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

mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world
was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in
the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we
bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt
themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any
thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his
signet and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who
can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give
the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, and
persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter,
that this thing which they do, is the apple which the ages have
desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the
harvest. The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald
sits, there is the head of the table. Linnaeus makes botany the most
alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman;
Davy, chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his, who
works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of
men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped
waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed,
-- darker than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the
feeling of my audience in stating my own belief. But I have already
shown the ground of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is
one. I believe man has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has
almost lost the light, that can lead him back to his prerogatives.
Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world of
to-day are bugs, are spawn, and are called `the mass' and `the herd.'
In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, -- one
or two approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest
behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude being, --
ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so _that_ may attain to its
full stature. What a testimony, -- full of grandeur, full of pity,
is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the
poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief. The poor and
the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their
acquiescence in a political and social inferiority. They are content
to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that
justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it is the
dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun
themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to be their own
element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod selves
upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of
blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and
conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and
power because it is as good as money, -- the "spoils," so called, "of
office." And why not? for they aspire to the highest, and this, in
their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them, and they