FATE
Delicate omens traced in air
To the lone bard true witness
bare;
Birds with auguries on their
wings
Chanted undeceiving things
Him to beckon, him to warn;
Well might then the poet scorn
To learn of scribe or courier
Hints writ in vaster character;
And on his mind, at dawn of day,
Soft shadows of the evening lay.
For the prevision is allied
Unto the thing so signified;
Or say, the foresight that
awaits
Is the same Genius that creates.
Fate
It chanced during one winter, a
few years ago, that our cities
wsing the theory of the Age. By an odd
coincidence, four or five
noted men were each reading a discourse to the citizens of Boston or
New York, on the Spirit of the Times.
It so happened that the
subject had the same prominence in some remarkable pamphlets and
journals issued in London in the same season.
To me, however, the
question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of
the conduct of life. How shall I
live? We are incompetent to solve
the times. Our geometry cannot span the
huge orbits of the
prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their
opposition. We can only obey our own
polarity. 'Tis fine for us to
speculate and elect our course, if we must accept an irresistible
dictation.
In our first steps to gain our
wishes, we come upon immovable
limitations. We are fired with the hope
to reform men. After many
experiments, we find that we must begin earlier, -- at school. But
the boys and girls are not docile; we can make nothing of them. We
decide that they are not of good stock.
We must begin our reform
earlier still, -- at generation: that is to say, there is Fate, or
laws of the world.
But if there be irresistible
dictation, this dictation
understands itself. If we must accept
Fate, we are not less
compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the
grandeur of duty, the power of character.
This is true, and that
other is true. But our geometry cannot
span these extreme points,
and reconcile them. What to do? By obeying each thought frankly, by
harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we learn at last
its power. By the same obedience to
other thoughts, we learn theirs,
and then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing them. We are
sure, that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with
liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit
of the times. The riddle of the age has
for each a private solution.
If one would study his own time, it must be by this method of taking
up in turn each of the leading topics which belong to our scheme of
human life, and, by firmly stating all that is agreeable to
experience on one, and doing the same justice to the opposing facts
in the others, the true limitations will appear. Any excess of
emphasis, on one part, would be corrected, and a just balance would
be made.
But let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad
name for superficialness. Great men,
great nations, have not been
boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have
manned themselves to face it. The
Spartan, embodying his religion in
his country, dies before its majesty without a question. The Turk,
who believes his doom is written on the iron leaf in the moment when
he entered the world, rushes on the enemy's sabre with undivided
will. The Turk, the Arab, the Persian,
accepts the foreordained
fate.
"On two days, it steads not
to run from thy grave,
The appointed, and the
unappointed day;
On the first, neither balm nor
physician can save,
Nor thee, on the second,
the Universe slay."
The Hindoo, under the wheel, is
as firm. Our Calvinists, in
the last generation, had something of the same dignity. They felt
that the weight of the Universe held them down to their place. What
could _they_ do? Wise men feel that there
is something which cannot
be talked or voted away, -- a strap or belt which girds the world.
"The Destiny, minister
general,
That executeth in the world o'er
all,
The purveyance which God hath
seen beforne,
So strong it is, that tho' the
world had sworn
The contrary of a thing by yea
or nay,
Yet sometime it shall fallen on
a day
That falleth not oft in a
thousand year;
For, certainly, our appetites
here,
Be it of war, or peace, or hate,
or love,
All this is ruled by the sight
above."
Chaucer: _The Knighte's
Tale._
The Greek Tragedy expressed the
same sense: "Whatever is fated,
that will take place. The great immense
mind of Jove is not to be
transgressed."
Savages cling to a local god of
one tribe or town. The broad
ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which
preach an election or favoritism. And,
now and then, an amiable
parson, like Jung Stilling, or Robert Huntington, believes in a
pistareen-Providence, which, whenever the good man wants a dinner,
makes that somebody shall knock at his door, and leave a half-dollar.
But Nature is no sentimentalist, -- does not cosset or pamper us. We
must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind
drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of
dust. The cold, inconsiderate of
persons, tingles your blood,
benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the
elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. The way
of Providence is a little rude. The
habit of snake and spider, the
snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle
of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda, -- these are in
the system, and our habits are like theirs.
You have just dined,
and, however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the
graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, -- expensive races,
-- race living at the expense of race.
The planet is liable to
shocks from comets, perturbations from planets, rendings from
earthquake and volcano, alterations of climate, precessions of
equinoxes. Rivers dry up by opening of
the forest. The sea changes
its bed. Towns and counties fall into
it. At Lisbon, an earthquake
killed men like flies. At Naples, three
years ago, ten thousand
persons were crushed in a few minutes.
The scurvy at sea; the sword
of the climate in the west of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New
Orleans, cut off men like a massacre.
Our western prairie shakes
with fever and ague. The cholera, the
small-pox, have proved as
mortal to some tribes, as a frost to the crickets, which, having
filled the summer with noise, are silenced by a fall of the
temperature of one night. Without
uncovering what does not concern
us, or counting how many species of parasites hang on a bombyx; or
groping after intestinal parasites, or infusory biters, or the
obscurities of alternate generation; -- the forms of the shark, the
_labrus_, the jaw of the sea-wolf paved with crushing teeth, the
weapons of the grampus, and other warriors hidden in the sea, -- are
hints of ferocity in the interiors of nature.
Let us not deny it up
and down. Providence has a wild, rough,
incalculable road to its
end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed
instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean
shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.
Will you say, the disasters
which threaten mankind are
exceptional, and one need not lay his account for cataclysms every
day? Aye, but what happens once, may
happen again, and so long as
these strokes are not to be parried by us, they must be feared.
