"Emerson, Ralph W. - Essays 1st Series" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

ESSAYS
_First Series_
by Ralph Waldo Emerson


HISTORY

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There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.


I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain.


ESSAY I _History_

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is
an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once
admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole
estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt,
he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can
understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all
that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is
illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by
nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the
human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty,
every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate
events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts
of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by
circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but
one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The
creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece,
Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.
Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are
merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The
Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one
man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is
a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.
As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature,