed by his
virtues,--sinks into entire sympathy with his society. This want reacts
to the center of the system. Though the agency of "the Lord" is in
every line referred to by name, it never becomes alive. There is no
lustre in that eye which gazes from the center, and which should vivify
the immense dependency of beings.

The vice of Swedenborg's mind is its theologic determination. Nothing
with him has the liberality of universal wisdom, but we are always in
a church. That Hebrew muse, which taught the lore of right and wrong
to man, had the same excess of influence for him, it has had for the
nations. The mode, as well as the essence, was sacred. Palestine is
ever the more valuable as a chapter in universal history, and ever the
less an available element in education. The genius of Swedenborg,
largest of all modern souls in this department of thought, wasted
itself in the endeavor to reanimate and conserve what had already
arrived at its natural term, and, in the great secular Providence, was
retiring from its prominence, before western modes of thought and
expression. Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching themselves
to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which
carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities, in its
bosom.

The excess of influence shows itself in the incongruous importation
of a foreign rhetoric. "What have I to do," asks the impatient reader,
"with jasper and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony; what with arks and
passovers, ephahs and ephods; what with lepers and emerods; what with
heave-offerings and unleavened bread; chariots of fire, dragons crowned
and horned, behemoth and unicorn? Good for orientals, these are nothing
to me. The more learning you bring to explain them, the more glaring
the impertinence. The more coherent and elaborate the system, the less
I like it. I say, with the Spartan, 'Why do you speak so much to the
purpose, of that which is nothing to the purpose?' My learning is such
as God gave me in my birth and habit, in the delight and study of my
eyes, and not of another man's. Of all absurdities, this of some
foreigner, purposing to take away my rhetoric, and substitute his own,
and amuse me with pelican and stork, instead of thrush and robin;
palm-trees and shittim-wood, instead of sassafras and hickory,--seems
the most needless." Locke said, "God, when he makes the prophet, does
not unmake the man." Swedenborg's history points the remark. The parish
disputes, in the Swedish church, between the friends and foes of Luther
and Melancthon, concerning "faith alone," and "works alone," intrude
themselves into his speculations upon the economy of the universe, and
of the celestial societies. The Lutheran bishop's son, for whom the
heavens are opened, so that he sees with eyes, and in the richest
symbolic forms, the awful truth of things, and utters again, in his
books, as under a heavenly mandate, the indisputable secrets of moral
nature,--with all these grandeurs resting upon him, remains the Lutheran
bishop's son; his judgments are those of a Swedish polemic, and his
vast enlargements purchased by adamantine limitations. He carries his
controversial memory with him, in his visits to the souls. He is like
Michel Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the cardinal who had offended
him to roast under a mountain of devils; or, like Dante, who avenged,
in vindictive melodies, all his private wrongs; or, perhaps still more
like Montaigne's parish priest, who, if a hailstorm passes over the
village, thinks the day of doom has come, and the cannibals already
have got the pip. Swedenborg confounds us not less with the pains of
Melancthon, and Luther, and Wolfius, and his own books, which he
advertises among the angels.

Under the same theologic cramp, many of his dogmas are bound. His
cardinal position in morals is, that evils should be shunned as sins.
But he does not know what evil is, or what good is, who thinks any
ground remains to be occupied, after saying that evil is to be shunned
as evil. I doubt not he was led by the desire to insert the element
of personality of Deity. But nothing is added. One man, you say, dreads
crysipelas,--show him that this dread is evil: or, one dreads
hell,--show him that dread is evil. He who loves goodness, harbors
angels, reveres reverence, and lives with God. The less we have to do
with our sins, the better. No man can afford to waste his moments in
compunctions. "That is active duty," say the Hindoos, "which is not
for our bondage; that is knowledge, which is for our liberation; all
other duty is good only unto weariness."

Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious theologic limitation,
is this Inferno. Swedenborg has devils. Evil, according to old
philosophers, is good in the making. That pure malignity can exist,
is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained
by a rational agent; it is atheism; it is the last profanation.
Euripides rightly said,--

"Goodness and being in the gods are one; He who imputes ill to them
makes them none."

To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology arrived, that
Swedenborg admitted no conversion for evil spirits! But the divine
effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself
to grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on
gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true. Burns, with the
wild humor of his apostrophe to "poor old Nickie Ben,"

"O wad ye tak a thought, and mend!"

has the advantage of the vindictive theologian. Everything is
superficial, and perishes, but love and truth only. The largest is
always the truest sentiment, and we feel the more generous spirit of
the Indian Vishnu,-"I am the same to all mankind. There is not one who
is worthy of my love or hatred. They who serve me with adoration,--I
am in them, and they in me. If one whose ways are altogether evil,
serve me alone, he is as respectable as the just man; he is altogether
well employed; he soon becometh of a virtuous spirit, and obtaineth
eternal happiness."

For the anomalous pretension of Revelations of the other world,--only
his probity and genius can entitle it to any serious regard. His
revelations destroy their credit by running into detail. If a man say,
that the Holy Ghost hath informed him that the Last Judgment (or the
last of the judgments) took place in 1757; or, that the Dutch, in the
other world, live in a heaven by themselves, and the English in a
heaven by themselves; I reply, that the Spirit which is holy, is
reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws. The rumors of ghosts and
hobgoblins gossip and tell fortunes. The teachings of the high Spirit
are abstemious, and, in regard to particulars, negative. Socrates'
Genius did not advise him to act or to find, but if he proposed to do
somewhat not advantageous, it dissuaded him. "What God is," he said,
"I know not; what he is not I know." The Hindoos have denominated the
Supreme Being, the "Internal Check." The illuminated Quakers explained
their Light, not as somewhat which leads to any action, but it appears
as an obstruction to anything unfit. But the right examples are private
experiences, which are absolutely at one on this point. Strictly
speaking, Swedenborg's revelation is a confounding of planes,--a capital
offence in so learned a categorist. This is to carry the law of surface
into the plane of substance, to carry individualism and its fopperies
into the realm of essences and generals, which is dislocation and
chaos.

The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable
angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints,
the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any
favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into
parallelism with the celestial currents, and could hint to human ears
the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul. But it is certain
that it must tally with what is best in nature. It must not be inferior
in tone to the already known works of the artist who sculptures the
globes of the firmament, and writes the moral law. It must be fresher
than rainbows, stabler than mountains, agreeing with flowers, with
tides, and the rising and setting of autumnal stars. Melodious poets
shall be hoarse as street ballads, when once the penetrating key-note
of nature and spirit is sounded,--the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat
which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood,
and the sap of trees.

In this mood, we hear the rumor that the seer has arrived, and his
tale is told. But there is no beauty, no heaven: for angels, goblins.
The sad muse loves night and death, and the pit. His Inferno is
mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the same relation to the
generosities and joys of truth, of which human souls have already made
us cognizant, as a man's bad dreams bear to his ideal life. It is
indeed very like, in its endless power of lurid pictures, to the
phenomena of dreaming, which nightly turns many an honest gentleman,
benevolent but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulking like a dog about the
outer yards and kennels of creation. When he mounts into the heavens,
I do not hear its language. A man should not tell me that he has walked
among the angels; his proof is, that his eloquence makes me one. Shall
the archangels be less majestic and sweet than the figures that have
actually walked the earth? These angels that Swedenborg paints give
us no very high idea of their discipline and culture; they are all
country parsons; their heaven is a _fete champetre_, and evangelical
picnic, or French distribution of prizes to virtuous peasants. Strange,
scholastic, didactic, passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes of
souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and visits doleful hells as a
stratum of chalk or hornblende! He has no sympathy. He goes up and down
the world of men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold-headed cane and peruke,
and with nonchalance, and the air of a referee, distributing souls. The
warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled world is to him a grammar of
hieroglyphs, or an emblematic freemason's procession. How different is
Jacob Behmen! he is tremulous with emotion, and listens awe-struck, with
the gentlest humanity, to the Teacher whose lessons he conveys; and when
he asserts that, "in some sort, love is greater than God," his heart
beats so high that the thumping against his leathern coat is audible
across the centuries. 'Tis a great difference. Behmen is healthily and
beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrowness and
incommunicableness. Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and, with all his
accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels.