But these shocks and ruins are
less destructive to us, than the
stealthy power of other laws which act on us daily. An expense of
ends to means is fate; -- organization tyrannizing over character.
The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate:
the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically
its limits. So is the scale of races,
of temperaments; so is sex; so
is climate; so is the reaction of talents imprisoning the vital power
in certain directions. Every spirit
makes its house; but afterwards
the house confines the spirit.
The gross lines are legible to
the dull: the cabman is
phrenologist so far: he looks in your face to see if his shilling is
sure. A dome of brow denotes one thing;
a pot-belly another; a
squint, a pug-nose, mats of hair, the pigment of the epidermis,
betray character. People seem sheathed
in their tough organization.
Ask Spurzheim, ask the doctors, ask Quetelet, if temperaments decide
nothing? or if there be any-thing they do not decide? Read the
description in medical books of the four temperaments, and you will
think you are reading your own thoughts which you had not yet told.
Find the part which black eyes, and which blue eyes, play severally
in the company. How shall a man escape
from his ancestors, or draw
off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or
his mother's life? It often appears in
a family, as if all the
qualities of the progenitors were potted in several jars, -- some
ruling quality in each son or daughter of the house, -- and sometimes
the unmixed temperament, the rank unmitigated elixir, the family
vice, is drawn off in a separate individual, and the others are
proportionally relieved. We sometimes
see a change of expression in
our companion, and say, his father, or his mother, comes to the
windows of his eyes, and sometimes a remote relative. In different
hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there
were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin,-- seven or
eight ancestors at least, -- and they constitute the variety of notes
for that new piece of music which his life is.
At the corner of the
street, you read the possibility of each passenger, in the facial
angle, in the complexion, in the depth of his eye. His parentage
determines it. Men are what their
mothers made them. You may as
well ask a loom which weaves huckaback, why it does not make
cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical
discovery from that jobber. Ask the
digger in the ditch to explain
Newton's laws: the fine organs of his brain have been pinched by
overwork and squalid poverty from father to son, for a hundred years.
When each comes forth from his mother's womb, the gate of gifts
closes behind him. Let him value his
hands and feet, he has but one
pair. So he has but one future, and
that is already predetermined in
his lobes, and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and
squat form. All the privilege and all
the legislation of the world
cannot meddle or help to make a poet or a prince of him.
Jesus said, "When he
looketh on her, he hath committed
adultery." But he is an adulterer before he has yet looked on the
woman, by the superfluity of animal, and the defect of thought, in
his constitution. Who meets him, or who
meets her, in the street,
sees that they are ripe to be each other's victim.
In certain men, digestion and
sex absorb the vital force, and
the stronger these are, the individual is so much weaker. The more
of these drones perish, the better for the hive. If, later, they
give birth to some superior individual, with force enough to add to
this animal a new aim, and a complete apparatus to work it out, all
the ancestors are gladly forgotten.
Most men and most women are
merely one couple more. Now and then,
one has a new cell or
camarilla opened in his brain, -- an architectural, a musical, or a
philological knack, some stray taste or talent for flowers, or
chemistry, or pigments, or story-telling, a good hand for drawing, a
good foot for dancing, an athletic frame for wide journeying, &c. --
which skill nowise alters rank in the scale of nature, but serves to
pass the time, the life of sensation going on as before. At last,
these hints and tendencies are fixed in one, or in a succession.
Each absorbs so much food and force, as to become itself a new
centre. The new talent draws off so
rapidly the vital force, that
not enough remains for the animal functions, hardly enough for
health; so that, in the second generation, if the like genius appear,
the health is visibly deteriorated, and the generative force
impaired.
People are born with the moral
or with the material bias; --
uterine brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with
high magnifiers, Mr. Frauenhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to
distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a Whig, and that
a Free-soiler.
It was a poetic attempt to lift
this mountain of Fate, to
reconcile this despotism of race with liberty, which led the Hindoos
to say, "Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of
existence." I find the coincidence of the extremes of eastern and
western speculation in the daring statement of Schelling, "there is
in every man a certain feeling, that he has been what he is from all
eternity, and by no means became such in time." To say it less
sublimely, -- in the history of the individual is always an account
of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present
estate.
A good deal of our politics is
physiological. Now and then, a
man of wealth in the heyday of youth adopts the tenet of broadest
freedom. In England, there is always
some man of wealth and large
connection planting himself, during all his years of health, on the
side of progress, who, as soon as he begins to die, checks his
forward play, calls in his troops, and becomes conservative. All
conservatives are such from personal defects.
They have been
effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through
luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the
defensive. But strong natures, backwoodsmen,
New Hampshire giants,
Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams, Websters, Kossuths, are inevitable
patriots, until their life ebbs, and their defects and gout, palsy
and money, warp them.
The strongest idea incarnates
itself in majorities and nations,
in the healthiest and strongest.
Probably, the election goes by
avoirdupois weight, and, if you could weigh bodily the tonnage of any
hundred of the Whig and the Democratic party in a town, on the
Dearborn balance, as they passed the hayscales, you could predict
with certainty which party would carry it.
On the whole, it would be
rather the speediest way of deciding the vote, to put the selectmen
or the mayor and aldermen at the hayscales.
In science, we have to consider
two things: power and
circumstance. All we know of the egg,
from each successive
discovery, is, _another vesicle_; and if, after five hundred years,
you get a better observer, or a better glass, he finds within the
last observed another. In vegetable and
animal tissue, it is just
alike, and all that the primary power or spasm operates, is, still,
vesicles, vesicles. Yes, -- but the
tyrannical Circumstance! A
vesicle in new circumstances, a vesicle lodged in darkness, Oken
thought, became animal; in light, a plant.
