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

and the decoration of it as the wealth of the nation increased; the
value which is given to wood by carving led to the carving over the
whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. When we have gone through
this process, and added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its
music, its processions, its Saints' days and image-worship, we have,
as it were, been the man that made the minster; we have seen how it
could and must be. We have the sufficient reason.

The difference between men is in their principle of
association. Some men classify objects by color and size and other
accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the
relation of cause and effect. The progress of the intellect is to
the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To
the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly
and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.
For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance.
Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth,
teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature,
soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard
pedants, and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of
time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and
genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them as a young child
plays with graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal
thought, and, far back in the womb of things, sees the rays parting
from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters.
Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the
metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through the fly, through
the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant
individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species; through
many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type;
through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity.
Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same. She
casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty
fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and toughness of
matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The
adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and, whilst I
look at it, its outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so
fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we
still trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of
servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness
and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the
imagination; but how changed, when as Isis in Egypt she meets
Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman, with nothing of the metamorphosis
left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows!

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity
equally obvious. There is at the surface infinite variety of things;
at the centre there is simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of