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

themselves; but hears, as at a vast distance, what they say, as if
his consciousness would speak to him through a pantomimic scene. His
thought, -- that is the Universe. His experience inclines him to
behold the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing
perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself,
centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all
things as having a subjective or relative existence, relative to that
aforesaid Unknown Centre of him.

From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, this
beholding of all things in the mind, follow easily his whole ethics.
It is simpler to be self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is,
to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is
good when it does not violate me; but best when it is likest to
solitude. Everything real is self-existent. Everything divine
shares the self-existence of Deity. All that you call the world is
the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of
the powers of thought, of those that are dependent and of those that
are independent of your will. Do not cumber yourself with fruitless
pains to mend and remedy remote effects; let the soul be erect, and
all things will go well. You think me the child of my circumstances:
I make my circumstance. Let any thought or motive of mine be
different from that they are, the difference will transform my
condition and economy. I -- this thought which is called I, -- is
the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould
is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould. You call
it the power of circumstance, but it is the power of me. Am I in
harmony with myself? my position will seem to you just and
commanding. Am I vicious and insane? my fortunes will seem to you
obscure and descending. As I am, so shall I associate, and, so shall
I act; Caesar's history will paint out Caesar. Jesus acted so,
because he thought so. I do not wish to overlook or to gainsay any
reality; I say, I make my circumstance: but if you ask me, Whence am
I? I feel like other men my relation to that Fact which cannot be
spoken, or defined, nor even thought, but which exists, and will
exist.

The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual
doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the
human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in
inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle
should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible
applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything
unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus,
the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and
never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other
rules and measures on the spirit than its own.

In action, he easily incurs the charge of antinomianism by his
avowal that he, who has the Lawgiver, may with safety not only