Lodged in the parent
animal, it suffers changes, which end in unsheathing miraculous
capability in the unaltered vesicle, and it unlocks itself to fish,
bird, or quadruped, head and foot, eye and claw. The Circumstance is
Nature. Nature is, what you may
do. There is much you may not. We
have two things, -- the circumstance, and the life. Once we thought,
positive power was all. Now we learn,
that negative power, or
circumstance, is half. Nature is the
tyrannous circumstance, the
thick skull, the sheathed snake, the ponderous, rock-like jaw;
necessitated activity; violent direction; the conditions of a tool,
like the locomotive, strong enough on its track, but which can do
nothing but mischief off of it; or skates, which are wings on the
ice, but fetters on the ground.
The book of Nature is the book
of Fate. She turns the gigantic
pages, -- leaf after leaf, -- never returning one. One leaf she lays
down, a floor of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a
thousand ages, and a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of
marl and mud: vegetable forms appear; her first misshapen animals,
zoophyte, trilobium, fish; then, saurians, -- rude forms, in which
she has only blocked her future statue, concealing under these
unwieldly monsters the fine type of her coming king. The face of the
planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born. But
when a race has lived its term, it comes no more again.
The population of the world is a
conditional population not the
best, but the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and
the steadiness with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to
another, is as uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in
history what weight belongs to race. We
see the English, French, and
Germans planting themselves on every shore and market of America and
Australia, and monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like
the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We
follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how
much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain. Look at
the unpalatable conclusions of Knox, in his "Fragment of Races," -- a
rash and unsatisfactory writer, but charged with pungent and
unforgetable truths. "Nature
respects race, and not hybrids." "Every
race has its own _habitat_." "Detach a colony from the race, and it
deteriorates to the crab." See the shades of the picture. The German
and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in
their destiny. They are ferried over
the Atlantic, and carted over
America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie
down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie.
One more fagot of these
adamantine bandages, is, the new
science of Statistics. It is a rule,
that the most casual and
extraordinary events -- if the basis of population is broad enough --
become matter of fixed calculation. It
would not be safe to say when
a captain like Bonaparte, a singer like Jenny Lind, or a navigator
like Bowditch, would be born in Boston: but, on a population of
twenty or two hundred millions, something like accuracy may be had.
(*)
(*) "Everything which
pertains to the human species, considered
as a whole, belongs to the order of physical facts. The greater the
number of individuals, the more does the influence of the individual
will disappear, leaving predominance to a series of general facts
dependent on causes by which society exists, and is preserved." --
Quetelet.
'Tis frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular
inventions. They have all been invented
over and over fifty times.
Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself
are toy models. He helps himself on
each emergency by copying or
duplicating his own structure, just so far as the need is. 'Tis hard
to find the right Homer Zoroaster, or Menu; harder still to find the
Tubal Cain, or Vulcan, or Cadmus, or Copernicus, or Fust, or Fulton,
the indisputable inventor. There are
scores and centuries of them.
"The air is full of men." This kind of talent so abounds, this
constructive tool-making efficiency, as if it adhered to the chemic
atoms, as if the air he breathes were made of Vaucansons, Franklins,
and Watts.
Doubtless, in every million
there will be an astronomer, a
mathematician, a comic poet, a mystic.
No one can read the history
of astronomy, without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace,
are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes,
Hipparchus, Empedocles, Aristarchus, Pythagoras, ;oEnopides, had
anticipated them; each had the same tense geometrical brain, apt for
the same vigorous computation and logic, a mind parallel to the
movement of the world. The Roman mile
probably rested on a measure
of a degree of the meridian. Mahometan
and Chinese know what we know
of leap-year, of the Gregorian calendar, and of the precession of the
equinoxes. As, in every barrel of
cowries, brought to New Bedford,
there shall be one _orangia_, so there will, in a dozen millions of
Malays and Mahometans, be one or two astronomical skulls. In a large
city, the most casual things, and things whose beauty lies in their
casualty, are produced as punctually and to order as the baker's
muffin for breakfast. Punch makes
exactly one capital joke a week;
and the journals contrive to furnish one good piece of news every
day.
And not less work the laws of
repression, the penalties of
violated functions. Famine, typhus,
frost, war, suicide, and effete
races, must be reckoned calculable parts of the system of the world.
These are pebbles from the
mountain, hints of the terms by
which our life is walled up, and which show a kind of mechanical
exactness, as of a loom or mill, in what we call casual or fortuitous
events.
The force with which we resist
these torrents of tendency looks
so ridiculously inadequate, that it amounts to little more than a
criticism or a protest made by a minority of one, under compulsion of
millions. I seemed, in the height of a
tempest, to see men overboard
struggling in the waves, and driven about here and there. They
glanced intelligently at each other, but 'twas little they could do
for one another; 'twas much if each could keep afloat alone. Well,
they had a right to their eye-beams, and all the rest was Fate.
We cannot trifle with this
reality, this cropping-out in our
planted gardens of the core of the world.
No picture of life can
have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's
power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he
touches on every side, until he learns its arc.
The element running through
entire nature, which we popularly
call Fate, is known to us as limitation.
Whatever limits us, we call
Fate. If we are brute and barbarous,
the fate takes a brute and
dreadful shape. As we refine, our
checks become finer. If we rise
to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form. In the
Hindoo fables, Vishnu follows Maya through all her ascending changes,
from insect and crawfish up to elephant; whatever form she took, he
took the male form of that kind, until she became at last woman and
goddess, and he a man and a god. The
limitations refine as the soul
purifies, but the ring of necessity is always perched at the top.
