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

applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything
unspiritual, that is, anything positive, dogmatic, or personal. The
excellence of this class consists in this, that they have believed;
that, affirming the need of new and higher modes of living and
action, they have abstained from the recommendation of low methods.
Their fault is that they have stopped at the intellectual perception;
that their will is not yet inspired from the Fountain of Love. But
whose fault is this? and what a fault, and to what inquiry does it
lead! We have come to that which is the spring of all power, of
beauty and virtue, of art and poetry; and who shall tell us according
to what law its inspirations and its informations are given or
withholden?

I do not wish to be guilty of the narrowness and pedantry of
inferring the tendency and genius of the Age from a few and
insufficient facts or persons. Every age has a thousand sides and
signs and tendencies; and it is only when surveyed from inferior
points of view, that great varieties of character appear. Our time
too is full of activity and performance. Is there not something
comprehensive in the grasp of a society which to great mechanical
invention, and the best institutions of property, adds the most
daring theories; which explores the subtlest and most universal
problems? At the manifest risk of repeating what every other Age has
thought of itself, we might say, we think the Genius of this Age more
philosophical than any other has been, righter in its aims, truer,
with less fear, less fable, less mixture of any sort.

But turn it how we will, as we ponder this meaning of the
times, every new thought drives us to the deep fact, that the Time is
the child of the Eternity. The main interest which any aspects of
the Times can have for us, is the great spirit which gazes through
them, the light which they can shed on the wonderful questions, What
we are? and Whither we tend? We do not wish to be deceived. Here we
drift, like white sail across the wild ocean, now bright on the wave,
now darkling in the trough of the sea; -- but from what port did we
sail? Who knows? Or to what port are we bound? Who knows? There
is no one to tell us but such poor weather-tossed mariners as
ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some signal,
or floated to us some letter in a bottle from far. But what know
they more than we? They also found themselves on this wondrous sea.
No; from the older sailors, nothing. Over all their
speaking-trumpets, the gray sea and the loud winds answer, Not in us;
not in Time. Where then but in Ourselves, where but in that Thought
through which we communicate with absolute nature, and are made aware
that, whilst we shed the dust of which we are built, grain by grain,
till it is all gone, the law which clothes us with humanity remains
new? where, but in the intuitions which are vouchsafed us from
within, shall we learn the Truth? Faithless, faithless, we fancy
that with the dust we depart and are not; and do not know that the
law and the perception of the law are at last one; that only as much