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

out of a certain height, and presupposing his intelligence. This
honor, which is possible in personal intercourse scarcely twice in a
lifetime, genius perpetually pays; contented if now and then in a
century the proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of
matter are degraded to a sort of cooks and confectioners, on the
appearance of the indicators of ideas. Genius is the naturalist or
geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and,
by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for
the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world
we have conversed with is the show.
We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power
and beauty of the body; there is the like pleasure and a higher
benefit from witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as feats of
memory, of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the
transmutings of the imagination, even versatility and
concentration,- as these acts expose the invisible organs and
members of the mind, which respond, member for member, to the parts of
the body. For we thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose men
by their truest marks, taught, with Plato, "to choose those who can,
without aid from the eyes or any other sense, proceed to truth and
to being." Foremost among these activities are the summersaults,
spells and resurrections wrought by the imagination. When this
wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times his
force. It opens the delicious sense of indeterminate size and inspires
an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of
gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in
conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are
bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit. And
this benefit is real because we are entitled to these enlargements,
and once having passed the bounds shall never again be quite the
miserable pedants we were.
The high functions of the intellect are so allied that some
imaginative power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in
arithmeticians of the first class, but especially in meditative men of
an intuitive habit of thought. This class serve us, so that they
have the perception of identity and the perception of reaction. The
eyes of Plato, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either
of these laws. The perception of these laws is a kind of metre of
the mind. Little minds are little through failure to see them.
Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight in reason
degenerates into idolatry of the herald. Especially when a mind of
powerful method has instructed men, we find the examples of
oppression. The dominion of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the
credit of Luther, of Bacon, of Locke;- in religion the history of
hierarchies, of saints, and the sects which have taken the name of
each founder, are in point. Alas! every man is such a victim. The
imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power. It is the
delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and to blind the beholder. But true
genius seeks to defend us from itself. True genius will not
impoverish, but will liberate, and add new senses. If a wise man