When the gods in the Norse
heaven were unable to bind the
Fenris Wolf with steel or with weight of mountains, -- the one he
snapped and the other he spurned with his heel,--they put round his
foot a limp band softer than silk or cobweb, and this held him: the
more he spurned it, the stiffer it drew.
So soft and so stanch is
the ring of Fate. Neither brandy, nor
nectar, nor sulphuric ether,
nor hell-fire, nor ichor, nor poetry, nor genius, can get rid of this
limp band. For if we give it the high
sense in which the poets use
it, even thought itself is not above Fate: that too must act
according to eternal laws, and all that is wilful and fantastic in it
is in opposition to its fundamental essence.
And, last of all, high over
thought, in the world of morals,
Fate appears as vindicator, levelling the high, lifting the low,
requiring justice in man, and always striking soon or late, when
justice is not done. What is useful
will last; what is hurtful will
sink. "The doer must suffer,"
said the Greeks: "you would soothe a
Deity not to be soothed." "God himself cannot procure good for the
wicked," said the Welsh triad.
"God may consent, but only for a
time," said the bard of Spain. The
limitation is impassable by any
insight of man. In its last and
loftiest ascensions, insight itself,
and the freedom of the will, is one of its obedient members. But we
must not run into generalizations too large, but show the natural
bounds or essential distinctions, and seek to do justice to the other
elements as well.
Thus we trace Fate, in matter,
mind, and morals, -- in race, in
retardations of strata, and in thought and character as well. It is
everywhere bound or limitation. But
Fate has its lord; limitation
its limits; is different seen from above and from below; from within
and from without. For, though Fate is
immense, so is power, which is
the other fact in the dual world, immense.
If Fate follows and
limits power, power attends and antagonizes Fate. We must respect
Fate as natural history, but there is more than natural history. For
who and what is this criticism that pries into the matter? Man is
not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and members, link in a
chain, nor any ignominious baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a
dragging together of the poles of the Universe. He betrays his
relation to what is below him, -- thick-skulled, small-brained,
fishy, quadrumanous, -- quadruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into
biped, and has paid for the new powers by loss of some of the old
ones. But the lightning which explodes
and fashions planets, maker
of planets and suns, is in him. On one
side, elemental order,
sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore;
and, on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and
decomposes nature, -- here they are, side by side, god and devil,
mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding
peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.
Nor can he blink the
freewill. To hazard the contradiction,
--
freedom is necessary. If you please to
plant yourself on the side of
Fate, and say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the
freedom of man. Forever wells up the
impulse of choosing and acting
in the soul. Intellect annuls
Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is
free. And though nothing is more
disgusting than the crowing about
liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for
freedom of some paper preamble like a "Declaration of Independence,"
or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think
or to act, yet it is wholesome to man to look not at Fate, but the
other way: the practical view is the other.
His sound relation to
these facts is to use and command, not to cringe to them. "Look not
on nature, for her name is fatal," said the oracle. The too much
contemplation of these limits induces meanness. They who talk much
of destiny, their birth-star, &c., are in a lower dangerous plane,
and invite the evils they fear.
I cited the instinctive and
heroic races as proud believers in
Destiny. They conspire with it; a
loving resignation is with the
event. But the dogma makes a different
impression, when it is held
by the weak and lazy. 'Tis weak and
vicious people who cast the
blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is
to bring up our conduct to
the loftiness of nature. Rude and
invincible except by themselves
are the elements. So let man be. Let him empty his breast of his
windy conceits, and show his lordship by manners and deeds on the
scale of nature. Let him hold his
purpose as with the tug of
gravitation. No power, no persuasion,
no bribe shall make him give
up his point. A man ought to compare
advantageously with a river, an
oak, or a mountain. He shall have not
less the flow, the expansion,
and the resistance of these.
'Tis the best use of Fate to teach a
fatal courage. Go face
the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the
burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing
you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny.
If you believe in Fate
to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.
For, if Fate is so prevailing,
man also is part of it, and can
confront fate with fate. If the
Universe have these savage
accidents, our atoms are as savage in resistance. We should be
crushed by the atmosphere, but for the reaction of the air within the
body. A tube made of a film of glass
can resist the shock of the
ocean, if filled with the same water.
If there be omnipotence in the
stroke, there is omnipotence of recoil.
1. But Fate against Fate is only
parrying and defence: there
are, also, the noble creative forces.
The revelation of Thought
takes man out of servitude into freedom.
We rightly say of
ourselves, we were born, and afterward we were born again, and many
times. We have successive experiences
so important, that the new
forgets the old, and hence the mythology of the seven or the nine
heavens. The day of days, the great day
of the feast of life, is
that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things, to the
omnipresence of law; -- sees that what is must be, and ought to be,
or is the best. This beatitude dips
from on high down on us, and we
see. It is not in us so much as we are
in it. If the air come to
our lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die. If the light come to
our eyes, we see; else not. And if
truth come to our mind, we
suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds. We are
as lawgivers; we speak for Nature; we prophesy and divine.
This insight throws us on the
party and interest of the
Universe, against all and sundry; against ourselves, as much as
others. A man speaking from insight
affirms of himself what is true
of the mind: seeing its immortality, he says, I am immortal; seeing
its invincibility, he says, I am strong.
It is not in us, but we are
in it. It is of the maker, not of what
is made. All things are
touched and changed by it. This uses,
and is not used. It distances
those who share it, from those who share it not. Those who share it
not are flocks and herds. It dates from
itself; -- not from former
men or better men, -- gospel, or constitution, or college, or custom.
