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

find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things
remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A
man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the
vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the
most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the
genius of the ancients.

There is one man of genius, who has done much for this
philosophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly
estimated; -- I mean Emanuel Swedenborg. The most imaginative of
men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored
to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity
of his time. Such an attempt, of course, must have difficulty, which
no genius could surmount. But he saw and showed the connection
between nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced the
emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangible
world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover over and interpret
the lower parts of nature; he showed the mysterious bond that allies
moral evil to the foul material forms, and has given in epical
parables a theory of isanity, of beasts, of unclean and fearful
things.

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous
political movement, is, the new importance given to the single
person. Every thing that tends to insulate the individual, -- to
surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall
feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign
state with a sovereign state; -- tends to true union as well as
greatness. "I learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi, "that no man
in God's wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man."
Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who
must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the
contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be
an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than
another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing,
the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know
not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole
of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr.
President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of
man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to
the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses
of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected
to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the
air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent,
complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this
country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no
work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the
fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the
mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth
below not in unison with these, -- but are hindered from action by