|
Click on marked passages for hypertext notes.
Delicate omens  traced in air
To the lone bard true
witness bare;
Birds with 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.
It chanced during one winter, a few years ago, that our cities were
bent on discussing 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. We are incompetent to solve the
times. Our geometry cannot span behold their
return, and reconcile their opposition. '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 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
But let us honestly state the facts. 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, , 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. --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.
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. 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. 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. 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,--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.
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 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 ; 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 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
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 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 of
these 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,
'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, Enopides, 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.
We cannot trifle with this reality, 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, 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. 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. 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. And though nothing is more disgusting
than the 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.
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. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 hibernation.
When hibernation 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.
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.
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.
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.
Selected Criticism on "Fate"
- Davidson, Frank. "Emerson and the Double Consciousness." Earlham Review 3 (April 1960): 1-15.
- Oliver, E. S. "The Asia in Emerson's Mind." Korean Survey 2 (May 1953): 10-12.
- Van Nostrand, A. D. "Emerson's Strategic Retreat." In Everyman His Own Poet: Romantic Gospels in American Literature.
NY: McGraw-Hill, 1968. Pp. 29-43.
- Francis, Richard Lee. "Necessitated Freedom: Emerson's The Conduct of Life." In Studies in the American Renaissance 1980, ed. Joel Myerson, pp. 73-89. Boston: Twayne, 1980.
- Cavell, Stanley. "Genteel Responses to Kant? In Emerson;s 'Fate' and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria." Raritan 3 (Fall 1983): 34-61.
- Hill, David W. "God, Wolf, and Law: Emerson's Indeterminant 'Fate.'" ESQ 34 (4 Quarter 1988): 229-255.
- Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. NY: W. W. Norton, 1991.
- Robinson, David M. Emerson and the Conduct of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
- Thomas, David Wayne. "Godel’s Theorem and Postmodern Theory." PMLA 110 (1995): 248-61.
- Lopez, Michael. "The Conduct of Life: Emerson's Anatomy of Power." In The Cambridge Companion, 1999, pp. 243-66.
- Cavell, Stanley. "Emerson's Constitutional Amending: Reading 'Fate.'" Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995. See also The Translatablity of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, 101-26. Stanford, 1996.
- Packer, Barbara. "Turning to Emerson." Common Knowledge 5 (1996): 51-60.
- Buell, Lawrence. "Emerson's Fate." In Mott and Burkholder, Emersonian Circles, pp. 11-28.
- Sloan, Gary. "Emerson’s Cosmic Sophistries." RE:AL, The Journal of Liberal Arts 25 (2000): 60-70.
Selected Criticism on the Essay:
|
