"LIT ETHC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

and me? Say to such doctors, We are thankful to you, as we are to
history, to the pyramids, and the authors; but now our day is come;
we have been born out of the eternal silence; and now will we live,
-- live for ourselves, -- and not as the pall-bearers of a funeral,
but as the upholders and creators of our age; and neither Greece nor
Rome, nor the three Unities of Aristotle, nor the three Kings of
Cologne, nor the College of the Sorbonne, nor the Edinburgh Review,
is to command any longer. Now that we are here, we will put our own
interpretation on things, and our own things for interpretation.
Please himself with complaisance who will, -- for me, things must
take my scale, not I theirs. I will say with the warlike king, "God
gave me this crown, and the whole world shall not take it away."

The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my
self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do. This is the
moral of the Plutarchs, the Cudworths, the Tennemanns, who give us
the story of men or of opinions. Any history of philosophy fortifies
my faith, by showing me, that what high dogmas I had supposed were
the rare and late fruit of a cumulative culture, and only now
possible to some recent Kant or Fichte, -- were the prompt
improvisations of the earliest inquirers; of Parmenides, Heraclitus,
and Xenophanes. In view of these students, the soul seems to
whisper, `There is a better way than this indolent learning of
another. Leave me alone; do not teach me out of Leibnitz or
Schelling, and I shall find it all out myself.'

Still more do we owe to biography the fortification of our
hope. If you would know the power of character, see how much you
would impoverish the world, if you could take clean out of history
the lives of Milton, Shakspeare, and Plato, -- these three, and cause
them not to be. See you not, how much less the power of man would
be? I console myself in the poverty of my thoughts; in the paucity
of great men, in the malignity and dulness of the nations, by falling
back on these sublime recollections, and seeing what the prolific
soul could beget on actual nature; -- seeing that Plato was, and
Shakspeare, and Milton, -- three irrefragable facts. Then I dare; I
also will essay to be. The humblest, the most hopeless, in view of
these radiant facts, may now theorize and hope. In spite of all the
rueful abortions that squeak and gibber in the street, in spite of
slumber and guilt, in spite of the army, the bar-room, and the jail,
_have been_ these glorious manifestations of the mind; and I will
thank my great brothers so truly for the admonition of their being,
as to endeavor also to be just and brave, to aspire and to speak.
Plotinus too, and Spinoza, and the immortal bards of philosophy, --
that which they have written out with patient courage, makes me bold.
No more will I dismiss, with haste, the visions which flash and
sparkle across my sky; but observe them, approach them, domesticate
them, brood on them, and draw out of the past, genuine life for the
present hour.