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

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Unpublished nature will have its whole secret told.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
with a fore-plane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life
is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of
men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky.
Engineer, broker, jurist, physician, moralist, theologian, and every
man, inasmuch as he has any science,- is a definer and map-maker of
the latitudes and longitudes of our condition. These roadmakers on
every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life and multiply our
relations. We are as much gainers by finding a new property in the old
earth as by acquiring a new planet.
We are too passive in the reception of these material or
semi-material aids. We must not be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one
step,- we are better served through our sympathy. Activity is
contagious. Looking where others look, and conversing with the same
things, we catch the charm which lured them. Napoleon said, "You
must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all