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

So little action amidst such audacious and yet sincere
profession, that we begin to doubt if that great revolution in the
art of war, which has made it a game of posts instead of a game of
battles, has not operated on Reform; whether this be not also a war
of posts, a paper blockade, in which each party is to display the
utmost resources of his spirit and belief, and no conflict occur; but
the world shall take that course which the demonstration of the truth
shall indicate.

But we must pay for being too intellectual, as they call it.
People are not as light-hearted for it. I think men never loved life
less. I question if care and doubt ever wrote their names so legibly
on the faces of any population. This _Ennui_, for which we Saxons
had no name, this word of France has got a terrific significance. It
shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light. Old age begins in
the nursery, and before the young American is put into jacket and
trowsers, he says, `I want something which I never saw before;' and
`I wish I was not I.' I have seen the same gloom on the brow even of
those adventurers from the intellectual class, who had dived deepest
and with most success into active life. I have seen the authentic
sign of anxiety and perplexity on the greatest forehead of the state.
The canker worms have crawled to the topmost bough of the wild elm,
and swing down from that. Is there less oxygen in the atmosphere?
What has checked in this age the animal spirits which gave to our
forefathers their bounding pulse?

But have a little patience with this melancholy humor. Their
unbelief arises out of a greater Belief; their inaction out of a
scorn of inadequate action. By the side of these men, the hot
agitators have a certain cheap and ridiculous air; they even look
smaller than the others. Of the two, I own, I like the speculators
best. They have some piety which looks with faith to a fair Future,
unprofaned by rash and unequal attempts to realize it. And truly we
shall find much to console us, when we consider the cause of their
uneasiness. It is the love of greatness, it is the need of harmony,
the contrast of the dwarfish Actual with the exorbitant Idea. No man
can compare the ideas and aspirations of the innovators of the
present day, with those of former periods, without feeling how great
and high this criticism is. The revolutions that impend over society
are not now from ambition and rapacity, from impatience of one or
another form of government, but from new modes of thinking, which
shall recompose society after a new order, which shall animate labor
by love and science, which shall destroy the value of many kinds of
property, and replace all property within the dominion of reason and
equity. There was never so great a thought laboring in the breasts
of men, as now. It almost seems as if what was aforetime spoken
fabulously and hieroglyphically, was now spoken plainly, the
doctrine, namely, of the indwelling of the Creator in man. The
spiritualist wishes this only, that the spiritual principle should be
suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible