"Emerson,_Ralph_Waldo_-_An_Address" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into
heaven, into hell.

These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed,
that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will,
of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of
the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that
will, is everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so,
and not otherwise. Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not
absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil
is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So
much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For all things
proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love,
justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean
receives different names on the several shores which it washes. All
things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with
it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength
of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves
himself of power, of auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote
channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute
badness is absolute death.

The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a
sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our
highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command.
It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh
and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. It makes the sky and the
hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it, is the
universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought
may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity;
but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is
the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds,
time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy.

This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of
man. It makes him illimitable. Through it, the soul first knows
itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks
to be great by following the great, and hopes to derive advantages
_from another_, -- by showing the fountain of all good to be in
himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the
deeps of Reason. When he says, "I ought;" when love warms him; when
he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep
melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom. Then he can
worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind
this sentiment. In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is
never surmounted, love is never outgrown.

This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, and
successively creates all forms of worship. The principle of
veneration never dies out. Man fallen into superstition, into