"Essays 1st Series" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs
the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle
of no concernment.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our
consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes
of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past
acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag
about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you
have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should
contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom
never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure
memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed
present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have
denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the
soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe
God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in
the hand of the harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored
by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a
great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself
with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words,
and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though
it contradict every thing you said to-day. -- `Ah, so you shall be
sure to be misunderstood.' -- Is it so bad, then, to be
misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and
Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every
pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be
misunderstood.

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of
his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities
of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere.
Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an
acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; -- read it forward, backward, or
across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite
wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest
thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will
be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My book
should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The
swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he
carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are.
Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate
their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that
virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so