It is the best sign of a great nature, that it opens a foreground,
and, like the breath of morning landscapes, invites us onward.
Swedenborg is retrospective, nor can we divest him of his mattock and
shroud. Some minds are forever restrained from descending into nature;
others are forever prevented from ascending out of it. With a force
of many men, he could never break the umbilical cord which held him
to nature, and he did not rise to the platform of pure genius.

It is remarkable that this man, who, by his perception of symbols, saw
the poetic construction of things, and the primary relation of mind
to matter, remained entirely devoid of the whole apparatus of poetic
expression, which that perception creates. He knew the grammar and
rudiments of the Mother-Tongue,--how could he not read off one strain
into music? Was he like Saadi, who, in his vision, designed to fill
his lap with the celestial flowers, as presents for his friends; but
the fragrance of the roses so intoxicated him, that the skirt dropped
from his hands? or, is reporting a breach of the manners of that
heavenly society? or, was it that he saw the vision intellectually,
and hence that chiding of the intellectual that pervades his books?
Be it as it may, his books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no
relief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate imagery
is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a lack-
lustre landscape. No bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead.
The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the
disease, and, like a hoarse voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of
warning. I think, sometimes, he will not be read longer. His great
name will turn a sentence. His books have become a monument. His laurels
so largely mixed with cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles with the
temple incense, that boys and maids will shun the spot.

Yet, in this immolation of genius and fame at the shrine of conscience,
is a merit sublime beyond praise. He lived to purpose: he gave a
verdict. He elected goodness as the clue to which the soul must cling
in all this labyrinth of nature. Many opinions conflict as to the true
center. In the shipwreck, some cling to running rigging, some to cask
and barrel, some to spars, some to mast; the pilot chooses with
science,--I plant myself here; all will sink before this; "he comes
to land who sails with me." Do not rely on heavenly favor, or on
compassion to folly, or on prudence, on common sense, the old usage
and main chance of men; nothing can keep you,--not fate, nor health,
nor admirable intellect; none can keep you, but rectitude only,
rectitude forever and ever!--and, with a tenacity that never swerved
in all his studies, inventions, dreams, he adheres to this brave choice.
I think of him as of some transmigratory votary of Indian legend, who
says, "Though I be dog, or jackal, or pismire, in the last rudiments
of nature, under what integument or ferocity, I cleave to right, as
the sure ladder that leads up to man and to God."

Swedenborg has rendered a double service to mankind, which is now only
beginning to be known. By the science of experiment and use, he made
his first steps; he observed and published the laws of nature; and,
ascending by just degrees, from events to their summits and causes,
he was fired with piety at the harmonies he felt, and abandoned himself
to his joy and worship. This was his first service. If the glory was
too bright for his eyes to bear, if he staggered under the trance of
delight, the more excellent is the spectacle he saw, the realities of
being which beam and blaze through him, and which no infirmities of
the prophet are suffered to obscure; and he renders a second passive
service to men, not less than the first,--perhaps, in the great circle
of being, and in the retributions of spiritual nature, not less glorious
or less beautiful to himself.




IV. MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC.


Every fact is related on one side to sensation and, on the other, to
morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two
sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.
Nothing so thin, but has these two faces; and, when the observer has
seen the obverse, he turns it over to see the reverse.

Life is a pitching of this penny,--heads or tails. We never tire of
this game, because there is still a slight shudder of astonishment at
the exhibition of the other face, at the contrast of the two faces.
A man is flushed with success, and bethinks himself what this good
luck signifies. He drives his bargain in the street; but it occurs
that he also is bought and sold. He sees the beauty of a human face,
and searches the cause of that beauty, which must be more beautiful.
He builds his fortunes, maintains the laws, cherishes his children;
but he asks himself, why? and whereto? This head and this tail are
called, in the language of philosophy, Infinite and Finite; Relative
and Absolute; Apparent and Real; and many fine names beside.

