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

The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at
fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes that
his life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but
knows where he stands, and what he does. Yet how easy it is to show
him, that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and
that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions,
to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before his
sense. The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on
blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house
or Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to the
angles of his structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and
solidity, red-hot or white-hot, perhaps at the core, which rounds off
to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and
goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of
thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither, -- a bit of
bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on
the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness. And this wild balloon,
in which his whole venture is embarked, is a just symbol of his whole
state and faculty. One thing, at least, he says is certain, and does
not give me the headache, that figures do not lie; the multiplication
table has been hitherto found unimpeachable truth; and, moreover, if
I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find it again to-morrow; -- but for
these thoughts, I know not whence they are. They change and pass
away. But ask him why he believes that an uniform experience will
continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith in his
figures, and he will perceive that his mental fabric is built up on
just as strange and quaking foundations as his proud edifice of
stone.

In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure
from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that.
The idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons
the world an appearance. The materialist respects sensible masses,
Society, Government, social art, and luxury, every establishment,
every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent of space, or
amount of objects, every social action. The idealist has another
measure, which is metaphysical, namely, the _rank_ which things
themselves take in his consciousness; not at all, the size or
appearance. Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other
natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history,
are only subjective phenomena. Although in his action overpowered by
the laws of action, and so, warmly cooperating with men, even
preferring them to himself, yet when he speaks scientifically, or
after the order of thought, he is constrained to degrade persons into
representatives of truths. He does not respect labor, or the
products of labor, namely, property, otherwise than as a manifold
symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidelity of details the laws of
being; he does not respect government, except as far as it reiterates
the law of his mind; nor the church; nor charities; nor arts, for