Where it shines, Nature is no longer intrusive, but all things make a
musical or pictorial impression. The
world of men show like a comedy
without laughter: -- populations, interests, government, history; --
'tis all toy figures in a toy house. It
does not overvalue
particular truths. We hear eagerly
every thought and word quoted
from an intellectual man. But, in his
presence, our own mind is
roused to activity, and we forget very fast what he says, much more
interested in the new play of our own thought, than in any thought of
his. 'Tis the majesty into which we
have suddenly mounted, the
impersonality, the scorn of egotisms, the sphere of laws, that engage
us. Once we were stepping a little this
way, and a little that way;
now, we are as men in a balloon, and do not think so much of the
point we have left, or the point we would make, as of the liberty and
glory of the way.
Just as much intellect as you
add, so much organic power. He
who sees through the design, presides over it, and must will that
which must be. We sit and rule, and,
though we sleep, our dream will
come to pass. Our thought, though it
were only an hour old, affirms
an oldest necessity, not to be separated from thought, and not to be
separated from will. They must always
have coexisted. It apprises
us of its sovereignty and godhead, which refuse to be severed from
it. It is not mine or thine, but the
will of all mind. It is poured
into the souls of all men, as the soul itself which constitutes them
men. I know not whether there be, as is
alleged, in the upper region
of our atmosphere, a permanent westerly current, which carries with
it all atoms which rise to that height, but I see, that when souls
reach a certain clearness of perception, they accept a knowledge and
motive above selfishness. A breath of
will blows eternally through
the universe of souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary.
It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the
wind which blows the worlds into order and orbit.
Thought dissolves the material
universe, by carrying the mind
up into a sphere where all is plastic.
Of two men, each obeying his
own thought, he whose thought is deepest will be the strongest
character. Always one man more than
another represents the will of
Divine Providence to the period.
2. If thought makes free, so
does the moral sentiment. The
mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed. Yet we can
see that with the perception of truth is joined the desire that it
shall prevail. That affection is
essential to will. Moreover, when
a strong will appears, it usually results from a certain unity of
organization, as if the whole energy of body and mind flowed in one
direction. All great force is real and
elemental. There is no
manufacturing a strong will. There must
be a pound to balance a
pound. Where power is shown in will, it
must rest on the universal
force. Alaric and Bonaparte must
believe they rest on a truth, or
their will can be bought or bent. There
is a bribe possible for any
finite will. But the pure sympathy with
universal ends is an
infinite force, and cannot be bribed or bent.
Whoever has had
experience of the moral sentiment cannot choose but believe in
unlimited power. Each pulse from that
heart is an oath from the Most
High. I know not what the word
_sublime_ means, if it be not the
intimations in this infant of a terrific force. A text of heroism, a
name and anecdote of courage, are not arguments, but sallies of
freedom. One of these is the verse of
the Persian Hafiz, "'Tis
written on the gate of Heaven, `Wo unto him who suffers himself to be
betrayed by Fate!'" Does the reading of history make us fatalists?
What courage does not the opposite opinion show! A little whim of
will to be free gallantly contending against the universe of
chemistry.
But insight is not will, nor is
affection will. Perception is
cold, and goodness dies in wishes; as Voltaire said, 'tis the
misfortune of worthy people that they are cowards; _"un des plus
grands malheurs des honnetes gens c'est qu'ils sont des lafaches."_
There must be a fusion of these two to generate the energy of will.
There can be no driving force, except through the conversion of the
man into his will, making him the will, and the will him. And one
may say boldly, that no man has a right perception of any truth, who
has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.
The one serious and formidable
thing in nature is a will.
Society is servile from want of will, and therefore the world wants
saviours and religions. One way is
right to go: the hero sees it,
and moves on that aim, and has the world under him for root and
support. He is to others as the
world. His approbation is honor;
his dissent, infamy. The glance of his
eye has the force of
sunbeams. A personal influence towers
up in memory only worthy, and
we gladly forget numbers, money, climate, gravitation, and the rest
of Fate.
We can afford to allow the
limitation, if we know it is the
meter of the growing man. We stand
against Fate, as children stand
up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height
from year to year. But when the boy
grows to man, and is master of
the house, he pulls down that wall, and builds a new and bigger.
'Tis only a question of time. Every
brave youth is in training to
ride and rule this dragon. His science
is to make weapons and wings
of these passions and retarding forces.
Now whether, seeing these
two things, fate and power, we are permitted to believe in unity?
The bulk of mankind believe in two gods.
They are under one dominion
here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in
letters, in art, in love, in religion: but in mechanics, in dealing
with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come
under another; and that it would be a practical blunder to transfer
the method and way of working of one sphere, into the other. What
good, honest, generous men at home, will be wolves and foxes on
change! What pious men in the parlor
will vote for what reprobates
at the polls! To a certain point, they
believe themselves the care
of a Providence. But, in a steamboat,
in an epidemic, in war, they
believe a malignant energy rules.
But relation and connection are
not somewhere and sometimes,
but everywhere and always. The divine
order does not stop where
their sight stops. The friendly power
works on the same rules, in
the next farm, and the next planet.
But, where they have not
experience, they run against it, and hurt themselves. Fate, then, is
a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; -- for
causes which are unpenetrated.
But every jet of chaos which
threatens to exterminate us, is
convertible by intellect into wholesome force.
Fate is unpenetrated
causes. The water drowns ship and
sailor, like a grain of dust. But
learn to swim, trim your bark, and the wave which drowned it, will be
cloven by it, and carry it, like its own foam, a plume and a power.
The cold is inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, freezes a
man like a dew-drop. But learn to
skate, and the ice will give you a
graceful, sweet, and poetic motion. The
cold will brace your limbs
and brain to genius, and make you foremost men of time. Cold and sea
will train an imperial Saxon race, which nature cannot bear to lose,
and, after cooping it up for a thousand years in yonder England,
gives a hundred Englands, a hundred Mexicos.
