"Representative Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

to the mineral and botanic kingdoms, which, in the highest moments,
comes up as the charm of nature,- the glitter of the spar, the
sureness of affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness, heat
and cold, hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid and gas,
circle us round in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable
quarrel, beguile the day of life. The eye repeats every day the
first eulogy on things,- "He saw that they were good." We know where
to find them; and these performers are relished all the more, after
a little experience of the pretending races. We are entitled also to
higher advantages. Something is wanting to science until it has been
humanized. The table of logarithms is one thing, and its vital play in
botany, music, optics and architecture, another. There are
advancements to numbers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little
suspected at first, when, by union with intellect and will, they
ascend into the life and reappear in conversation, character and
politics.

But this comes later. We speak now only of our acquaintance with
them in their own sphere and the way in which they seem to fascinate
and draw to them some genius who occupies himself with one thing,
all his life long. The possibility of interpretation lies in the
identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has
its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the
spiritual and necessary sphere where it plays a part as indestructible
as any other. And to these, their ends, all things continually ascend.
The gases gather to the solid firmament: the chemic lump arrives at
the plant, and grows; arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives
at the man, and thinks. But also the constituency determines the
vote of the representative. He is not only representative, but
participant. Like can only be known by like. The reason why he knows
about them is that he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or
from being a part of that thing. Animated chlorine knows of
chlorine, and incarnate zinc, of zinc. Their quality makes his career;
and he can variously publish their virtues, because they compose
him. Man, made of the dust of the world, does not forget his origin;
and all that is yet inanimate will one day speak and reason.
Unpublished nature will have its whole secret told. Shall we say
that quartz mountains will pulverize into innumerable Werners, Von
Buchs and Beaumonts, and the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in
solution I know not what Berzeliuses and Davys?

Thus we sit by the fire and take hold on the poles of the earth.
This quasi omnipresence supplies the imbecility of our condition. In
one of those celestial days when heaven and earth meet and adorn
each other, it seems a poverty that we can only spend it once: we wish
for a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its
immense beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good
faith, we are multiplied by our proxies. How easily we adopt their
labors! Every ship that comes to America got its chart from
Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves