"SCHOLAR" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular
up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the
poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the
controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun,
though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the
crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let
him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of
neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, -- happy enough,
if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something
truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is
sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then
learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has
descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has
mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of
all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his
own can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his
spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded
that, which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The
orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, --
his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, -- until he finds
that he is the complement of his hearers; -- that they drink his
words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he
dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he
finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally
true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels,
This is my music; this is myself.

In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should
the scholar be, -- free and brave. Free even to the definition of
freedom, "without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own
constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing, which a scholar by his
very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance.
It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, amid dangerous times, arise
from the presumption, that, like children and women, his is a
protected class; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of
his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like
an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and
turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the
danger a danger still; so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn
and face it. Let him look into its eye and search its nature,
inspect its origin, -- see the whelping of this lion, -- which lies
no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect
comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands
meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it, and pass on
superior. The world is his, who can see through its pretension.
What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you
behold, is there only by sufferance, -- by your sufferance. See it
to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

Yes, we are the cowed, -- we the trustless. It is a