All the bloods it shall
absorb and domineer: and more than Mexicos, -- the secrets of water
and steam, the spasms of electricity, the ductility of metals, the
chariot of the air, the ruddered balloon are awaiting you.
The annual slaughter from typhus
far exceeds that of war; but
right drainage destroys typhus. The
plague in the sea-service from
scurvy is healed by lemon juice and other diets portable or
procurable: the depopulation by cholera and small-pox is ended by
drainage and vaccination; and every other pest is not less in the
chain of cause and effect, and may be fought off. And, whilst art
draws out the venom, it commonly extorts some benefit from the
vanquished enemy. The mischievous
torrent is taught to drudge for
man: the wild beasts he makes useful for food, or dress, or labor;
the chemic explosions are controlled like his watch. These are now
the steeds on which he rides. Man moves
in all modes, by legs of
horses, by wings of wind, by steam, by gas of balloon, by
electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in
his own element. There's nothing he
will not make his carrier.
Steam was, till the other day,
the devil which we dreaded.
Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its
cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof, and
carry the house away. But the Marquis
of Worcester, Watt, and Fulton
bethought themselves, that, where was power, was not devil, but was
God; that it must be availed of, and not by any means let off and
wasted. Could he lift pots and roofs
and houses so handily? he was
the workman they were in search of. He
could be used to lift away,
chain, and compel other devils, far more reluctant and dangerous,
namely, cubic miles of earth, mountains, weight or resistance of
water, machinery, and the labors of all men in the world; and time he
shall lengthen, and shorten space.
It has not fared much otherwise
with higher kinds of steam.
The opinion of the million was the terror of the world, and it was
attempted, either to dissipate it, by amusing nations, or to pile it
over with strata of society, -- a layer of soldiers; over that, a
layer of lords; and a king on the top; with clamps and hoops of
castles, garrisons, and police. But,
sometimes, the religious
principle would get in, and burst the hoops, and rive every mountain
laid on top of it. The Fultons and
Watts of politics, believing in
unity, saw that it was a power, and, by satisfying it, (as justice
satisfies everybody,) through a different disposition of society, --
grouping it on a level, instead of piling it into a mountain, -- they
have contrived to make of his terror the most harmless and energetic
form of a State.
Very odious, I confess, are the
lessons of Fate. Who likes to
have a dapper phrenologist pronouncing on his fortunes? Who likes to
believe that he has hidden in his skull, spine, and pelvis, all the
vices of a Saxon or Celtic race, which will be sure to pull him down,
-- with what grandeur of hope and resolve he is fired, -- into a
selfish, huckstering, servile, dodging animal?
A learned physician
tells us, the fact is invariable with the Neapolitan, that, when
mature, he assumes the forms of the unmistakable scoundrel. That is
a little overstated, -- but may pass.
But these are magazines and
arsenals. A man must thank his
defects, and stand in some terror of his talents. A transcendent
talent draws so largely on his forces, as to lame him; a defect pays
him revenues on the other side. The
sufferance, which is the badge
of the Jew, has made him, in these days, the ruler of the rulers of
the earth. If Fate is ore and quarry,
if evil is good in the making,
if limitation is power that shall be, if calamities, oppositions, and
weights are wings and means, -- we are reconciled.
Fate involves the
melioration. No statement of the
Universe
can have any soundness, which does not admit its ascending effort.
The direction of the whole, and of the parts, is toward benefit, and
in proportion to the health. Behind
every individual, closes
organization: before him, opens liberty, -- the Better, the Best.
The first and worst races are dead. The
second and imperfect races
are dying out, or remain for the maturing of higher. In the latest
race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and
praise he extorts from his fellows, are certificates of advance out
of fate into freedom. Liberation of the
will from the sheaths and
clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is the end and aim of
this world. Every calamity is a spur
and valuable hint; and where
his endeavors do not yet fully avail, they tell as tendency. The
whole circle of animal life, -- tooth against tooth, -- devouring
war, war for food, a yelp of pain and a grunt of triumph, until, at
last, the whole menagerie, the whole chemical mass is mellowed and
refined for higher use, -- pleases at a sufficient perspective.
But to see how fate slides into
freedom, and freedom into fate,
observe how far the roots of every creature run, or find, if you can,
a point where there is no thread of connection. Our life is
consentaneous and far-related. This
knot of nature is so well tied,
that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends. Nature is
intricate, overlapped, interweaved, and endless. Christopher Wren
said of the beautiful King's College chapel, "that, if anybody would
tell him where to lay the first stone, he would build such another."
But where shall we find the first atom in this house of man, which is
all consent, inosculation, and balance of parts?
The web of relation is shown in
_habitat_, shown in
hybernation. When hybernation was
observed, it was found, that,
whilst some animals became torpid in winter, others were torpid in
summer: hybernation then was a false name.
The _long sleep_ is not
an effect of cold, but is regulated by the supply of food proper to
the animal. It becomes torpid when the
fruit or prey it lives on is
not in season, and regains its activity when its food is ready.
Eyes are found in light; ears in
auricular air; feet on land;
fins in water; wings in air; and, each creature where it was meant to
be, with a mutual fitness. Every zone
has its own _Fauna_. There is
adjustment between the animal and its food, its parasite, its enemy.
Balances are kept. It is not allowed to
diminish in numbers, nor to
exceed. The like adjustments exist for
man. His food is cooked,
when he arrives; his coal in the pit; the house ventilated; the mud
of the deluge dried; his companions arrived at the same hour, and
awaiting him with love, concert, laughter, and tears. These are
coarse adjustments, but the invisible are not less. There are more
belongings to every creature than his air and his food. His
instincts must be met, and he has predisposing power that bends and
fits what is near him to his use. He is
not possible until the
invisible things are right for him, as well as the visible. Of what
changes, then, in sky and earth, and in finer skies and earths, does
the appearance of some Dante or Columbus apprise us!
