One gracious fact emerges from these studies--that there is true
ascension in our love. The reputations of the nineteenth century will
one day be quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of humanity is the
real subject whose biography is written in our annals. We must infer
much, and supply many chasms in the record. The history of the universe
is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all the procession of
famous men, is reason or illumination, or that essence we were looking
for, but is an exhibition, in some quarter, of new possibilities. Could
we one day complete the immense figure which these flagrant points
compose! The study of many individuals leads us to an elemental region
wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch by their summits.
Thought and feeling, that break out there, cannot be impounded by any
fence of personality. This is the key to the power of the greatest
men--their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of mind travels by
night and by day, in concentric circles from its origin, and publishes
itself by unknown methods; the union of all minds appears intimate; what
gets admission to one cannot be kept out of any other; the smallest
acquisition of truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so much good to
the commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of talent and position
vanish when the individuals are seen in the duration which is necessary
to complete the career of each, even more swiftly the seeming injustice
disappears when we ascend to the central identity of all the
individuals, and know that they are made of the substance which
ordaineth and doeth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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