"THE TIME" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

of the French Revolution, after witnessing its sequel, recorded his
conviction, that "the amelioration of outward circumstances will be
the effect, but can never be the means of mental and moral
improvement." Quitting now the class of actors, let us turn to see
how it stands with the other class of which we spoke, namely, the
students.


A new disease has fallen on the life of man. Every Age, like
every human body, has its own distemper. Other times have had war,
or famine, or a barbarism domestic or bordering, as their antagonism.
Our forefathers walked in the world and went to their graves,
tormented with the fear of Sin, and the terror of the Day of
Judgment. These terrors have lost their force, and our torment is
Unbelief, the Uncertainty as to what we ought to do; the distrust of
the value of what we do, and the distrust that the Necessity (which
we all at last believe in) is fair and beneficent. Our Religion
assumes the negative form of rejection. Out of love of the true, we
repudiate the false: and the Religion is an abolishing criticism. A
great perplexity hangs like a cloud on the brow of all cultivated
persons, a certain imbecility in the best spirits, which
distinguishes the period. We do not find the same trait in the
Arabian, in the Hebrew, in Greek, Roman, Norman, English periods; no,
but in other men a natural firmness. The men did not see beyond the
need of the hour. They planted their foot strong, and doubted
nothing. We mistrust every step we take. We find it the worst thing
about time, that we know not what to do with it. We are so
sharp-sighted that we can neither work nor think, neither read Plato
nor not read him.

Then there is what is called a too intellectual tendency. Can
there be too much intellect? We have never met with any such excess.
But the criticism, which is levelled at the laws and manners, ends in
thought, without causing a new method of life. The genius of the day
does not incline to a deed, but to a beholding. It is not that men
do not wish to act; they pine to be employed, but are paralyzed by
the uncertainty what they should do. The inadequacy of the work to
the faculties, is the painful perception which keeps them still.
This happens to the best. Then, talents bring their usual
temptations, and the current literature and poetry with perverse
ingenuity draw us away from life to solitude and meditation. This
could well be borne, if it were great and involuntary; if the men
were ravished by their thought, and hurried into ascetic
extravagances. Society could then manage to release their shoulder
from its wheel, and grant them for a time this privilege of sabbath.
But they are not so. Thinking, which was a rage, is become an art.
The thinker gives me results, and never invites me to be present with
him at his invocation of truth, and to enjoy with him its proceeding
into his mind.