How is this effected? Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the
shortest way to her ends. As the
general says to his soldiers, "if
you want a fort, build a fort," so nature makes every creature do its
own work and get its living, -- is it planet, animal, or tree. The
planet makes itself. The animal cell
makes itself; -- then, what it
wants. Every creature, -- wren or
dragon, -- shall make its own
lair. As soon as there is life, there
is self-direction, and
absorbing and using of material. Life
is freedom, -- life in the
direct ratio of its amount. You may be
sure, the new-born man is not
inert. Life works both voluntarily and
supernaturally in its
neighborhood. Do you suppose, he can be
estimated by his weight in
pounds, or, that he is contained in his skin, -- this reaching,
radiating, jaculating fellow? The
smallest candle fills a mile with
its rays, and the papillae of a man run out to every star.
When there is something to be
done, the world knows how to get
it done. The vegetable eye makes leaf,
pericarp, root, bark, or
thorn, as the need is; the first cell converts itself into stomach,
mouth, nose, or nail, according to the want: the world throws its
life into a hero or a shepherd; and puts him where he is wanted.
Dante and Columbus were Italians, in their time: they would be
Russians or Americans to-day. Things
ripen, new men come. The
adaptation is not capricious. The
ulterior aim, the purpose beyond
itself, the correlation by which planets subside and crystallize,
then animate beasts and men, will not stop, but will work into finer
particulars, and from finer to finest.
The secret of the world is, the
tie between person and event.
Person makes event, and event person.
The "times," "the age," what
is that, but a few profound persons and a few active persons who
epitomize the times? -- Goethe, Hegel,
Metternich, Adams, Calhoun,
Guizot, Peel, Cobden, Kossuth, Rothschild, Astor, Brunel, and the
rest. The same fitness must be presumed
between a man and the time
and event, as between the sexes, or between a race of animals and the
food it eats, or the inferior races it uses.
He thinks his fate
alien, because the copula is hidden.
But the soul contains the event
that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its
thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted. The
event is the print of your form. It
fits you like your skin. What
each does is proper to him. Events are
the children of his body and
mind. We learn that the soul of Fate is
the soul of us, as Hafiz
sings,
Alas! till now I had not known,
My guide and fortune's guide are
one.
All the toys that infatuate men,
and which they play for, --
houses, land, money, luxury, power, fame, are the selfsame thing,
with a new gauze or two of illusion overlaid.
And of all the drums
and rattles by which men are made willing to have their heads broke,
and are led out solemnly every morning to parade, -- the most
admirable is this by which we are brought to believe that events are
arbitrary, and independent of actions.
At the conjuror's, we detect
the hair by which he moves his puppet, but we have not eyes sharp
enough to descry the thread that ties cause and effect.
Nature magically suits the man
to his fortunes, by making these
the fruit of his character. Ducks take
to the water, eagles to the
sky, waders to the sea margin, hunters to the forest, clerks to
counting-rooms, soldiers to the frontier.
Thus events grow on the
same stem with persons; are sub-persons.
The pleasure of life is
according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or
the place. Life is an ecstasy. We know what madness belongs to
love, -- what power to paint a vile object in hues of heaven. As
insane persons are indifferent to their dress, diet, and other
accommodations, and, as we do in dreams, with equanimity, the most
absurd acts, so, a drop more of wine in our cup of life will
reconcile us to strange company and work.
Each creature puts forth
from itself its own condition and sphere, as the slug sweats out its
slimy house on the pear-leaf, and the woolly aphides on the apple
perspire their own bed, and the fish its shell. In youth, we clothe
ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac. In age, we
put out another sort of perspiration, -- gout, fever, rheumatism,
caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.
A man's fortunes are the fruit
of his character. A man's
friends are his magnetisms. We go to
Herodotus and Plutarch for
examples of Fate; but we are examples.
_"Quisque suos patimur
manes."_ The tendency of every man to enact all that is in his
constitution is expressed in the old belief, that the efforts which
we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it: and
I have noticed, a man likes better to be complimented on his
position, as the proof of the last or total excellence, than on his
merits.
A man will see his character emitted
in the events that seem to
meet, but which exude from and accompany him.
Events expand with the
character. As once he found himself
among toys, so now he plays a
part in colossal systems, and his growth is declared in his ambition,
his companions, and his performance. He
looks like a piece of luck,
but is a piece of causation; -- the mosaic, angulated and ground to
fit into the gap he fills. Hence in
each town there is some man who
is, in his brain and performance, an explanation of the tillage,
production, factories, banks, churches, ways of living, and society,
of that town. If you do not chance to
meet him, all that you see
will leave you a little puzzled: if you see him, it will become
plain. We know in Massachusetts who
built New Bedford, who built
Lynn, Lowell, Lawrence, Clinton, Fitchburg, Holyoke, Portland, and
many another noisy mart. Each of these
men, if they were
transparent, would seem to you not so much men, as walking cities,
and, wherever you put them, they would build one.
History is the action and reaction of these two, -- Nature and
Thought; -- two boys pushing each other on the curb-stone of the
pavement. Everything is pusher or
pushed: and matter and mind are in
perpetual tilt and balance, so. Whilst
the man is weak, the earth
takes up him. He plants his brain and
affections. By and by he will
take up the earth, and have his gardens and vineyards in the
beautiful order and productiveness of his thought. Every solid in
the universe is ready to become fluid on the approach of the mind,
and the power to flux it is the measure of the mind. If the wall
remain adamant, it accuses the want of thought. To a subtler force,
it will stream into new forms, expressive of the character of the
mind. What is the city in which we sit
here, but an aggregate of
incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man? The
granite was reluctant, but his hands were stronger, and it came.