Each man is born with a predisposition to one or the other of these
sides of nature; and it will easily happen that men will be found
devoted to one or the other. One class has the perception of difference,
and is conversant with facts and surfaces; cities and persons; and the
bringing certain things to pass;--the men of talent and action. Another
class have the perception of identity, and are men of faith and
philosophy, men of genius.

Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus believes only in
philosophers; Fenelon, in saints; Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the
haughty language in which Plato and the Platonists speak of all men
who are not devoted to their own shining abstractions: other men are
rats and mice. The literary class is usually proud and exclusive. The
correspondence of Pope and Swift describes mankind around them as
monsters; and that of Goethe and Schiller, in our own time, is scarcely
more kind.

It is easy to see how this arrogance comes. The genius is a genius by
the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he
not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design--he will presently
undervalue the actual object. In powerful moments, his thought has
dissolved the works of art and nature into their causes, so that the
works appear heavy and faulty. He has a conception of beauty which the
sculptor cannot embody. Picture, statue, temple, railroad, steam-engine,
existed first in an artist's mind, without flaw, mistake, or friction,
which impair the executed models. So did the church, the state, college,
court, social circle, and all the institutions. It is not strange that
these men, remembering what they have seen and hoped of ideas, should
affirm disdainfully the superiority of ideas. Having at some time seen
that the happy soul will carry all the arts in power, they say, Why
cumber ourselves with superfluous realizations? and, like dreaming
beggars, they assume to speak and act as if these values were already
substantiated.

On the other part, the men of toil and trade and luxury,--the animal
world, including the animal in the philosopher and poet also,--and the
practical world, including the painful drudgeries which are never
excused to philosopher or poet any more than to the rest,--weigh heavily
on the other side. The trade in our streets believes in no metaphysical
causes, thinks nothing of the force which necessitated traders and a
trading planet to exist; no, but sticks to cotton, sugar, wool, and
salt. The ward meetings, on election days, are not softened by any
misgivings of the value of these ballotings. Hot life is streaming in
a single direction. To the men of this world, to the animal strength
and spirits, to the men of practical power, whilst immersed in it, the
man of ideas appears out of his reason. They alone have reason.

Things always bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence.
No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic,
also. In England, the richest country that ever existed, property
stands for more, compared with personal ability, than in any other.
After dinner, a man believes less, denies more; verities have lost
some charm. After dinner, arithmetic is the only science; ideas are
disturbing, incendiary, follies of young men, repudiated by the solid
portion of society; and a man comes to be valued by his athletic and
animal qualities. Spence relates, that Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey
Kneller one day, when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came in. "Nephew,"
said Sir Godfrey, "you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men
in the world." "I don't know how great men you may be," said the Guinea
man, "but I don't like your looks. I have often bought a man much
better than both of you, all muscles and bones, for ten guineas. Thus,
the men of the senses revenge themselves on the professors, and repay
scorn for scorn. The first had leaped to conclusions not yet ripe, and
say more than is true; the others make themselves merry with the
philosopher, and weigh man by the pound.--They believe that mustard
bites the tongue, that pepper is hot, friction-matches are incendiary,
revolvers to be avoided, and suspenders hold up pantaloons; that there
is much sentiment in a chest of tea; and a man will be eloquent, if
you give him good wine. Are you tender and scrupulous,--you must eat
more mince-pie. They hold that Luther had milk in him when he said,

"Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben
lang,"

and when he advised a young scholar perplexed with fore-ordination and
free-will, to get well drunk. "The nerves," says Cabanis, "they are
the man." My neighbor, a jolly farmer, in the tavern bar-room, thinks
that the use of money is sure and speedy spending. "For his part," he
says, "he puts his down his neck, and gets the good of it."

