"Emerson, Ralph Waldo - The Conservative (1841)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

Saturn was silent, and went on making oysters for a thousand years.

After that, the word of Uranus came into his mind like a ray of
the sun, and he made Jupiter; and then he feared again; and nature
froze, the things that were made went backward, and, to save the
world, Jupiter slew his father Saturn.

This may stand for the earliest account of a conversation on
politics between a Conservative and a Radical, which has come down to
us. It is ever thus. It is the counteraction of the centripetal and
the centrifugal forces. Innovation is the salient energy;
Conservatism the pause on the last movement. `That which is was made
by God,' saith Conservatism. `He is leaving that, he is entering
this other;' rejoins Innovation.

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of
conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact. It
affirms because it holds. Its fingers clutch the fact, and it will
not open its eyes to see a better fact. The castle, which
conservatism is set to defend, is the actual state of things, good
and bad. The project of innovation is the best possible state of
things. Of course, conservatism always has the worst of the
argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that
to change would be to deteriorate; it must saddle itself with the
mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny the
possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet;
whilst innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and
sure of final success. Conservatism stands on man's confessed
limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on
circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member
of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man
himself; conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual
and imperious. We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and
winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at
night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism
goes for comfort, reform for truth. Conservatism is more candid to
behold another's worth; reform more disposed to maintain and increase
its own. Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no
invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence,
no husbandry. It makes a great difference to your figure and to your
thought, whether your foot is advancing or receding. Conservatism
never puts the foot forward; in the hour when it does that, it is not
establishment, but reform. Conservatism tends to universal seeming
and treachery, believes in a negative fate; believes that men's
temper governs them; that for me, it avails not to trust in
principles; they will fail me; I must bend a little; it distrusts
nature; it thinks there is a general law without a particular
application, -- law for all that does not include any one. Reform in
its antagonism inclines to asinine resistance, to kick with hoofs; it
runs to egotism and bloated self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless