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

other, knowledge: one, possession; the other, trade: one, caste; the
other, culture: one, king; the other, democracy: and, if we dare carry
these generalizations a step higher, and name the last tendency of
both, we might say, that the end of the one is escape from
organization,- pure science; and the end of the other is the highest
instrumentality, or use of means, or executive deity.
Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or
to the second of these gods of the mind. By religion, he tends to
unity; by intellect, or by the senses, to the many. A too rapid
unification, and an excessive appliance to parts and particulars,
are the twin dangers of speculation.
To this partiality the history of nations corresponded. The
country of unity, of immovable institutions, the seat of a
philosophy delighting in abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and
in practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is
Asia; and it realizes this faith in the social institution of caste.
On the other side, the genius of Europe is active and creative: it
resists caste by culture; its philosophy was a discipline; it is a
land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the East loved
infinity, the West delighted in boundaries.
European civility is the triumph of talent, the extension of system,
the sharpened understanding, adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight
in manifestation, in comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens, Greece,
had been working in this element with the joy of genius not yet
chilled by any foresight of the detriment of an excess. They saw
before them no sinister political economy; no ominous Malthus; no
Paris or London; no pitiless subdivision of classes,- the doom of
the pin-makers, the doom of the weavers, of dressers, of
stockingers, of carders, of spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no
Indian caste, superinduced by the efforts of Europe to throw it off.
The understanding was in its health and prime. Art was in its splendid
novelty. They cut the Pentelican marble as if it were snow, and
their perfect works in architecture and sculpture seemed things of
course, not more difficult than the completion of a new ship at the
Medford yards, or new mills at Lowell. These things are in course, and
may be taken for granted. The Roman legion, Byzantine legislation,
English trade, the saloons of Versailles, the cafes of Paris, the
steam-mill, steamboat, steam-coach, may all be seen in perspective;
the town-meeting, the ballot-box, the newspaper and cheap press.
Meantime, Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the
idea of one Deity, in which all things are absorbed. The unity of Asia
and the detail of Europe; the infinitude of the Asiatic soul and the
defining, result-loving, machine-making, surface-seeking,
opera-going Europe,- Plato came to join, and, by contact, to enhance
the energy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia are in his
brain. Metaphysics and natural philosophy expressed the genius of
Europe; he substructs the religion of Asia, as the base.
In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two
elements. It is as easy to be great as to be small. The reason why
we do not at once believe in admirable souls is because they are not