The inconvenience of this way of thinking is, that it runs into
indifferentism, and then into disgust. Life is eating us up. We shall
be fables presently. Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years
hence. Life's well enough; but we shall be glad to get out of it, and
they will all be glad to have us. Why should we fret and drudge? Our
meat will taste to-morrow as it did yesterday, and we may at last have
had enough of it. "Ah," said my languid gentleman at Oxford, "there's
nothing new or true,--and no matter."

With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans: our life is like an
ass led to market by a bundle of hay being carried before him: he sees
nothing but the bundle of hay. "There is so much trouble in coming
into the world," said Lord Bolingbroke, "and so much more, as well as
meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly worth while to be here
at all." I knew a philosopher of this kidney, who was accustomed briefly
to sum up his experience of human nature in saying, "Mankind is a
damned rascal:" and the natural corollary is pretty sure to
follow,--"The world lives by humbug, and so will I."

The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each
other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there
arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two,
the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He
labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. He will not
go beyond his card. He sees the one-sidedness of these men of the
street; he will not be a Gibeonite; he stands for the intellectual
faculties, a cool head, and whatever serves to keep it cool; no
unadvised industry, no unrewarded self-devotion, no loss of the brains
in toil. Am I an ox, or a dray?--You are both in extremes, he says.
You that will have all solid, and a world of pig-lead, deceive
yourselves grossly. You believe yourselves rooted and grounded on
adamant; and, yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowledge, you
are spinning like bubbles in a river, you know not whither or whence,
and you are bottomed and capped and wrapped in delusions.

Neither will he be betrayed to a book, and wrapped in a gown. The
studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their
feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the
day a fear of interruption,--pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If
you come near them, and see what conceits they entertain,--they are
abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some
dreams; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme
built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of
justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer
to embody and vitalize it.

But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I know that human
strength is not in extremes, but in avoiding extremes. I, at least,
will shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. What is the
use of pretending to powers we have not? What is the use of pretending
to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? Why exaggerate
the power of virtue? Why be an angel before your time? These strings,
wound up too high, will snap. If there is a wish for immortality, and
no evidence, why not say just that? If there are conflicting evidences,
why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to
make up his mind, yea or nay,--why not suspend the judgment? I weary
of these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny the
dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand here to try the case. I am
here to consider,--to consider how it is. I will try to keep the balance
true. Of what use to take the chair, and glibly rattle off theories
of societies, religion, and nature, when I know that practical
objections lie in the way, insurmountable by me and by my mates? Why
so talkative in public, when each of my neighbors can pin me to my
seat by arguments I cannot refute? Why pretend that life is so simple
a game, when we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus is? Why think
to shut up all things in your narrow coop, when we know there are not
one or two only, but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike? Why
fancy that you have all the truth in your keeping? There is much to
say on all sides.

Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical
question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be
had? Is not marriage an open question when it is alleged, from the
beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to
get out, and such as are out wish to get in? And the reply of Socrates,
to him who asked whether he should choose a wife, still remains
reasonable, "that, whether he should choose one or not, he would repent
it." Is not the state a question? All society is divided in opinion
on the subject of the state. Nobody loves it; great numbers dislike
it, and suffer conscientious scruples to allegiance: and the only
defense set up, is, the fear of doing worse in disorganizing. Is it
otherwise with the church? Or, to put any of the questions which touch
mankind nearest,--shall the young man aim at a leading part in law,
in politics, in trade? It will not be pretended that a success in
either of these kinds is quite coincident with what is best and inmost
in his mind. Shall he, then, cutting the stays that hold him fast to
the social state, put out to sea with no guidance but his genius? There
is much to say on both sides. Remember the open question between the
present order of "competition," and the friends of "attractive and
associated labor." The generous minds embrace the proposition of labor
shared by all; it is the only honesty; nothing else is safe. It is
from the poor man's hut alone, that strength and virtue come; and yet,
on the other side, it is alleged that labor impairs the form, and
breaks the spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, "We have
no thoughts." Culture, how indispensable! I cannot forgive you the
want of accomplishment; and yet, culture will instantly destroy that
chiefest beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent is culture for a savage;
but once let him read in the book, and he is no longer able not to
think of Plutarch's heroes. In short, since true fortitude of
understanding consists "in not letting what we know be embarrassed by
what we do not know," we ought to secure those advantages which we can
command, and not risk them by clutching after the airy and unattainable.
Come, no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let us mix in affairs; let us
learn, and get, and have, and climb. "Men are a sort of moving plants,
and, like trees, receive a great part of their nourishment from the
air. If they keep too much at home, they pine." Let us have a robust,
manly life; let us know what we know, for certain; what we have, let
it be solid, and seasonable, and our own. A world in the hand is worth
two in the bush. Let us have to do with real men and women, and not
with skipping ghosts.