Iron was deep in the ground, and well combined with stone; but could
not hide from his fires. Wood, lime,
stuffs, fruits, gums, were
dispersed over the earth and sea, in vain.
Here they are, within
reach of every man's day-labor, -- what he wants of them. The whole
world is the flux of matter over the wires of thought to the poles or
points where it would build. The races
of men rise out of the ground
preoccupied with a thought which rules them, and divided into parties
ready armed and angry to fight for this metaphysical abstraction.
The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman,
the Austrian and the American. The men
who come on the stage at one
period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are
in the air. We are all impressionable,
for we are made of them; all
impressionable, but some more than others, and these first express
them. This explains the curious
contemporaneousness of inventions
and discoveries. The truth is in the
air, and the most
impressionable brain will announce it first, but all will announce it
a few minutes later. So women, as most
susceptible, are the best
index of the coming hour. So the great
man, that is, the man most
imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man, -- of
a fibre irritable and delicate, like iodine to light. He feels the
infinitesimal attractions. His mind is
righter than others, because
he yields to a current so feeble as can be felt only by a needle
delicately poised.
The correlation is shown in
defects. Moller, in his Essay on
Architecture, taught that the building which was fitted accurately to
answer its end, would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not
been intended. I find the like unity in
human structures rather
virulent and pervasive; that a crudity in the blood will appear in
the argument; a hump in the shoulder will appear in the speech and
handiwork. If his mind could be seen,
the hump would be seen. If a
man has a seesaw in his voice, it will run into his sentences, into
his poem, into the structure of his fable, into his speculation, into
his charity. And, as every man is
hunted by his own daemon, vexed by
his own disease, this checks all his activity.
So each man, like each plant,
has his parasites. A strong,
astringent, bilious nature has more truculent enemies than the slugs
and moths that fret my leaves. Such an
one has curculios, borers,
knife-worms: a swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack,
then smooth, plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish as Moloch.
This correlation really existing
can be divined. If the
threads are there, thought can follow and show them. Especially when
a soul is quick and docile; as Chaucer sings,
"Or if the soul of proper
kind
Be so perfect as men find,
That it wot what is to come,
And that he warneth all and some
Of every of their aventures,
By previsions or figures;
But that our flesh hath not
might
It to understand aright
For it is warned too
darkly." --
Some people are made up of
rhyme, coincidence, omen,
periodicity, and presage: they meet the person they seek; what their
companion prepares to say to them, they first say to him; and a
hundred signs apprise them of what is about to befall.
Wonderful intricacy in the web,
wonderful constancy in the
design this vagabond life admits. We
wonder how the fly finds its
mate, and yet year after year we find two men, two women, without
legal or carnal tie, spend a great part of their best time within a
few feet of each other. And the moral
is, that what we seek we shall
find; what we flee from flees from us; as Goethe said, "what we wish
for in youth, comes in heaps on us in old age," too often cursed with
the granting of our prayer: and hence the high caution, that, since
we are sure of having what we wish, we beware to ask only for high
things.
One key, one solution to the
mysteries of human condition, one
solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge,
exists, the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. A man
must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public
nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from
horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other
foot on the back of the other. So when
a man is the victim of his
fate, has sciatica in his loins, and cramp in his mind; a club-foot
and a club in his wit; a sour face, and a selfish temper; a strut in
his gait, and a conceit in his affection; or is ground to powder by
the vice of his race; he is to rally on his relation to the Universe,
which his ruin benefits. Leaving the
daemon who suffers, he is to
take sides with the Deity who secures universal benefit by his pain.
To offset the drag of
temperament and race, which pulls down,
learn this lesson, namely, that by the cunning copresence of two
elements, which is throughout nature, whatever lames or paralyzes
you, draws in with it the divinity, in some form, to repay. A good
intention clothes itself with sudden power.
When a god wishes to
ride, any chip or pebble will bud and shoot out winged feet, and
serve him for a horse.
Let us build altars to the
Blessed Unity which holds nature and
souls in perfect solution, and compels every atom to serve an
universal end. I do not wonder at a
snow-flake, a shell, a summer
landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty
under which the universe lies; that all is and must be pictorial;
that the rainbow, and the curve of the horizon, and the arch of the
blue vault are only results from the organism of the eye. There is
no need for foolish amateurs to fetch me to admire a garden of
flowers, or a sun-gilt cloud, or a waterfall, when I cannot look
without seeing splendor and grace. How
idle to choose a random
sparkle here or there, when the indwelling necessity plants the rose
of beauty on the brow of chaos, and discloses the central intention
of Nature to be harmony and joy.
Let us build altars to the
Beautiful Necessity. If we thought
men were free in the sense, that, in a single exception one
fantastical will could prevail over the law of things, it were all
one as if a child's hand could pull down the sun. If, in the least
particular, one could derange the order of nature, -- who would
accept the gift of life?
Let us build altars to the
Beautiful Necessity, which secures
that all is made of one piece; that plaintiff and defendant, friend
and enemy, animal and planet, food and eater, are of one kind. In
astronomy, is vast space, but no foreign system; in geology, vast
time, but the same laws as to-day. Why
should we be afraid of
Nature, which is no other than "philosophy and theology embodied"?
Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made
up of the same elements? Let us build
to the Beautiful Necessity,
which makes man brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger that
is appointed, nor incur one that is not; to the Necessity which
rudely or softly educates him to the perception that there are no
contingencies; that Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is
not intelligent but intelligence, -- not personal nor impersonal, --
it disdains words and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it
vivifies nature; yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its
omnipotence.