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

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST

_A Lecture read at the Masonic Temple, Boston,
January, 1842_

The first thing we have to say respecting what are called _new
views_ here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are
not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these
new times. The light is always identical in its composition, but it
falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is first
revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is formless, but in
theirs; in like manner, thought only appears in the objects it
classifies. What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is
Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have
ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first
class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first
class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second
class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses
give us representations of things, but what are the things
themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on
history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man;
the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on
miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both
natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in
higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the
impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty,
and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that
things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm
facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the
same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to
doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native
superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by
which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a
retirement from the senses to discern. Every materialist will be an
idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.

The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He
does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see
that alone. He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair,
and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the
reverse side of the tapestry, as the _other end_, each being a sequel
or completion of a spiritual fact which nearly concerns him. This
manner of looking at things, transfers every object in nature from an
independent and anomalous position without there, into the
consciousness. Even the materialist Condillac, perhaps the most
logical expounder of materialism, was constrained to say, "Though we
should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss,
we never go out of ourselves; it is always our own thought that we
perceive." What more could an idealist say?