"Emerson, Ralph W. - The Amereican Scholar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own
unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing
anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary
and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently
learns, that, since the dawn of history, there has been a constant
accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification
but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not
foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The
astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human
mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds
proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is
nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote
parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one
after another, reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to
their class and their law, and goes on for ever to animate the last
fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day,
is suggested, that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and
one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what
is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? -- A thought too
bold, -- a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have
revealed the law of more earthly natures, -- when he has learned to
worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is,
is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look
forward to an ever expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He
shall see, that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it
part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the
beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind.
Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much
of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not
yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and
the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.

II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar,
is, the mind of the Past, -- in whatever form, whether of literature,
of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best
type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the
truth, -- learn the amount of this influence more conveniently, -- by
considering their value alone.

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age
received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new
arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him,
life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived
actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him,
business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is
quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now
flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind
from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.