Miscellanies : $b embracing Nature, addresses, and lecturesEmerson, Ralph Waldo
Philosophy
Miscellanies : $b embracing Nature, addresses, and lectures
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
American essays -- 19th century; Philosophy of nature; Transcendentalism (New England)
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
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?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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