"REP MEN" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

you don't understand me; I have never met with any one who comprehends
me": and they sigh and weep, write verses and walk alone,- fault of
power to express their precise meaning. In a month or two, through the
favor of their good genius, they meet some one so related as to assist
their volcanic estate, and, good communication being once established,
they are thenceforward good citizens. It is ever thus. The progress is
to accuracy, to skill, to truth, from blind force.
There is a moment in the history of every nation, when, proceeding
out of this brute youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness
and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant,
extends across the entire scale, and, with his feet still planted on
the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and brain with
solar and stellar creation. That is the moment of adult health, the
culmination of power.
Such is the history of Europe, in all points; and such in
philosophy. Its early records, almost perished, are of the
immigrations from Asia, bringing with them the dreams of barbarians; a
confusion of crude notions of morals and of natural philosophy,
gradually subsiding through the partial insight of single teachers.
Before Pericles came the Seven Wise Masters, and we have the
beginnings of geometry, metaphysics and ethics: then the partialists,-
deducing the origin of things from flux or water, or from air, or from
fire, or from mind. All mix with these causes mythologic pictures.
At last comes Plato, the distributor, who needs no barbaric point,
or tattoo, or whooping; for he can define. He leaves with Asia the
vast and superlative; he is the arrival of accuracy and
intelligence. "He shall be as a god to me, who can rightly divide
and define."
This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the
human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two
cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one, and the two: 1.
Unity, or Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite all things by perceiving
the law which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences
and the profound resemblances. But every mental act,- this very
perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of
things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or to think
without embracing both.
The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many effects; then for the
cause of that; and again the cause, diving still into the profound:
self-assured that it shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient
one,- a one that shall be all. "In the midst of the sun is the
light, in the midst of the light is truth, and in the midst of truth
is the imperishable being," say the Vedas. All philosophy, of East and
West, has the same centripetence. Urged by an opposite necessity,
the mind returns from the one to that which is not one, but other or
many; from cause to effect; and affirms the necessary existence of
variety, the self-existence of both, as each is involved in the other.
These strictly-blended elements it is the problem of thought to
separate and to reconcile. Their existence is mutually contradictory
and exclusive; and each so fast slides into the other that we can