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

This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England,
War, Colonization, Church, Court, and Commerce, as with so many
flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more
account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia,
Italy, Spain, and the Islands, -- the genius and creative principle
of each and of all eras in my own mind.

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in
our private experience, and verifying them here. All history becomes
subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only
biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, -- must
go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not
live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a
formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good
of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule.
Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that
loss by doing the work itself. Ferguson discovered many things in
astronomy which had long been known. The better for him.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the
state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must
in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, -- see how it
could and must be. So stand before every public and private work;
before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a
martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson,
before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches,
before a fanatic Revival, and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in
Providence. We assume that we under like influence should be alike
affected, and should achieve the like; and we aim to master
intellectually the steps, and reach the same height or the same
degradation, that our fellow, our proxy, has done.

All inquiry into antiquity, -- all curiosity respecting the
Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico,
Memphis, -- is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and
preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and
the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of
Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the
monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in
general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so
armed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself should also
have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives along the whole
line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all
with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are _now_.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us, and not done
by us. Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our man. But we
apply ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves
into the place and state of the builder. We remember the
forest-dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the first type,