This, then, is the right ground of the skeptic,--this of consideration,
of self-containing; not at all of unbelief; not at all of universal
denying, nor of universal doubting,--doubting even that he doubts;
least of all, of scoffing and profligate jeering at all that is stable
and good. These are no more his moods than are those of religion and
philosophy. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting
stock, husbanding his means, believing that a man has too many enemies,
than that he can afford to be his own; that we cannot give ourselves
too many advantages, in this unequal conflict, with powers so vast and
unweariable ranged on one side, and this little, conceited, vulnerable
popinjay that a man is, bobbing up and down into every danger, on the
other. It is a position taken up for better defense, as of more safety,
and one that can be maintained; and it is one of more opportunity and
range; as, when we build a house, the rule is, to set it not too high
nor too low, under the wind, but out of the dirt.

The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. The Spartan
and Stoic schemes are too stark and stiff for our occasion. A theory
of Saint John, and of non-resistance, seems, on the other hand, too
thin and aerial. We want some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as
the first, and limber as the second. We want a ship in these billows
we inhabit. An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and
splinters, in this storm of many elements. No, it must be tight, and
fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell is the architecture
of a house founded on the sea. The soul of man must be the type of our
scheme, just as the body of man is the type after which a dwelling-house
is built. Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature. We are
golden averages, volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic errors,
houses founded on the sea. The wise skeptic wishes to have a near view
of the best game, and the chief players; what is best in the planet;
art and nature, places and events, but mainly men. Everything that is
excellent in mankind,--a form of grace, an arm of iron, lips of
persuasion, a brain of resources, every one skilful to play and win,--he
will see and judge.

The terms of admission to this spectacle are, that he have a certain
solid and intelligible way of living of his own; some method of
answering the inevitable needs of human life; proof that he has played
with skill and success; that he has evinced the temper, stoutness, and
the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries and countrymen,
entitle him to fellowship and trust. For, the secrets of life are not
shown except to sympathy and likeness. Men do not confide themselves
to boys, or coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers. Some wise
limitation, as the modern phrase is; some condition between the
extremes, and having itself a positive quality; some stark and
sufficient man, who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to
the world to do justice to Paris or London, and, at the same time, a
vigorous and original thinker, whom cities cannot overawe, but who
uses them,--is the fit person to occupy this ground of speculation.

These qualities meet in the character of Montaigne. And yet, since the
personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne may be unduly great,
I will, under the shield of this prince of egotists, offer, as an
apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism, a word
or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.

A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of the Essays remained to
me from my father's library, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until,
after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the
book, and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight and
wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had myself
written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my
thought and experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in
the cemetery of Pere le Chaise, I came to a tomb of Augustus Collignon,
who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument,
"lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of
Montaigne." Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished
English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence,
I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to
his chateau, still standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and, after
two hundred and fifty years, had copied from the walls of his library
the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there. That Journal of
Mr. Sterling's, published in the Westminster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has
reprinted in the Prolegomenae to his edition of the Essays. I heard
with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs of William
Shakspeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. It is
the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's
library. And, oddly enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, which the
British Museum purchased, with a view of protecting the Shakspeare
autograph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the
autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord
Byron, that Montaigne was the only great writer of past times whom he
read with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to be
mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still new and immortal
for me.

