"Emerson, Ralph W. - Representative Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

We must infer much, and supply many chasms in the record. The
history of the universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No
man, in all the procession of famous men, is reason or illumination or
that essence we were looking for; but is an exhibition, in some
quarter, of new possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense
figure which these flagrant*(5) points compose! The study of many
individuals leads us to an elemental region wherein the individual
is lost, or wherein all touch by their summits. Thought and feeling
that break out there cannot be impounded by any fence of
personality. This is the key to the power of the greatest men,-
their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of mind travels by night
and by day, in concentric circles from its origin, and publishes
itself by unknown methods: the union of all minds appears intimate;
what gets admission to one, cannot be kept out of any other; the
smallest acquisition of truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so much
good to the commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of talent and
position vanish when the individuals are seen in the duration which is
necessary to complete the career of each, even more swiftly the
seeming injustice disappears when we ascend to the central identity of
all the individuals, and know that they are made of the substance
which ordaineth and doeth.

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

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