"Literary Ethics" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

in general, that the diffidence of mankind in the soul has crept over
the American mind; that men here, as elsewhere, are indisposed to
innovation, and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery
productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought.

Yet, in every sane hour, the service of thought appears
reasonable, the despotism of the senses insane. The scholar may lose
himself in schools, in words, and become a pedant; but when he
comprehends his duties, he above all men is a realist, and converses
with things. For, the scholar is the student of the world, and of
what worth the world is, and with what emphasis it accosts the soul
of man, such is the worth, such the call of the scholar.

The want of the times, and the propriety of this anniversary,
concur to draw attention to the doctrine of Literary Ethics. What I
have to say on that doctrine distributes itself under the topics of
the resources, the subject, and the discipline of the scholar.

I. The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his
confidence in the attributes of the Intellect. The resources of the
scholar are co-extensive with nature and truth, yet can never be his,
unless claimed by him with an equal greatness of mind. He cannot
know them until he has beheld with awe the infinitude and
impersonality of the intellectual power. When he has seen, that it
is not his, nor any man's, but that it is the soul which made the
world, and that it is all accessible to him, he will know that he, as
its minister, may rightfully hold all things subordinate and
answerable to it. A divine pilgrim in nature, all things attend his
steps. Over him stream the flying constellations; over him streams
Time, as they, scarcely divided into months and years. He inhales
the year as a vapor: its fragrant midsummer breath, its sparkling
January heaven. And so pass into his mind, in bright
transfiguration, the grand events of history, to take a new order and
scale from him. He is the world; and the epochs and heroes of
chronology are pictorial images, in which his thoughts are told.
There is no event but sprung somewhere from the soul of man; and
therefore there is none but the soul of man can interpret. Every
presentiment of the mind is executed somewhere in a gigantic fact.
What else is Greece, Rome, England, France, St. Helena? What else
are churches, literatures, and empires? The new man must feel that
he is new, and has not come into the world mortgaged to the opinions
and usages of Europe, and Asia, and Egypt. The sense of spiritual
independence is like the lovely varnish of the dew, whereby the old,
hard, peaked earth, and its old self-same productions, are made new
every morning, and shining with the last touch of the artist's hand.
A false humility, a complaisance to reigning schools, or to the
wisdom of antiquity, must not defraud me of supreme possession of
this hour. If any person have less love of liberty, and less
jealousy to guard his integrity, shall he therefore dictate to you
and me? Say to such doctors, We are thankful to you, as we are to