On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in HistoryCarlyle, Thomas
Philosophy
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
Carlyle, Thomas
Hero worship; Heroes
Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but, consider
it,--without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a thoroughly
immoral _man_ could not know anything at all! To know a thing, what we
can call knowing, a man must first _love_ the thing, sympathize with it:
that is, be _virtuously_ related to it. If he have not the justice to
put down his own selfishness at every turn, the courage to stand by the
dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he know? His virtues, all
of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge. Nature, with her truth,
remains to the bad, to the selfish and the pusillanimous forever a
sealed book: what such can know of Nature is mean, superficial,
small; for the uses of the day merely.--But does not the very Fox know
something of Nature? Exactly so: it knows where the geese lodge! The
human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in the world, what more does he
know but this and the like of this? Nay, it should be considered too,
that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine _morality_, he could not even
know where the geese were, or get at the geese! If he spent his time
in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his own misery, his ill usage
by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so forth; and had not courage,
promptitude, practicality, and other suitable vulpine gifts and graces,
he would catch no geese. We may say of the Fox too, that his morality
and insight are of the same dimensions; different faces of the same
internal unity of vulpine life!--These things are worth stating; for
the contrary of them acts with manifold very baleful perversion, in this
time: what limitations, modifications they require, your own candor will
supply.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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