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

to do this and that other feat with words; but we must pay our vows
to the highest power, and pass, if it be possible, by assiduous love
and watching, into the visions of absolute truth. The growth of the
intellect is strictly analogous in all individuals. It is larger
reception. Able men, in general, have good dispositions, and a
respect for justice; because an able man is nothing else than a good,
free, vascular organization, whereinto the universal spirit freely
flows; so that his fund of justice is not only vast, but infinite.
All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in
the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and
individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation
in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the
private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law
of universal being. The hero is great by means of the predominance
of the universal nature; he has only to open his mouth, and it
speaks; he has only to be forced to act, and it acts. All men catch
the word, or embrace the deed, with the heart, for it is verily
theirs as much as his; but in them this disease of an excess of
organization cheats them of equal issues. Nothing is more simple
than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. The vision of
genius comes by renouncing the too officious activity of the
understanding, and giving leave and amplest privilege to the
spontaneous sentiment. Out of this must all that is alive and genial
in thought go. Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and
nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert
the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope,
virtue, learning, anecdote, all flock to their aid. Observe the
phenomenon of extempore debate. A man of cultivated mind, but
reserved habits, sitting silent, admires the miracle of free,
impassioned, picturesque speech, in the man addressing an assembly;
-- a state of being and power, how unlike his own! Presently his own
emotion rises to his lips, and overflows in speech. He must also
rise and say somewhat. Once embarked, once having overcome the
novelty of the situation, he finds it just as easy and natural to
speak, -- to speak with thoughts, with pictures, with rhythmical
balance of sentences, -- as it was to sit silent; for, it needs not
to do, but to suffer; he only adjusts himself to the free spirit
which gladly utters itself through him; and motion is as easy as
rest.

II. I pass now to consider the task offered to the intellect of
this country. The view I have taken of the resources of the scholar,
presupposes a subject as broad. We do not seem to have imagined its
riches. We have not heeded the invitation it holds out. To be as
good a scholar as Englishmen are; to have as much learning as our
contemporaries; to have written a book that is read; satisfies us.
We assume, that all thought is already long ago adequately set down
in books, -- all imaginations in poems; and what we say, we only
throw in as confirmatory of this supposed complete body of
literature. A very shallow assumption. Say rather, all literature