In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, then thirty-eight years
old, retired from the practice of law, at Bordeaux, and settled himself
on his estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure, and sometimes a
courtier, his studious habits now grew on him, and he loved the compass,
staidness, and independence of the country gentleman's life. He took
up his economy in good earnest, and made his farms yield the most.
Downright and plain-dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to
deceive, he was esteemed in the country for his sense and probity. In
the civil wars of the League, which converted every house into a fort,
Montaigne kept his gates open, and his house without defense. All
parties freely came and went, his courage and honor being universally
esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry brought jewels and papers
to him for safekeeping. Gibbon reckons, in these bigoted times, but
two men of liberality in France,--Henry IV. and Montaigne.

Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French
freedom runs into grossness; but he has anticipated all censures by
the bounty of his own confessions. In his times, books were written
to one sex only, and almost all were written in Latin; so that, in a
humorist, a certain nakedness of statement was permitted, which our
manners, of a literature addressed equally to both sexes, do not allow.
But, though a biblical plainness, coupled with a most uncanonical
levity, may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the offence
is superficial. He parades it: he makes the most of it; nobody can
think or say worse of him than he does. He pretends to most of the
vices; and, if there be any virtue in him, he says, it got in by
stealth. There is no man, in his opinion, who has not deserved hanging
five or six times; and he pretends no exception in his own behalf.
"Five or six as ridiculous stories," too, he says, "can be told of me,
as of any man living." But, with all this really superfluous frankness,
the opinion of an invincible probity grows into every reader's mind.

"When I the most strictly and religiously confess myself, I find that
the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid
that Plato, in his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and perfect a
lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had
listened, and laid his ear close to himself, would have heard some
jarring sound of human mixture; but faint and remote, and only to be
perceived by himself."

Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color or pretense of any
kind. He has been in courts so long as to have conceived a furious
disgust at appearances; he will indulge himself with a little cursing
and swearing; he will talk with sailors and gypsies, use flash and
street ballads; he has stayed indoors till he is deadly sick; he will
to the open air, though it rain bullets. He has seen too much of
gentlemen of the long robe, until he wishes for cannibals; and is so
nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks, the more barbarous man
is, the better he is. He likes his saddle. You may read theology, and
grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever you get here, shall smack
of the earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging. He makes
no hesitation to entertain you with the records of his disease; and
his journey to Italy is quite full of that matter. He took and kept
this position of equilibrium. Over his name, he drew an emblematic
pair of scales, and wrote, _Que sais-je?_ under it. As I look at
his effigy opposite the title-page, I seem to hear him say, "You may
play old Poz, if you will; you may rail and exaggerate,--I stand here
for truth, and will not, for all the states, and churches, and revenues,
and personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see
it; I will rather mumble and prose about what I certainly know,--my
house and barns; my father, my wife, and my tenants; my old lean bald
pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat, and what drinks I prefer;
and a hundred straws just as ridiculous,--than I will write, with a
fine crow-quill, a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and
winter weather. I am gray and autumnal myself, and think an undress,
and old shoes that do not pinch my feet, and old friends who do not
constrain me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain myself
and pump my brains, the most suitable. Our condition as men is risky
and ticklish enough. One cannot be sure of himself and his fortune an
hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight.
Why should I vapor and play the philosopher, instead of ballasting,
the best I can, this dancing balloon? So, at least, I live within
compass, keep myself ready for action, and can shoot the gulf, at last,
with decency. If there be anything farcical in such a life, the blame
is not mine; let it lie at fate's and nature's door."

The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random
topic that comes into his head; treating everything without ceremony,
yet with masculine sense. There have been men with deeper insight;
but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts; he
is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader
care for all that he cares for.

The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know
not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of
conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would
bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it
that we have in listening to the necessary speech of men about their
work, when any unusual circumstance give momentary importance to the
dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their speech;
it is a shower of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct themselves,
and begin again at every half-sentence, and, moreover, will pun, and
refine too much, and swerve from the matter to the expression. Montaigne
talks with shrewdness, knows the world, and books, and himself, and
uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays; no
weakness, no convulsion, no superlative; does not wish to jump out of
his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time; but is stout
and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain, because it makes
him feel himself, and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know
that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes
to feel solid ground, and the stones underneath. His writing has no
enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting, and keeping
the middle of the road. There is but one exception,--in his love for
Socrates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek flushes, and his style
rises to passion.

Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty, in 1592. When he came
to die, he caused the mass to be celebrated in his chamber. At the age
of thirty-three, he had been married. "But," he says, "might I have
had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would
have had me; but 'tis to much purpose to evade it, the common custom
and use of life will have it so. Most of my actions are guided by
example, not choice." In the hour of death he gave the same weight to
custom. _Que sais-je?_ What do I know.

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed, by translating it into
all tongues, and printing seventy-five editions of it in Europe; and
that, too, a circulation somewhat chosen, namely, among courtiers,
soldiers, princes, men of the world, and men of wit and generosity.

Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, and given the right and
permanent expression of the human mind, on the conduct of life?

We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and
effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through
all things; all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men, and events,
and life, come to us, only because of that thread; they pass and repass,
only that we may know the direction and continuity of that line. A
book or statement which goes to show that there is no line, but random
and chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a prosperity and no account of
it, a hero born from a fool, a fool from a hero,--dispirits us. Seen
or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes counterfeit ties;
genius finds the real ones. We hearken to the man of science, because
we anticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which he uncovers. We
love whatever affirms, connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters
or pulls down. One man appears whose nature is to all men's eyes
conserving and constructive; his presence supposes a well-ordered
society, agriculture, trade, large institutions, and empire. If these
did not exist, they would begin to exist through his endeavors.
Therefore, he cheers and comforts men, who feel all this in him very
readily. The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable
things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no
plan of house or state of their own. Therefore, though the town, and
state, and way of living, which our counselor contemplated, might be
a very modest or musty prosperity, yet men rightly go for him, and
reject the reformer, so long as he comes only with axe and crowbar.

But though we are natural conservers and causationists, and reject a
sour, dumpish unbelief, the skeptical class, which Montaigne represents,
have reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it. Every superior
mind will pass through this domain of equilibration,--I should rather
say, will know how to avail himself of the checks and balances in
nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and formalism of
bigots and blockheads.

Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the
particulars which society adores, but which he sees to be reverent
only in their tendency and spirit. The ground occupied by the skeptic
is the vestibule of the temple. Society does not like to have any
breath of question blown on the existing order. But the interrogation
of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every
superior mind, and is the evidence of its perception of the flowing
power which remains itself in all changes.

The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of
society, and with the projects that are offered to relieve them. The
wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no conservative; he sees the selfishness
of property, and the drowsiness of institutions. But neither is he fit
to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties
wish every one committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism.
His politics are those of the "Soul's Errand" of Sir Walter Raleigh;
or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat, "There is none who is worthy of my
love or hatred;" while he sentences law, physic, divinity, commerce,
and custom. He is a reformer: yet he is no better member of the
philanthropic association. It turns out that he is not the champion
of the operative, the pauper, the prisoner, the slave. It stands in
his mind, that our life in this world is not of quite so easy
interpretation as churches and school-books say. He does not wish to
take ground against these benevolences, to play the part of devil's
attorney, and blazon every doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for
him. But he says, There are doubts.

I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the calendar-day of our Saint
Michel de Montaigne, by counting and describing these doubts or
negations. I wish to ferret them out of their holes, and sun them a
little. We must do with them as the police do with old rogues, who are
shown up to the public at the marshal's office. They will never be so
formidable, when once they have been identified and registered. But
I mean honestly by them--that justice shall be done to their terrors.
I shall not take Sunday objections, made up on purpose to be put down.
I shall take the worst I can find, whether I can dispose of them, or
they of me.

I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. I know the quadruped
opinion will not prevail. 'Tis of no importance what bats and oxen
think. The first dangerous symptom I report is, the levity of intellect;
as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much. Knowledge is the
knowing that we cannot know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light
mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect
kills it. Nay, San Carlo, my subtle and admirable friend, one of the
most penetrating of men, finds that all direct ascension,

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