“ The poet is born, not made; he rises up, no man knowing his beginnings; when he goes away, though men after him may sing his songs for centuries, he himself goes away wholly, having taken with him his mantle, for this he can give to none other. The man of science is not thus creative: he is created. His work, however great it be, is not wholly his own: it is in part the outcome of the work of men who have gone before. Again and again a conception which has made a name great has come not so much by the man’s own effort as out of the fullness of time. ”

“ The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will. Society is servile from want of will, and therefore the world wants saviours and religions. One way is right to go: the hero sees it, and moves on that aim, and has the world under him for root and support. He is to others as the world. His approbation is honor; his dissent, infamy. The glance of his eye has the force of sunbeams. A personal influence towers up in memory only worthy, and we gladly forget numbers, money, climate, gravitation, and the rest of Fate. ”

“ If we thought men were free in the sense that in a single exception one fantastical will could prevail over the law of things, it were all one as if a child’s hand could pull down the sun. If, in the least particular, one could derange the order of nature—who would accept the gift of life?
Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all is made of one piece; that plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animal and planet, food and eater, are of one kind. In astronomy is vast space, but no foreign system; in geology, vast time, but the same laws as to-day. ”

“ And in that bitter song of the Iliad, this man, though aided continually by the wisest of the gods, and burning with the desire of justice in his heart, becomes yet, through ill-governed passion, the most unjust of men; and, full of the deepest tenderness in his heart, becomes yet, through ill-governed passion, the most cruel of men. Intense alike in love and in friendship, he loses, first his mistress, and then his friend; for the sake of the one, he surrenders to death the armies of his own land; for the sake of the other, he surrenders all. Will a man lay down his life for his friend? ”

“ I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the éclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art. At the top or at the bottom of all illusions, I set the cheat which still leads us to work and live for appearances, in spite of our conviction, in all sane hours, that it is what we really are that avails with friends, with strangers, and with fate or fortune.
One would think from the talk of men, that riches and poverty were a great matter ”

“ I believe, upon many of the best minds of these days. They watch what they conceive to be the progress of materialism, in such fear and powerless anger as a savage feels, when, during an eclipse, the great shadow creeps over the face of the sun. The advancing tide of matter threatens to drown their souls; the tightening grasp of law impedes their freedom; they are alarmed lest man’s moral nature be debased by the increase of his wisdom.
If the “New Philosophy” be worthy of the reprobation with which it is visited, I confess their fears seem to me to be well founded. ”

“ The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. It is the common and the god-like law of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the thousand-footed [Pg 115] creeper in the dust, as they share with us the gift of life, share with us the love of an ideal: strive like us,—like us are tempted to grow weary of the struggle,—to do well; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support, returns of courage; and are condemned like us to be crucified between that double law of the members and the will. ”

“ The mass of mankind have neither force of intellect enough to apprehend them clearly as ideas, nor force of character enough to follow them strictly as laws. The mass of mankind can be carried along a course full of hardship for the natural man, can be borne over the thousand impediments of the narrow way, only by the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion. It is impossible to rise from reading Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius without a sense of constraint and melancholy, without feeling that the burden laid upon man is well-nigh greater than he can bear. ”

“ Where shall we find language innocent enough, how shall we make the spotless purity of our intentions evident enough, to enable us to say to the political Englishman that the British constitution itself, which, seen from the practical side, looks such a magnificent organ of progress and virtue, seen from the speculative side,—with its compromises, its love of facts, its horror of theory, its studied avoidance of clear thoughts,—that, seen from this side, our august constitution sometimes looks—forgive me, shade of Lord Somers!—a colossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines? ”

“ Is our life forever to be without profit—without possession? Shall the strength of its generations be as barren as death; or cast away their labor, as the wild fig tree casts her untimely figs? Is it all a dream then—the desire of the eyes and the pride of life—or, if it be, might we not live in nobler dream than this? The poets and prophets, the wise men, and the scribes, though they have told us nothing about a life to come, have told us much about the life that is now. ”

“ I know not whether there be, as is alleged, in the upper region of our atmosphere, a permanent westerly current, which carries with it all atoms which rise to that height; but I see that, when souls reach a certain clearness of perception, they accept a knowledge and motive above selfishness. A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary. It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the worlds into order and orbit. ”

“ In science there is only progress. The path may not be always a straight line; there may be swerving to this side and to that; ideas may seem to return again and again to the same point of the intellectual compass; but it will always be found that they have reached a higher level—they have moved, not in a circle, but in a spiral. Moreover, science is not fashioned as is a house, by putting brick to brick, that which is once put remaining as it was put, to the end. The growth of science is that of a living being. ”

“ It may be, or it may not be, that man’s grasp of the beautiful and of the good, if not looser, is not firmer than it was a hundred years ago. It may be, or it may not be, that man is no nearer to absolute truth, to seeing things as they really are, than he was then. I will merely ask you to consider with me for a few minutes how far and in what ways man’s laying hold of that aspect of, or part of, truth which we call natural knowledge, or sometimes science, differed in 1799 from what it is to-day, and whether that change must not be accounted a real advance, a real improvement in man. ”

“ Let me ask you to picture to yourselves what confusion there would be to-morrow, not only in the discussions at the sectional meetings of our association, but in the world at large, if it should happen that in the coming night some destroying touch should wither up certain tender structures in all our brains and wipe out from our memories all traces of the ideas which cluster in our minds around the verbal tokens, oxygen and oxidation. How could any of us—not the so-called man of science alone, but even the man of business and the man of pleasure—go about his ways lacking those ideas? ”

“ Seeing in matters lying outside science few marks of progress and many tokens of decline or decay, recognizing in science its material benefits only, such men have thoughts of despair when they look forward to the times to come. But if there be any truth in what I have attempted to urge to-night, if the intellectual, if the moral influences of science are no less marked than her material benefits, if, moreover, that which she has done is but the earnest of that which she shall do, such men may pluck up courage and gather strength by laying hold of her garment. ”

“ Who will even venture to affirm that, separated in great measure from the intellect and civilization of the world for one or two centuries, Christianity, wonderful as have been its fruits, had the development perfectly worthy of its inestimable germ? Who will venture to affirm that, by the alliance of Christianity with the virtue and intelligence of men like the Antonines,—of the best product of Greek and Roman civilization, while Greek and Roman civilization had yet life and power,—Christianity and the world, as well as the Antonines themselves, would not have been gainers? ”

“ As a child in its infancy looks upon its mother only as a giver of good things, and does not learn till after days how she was also showing her love by carefully training it in the way it should go, so we, too, have thought too much of the gifts of science, overlooking her power to guide.
Man does not live by bread alone, and science brings him more than bread. It is a great thing to make two blades of grass grow where before one alone grew; but it is no less great a thing to help a man to come to a just conclusion on the questions with which he has to deal. ”

“ But the Hindoos, in their sacred writings, express the liveliest feeling, both of the essential identity, and of that illusion which they conceive variety to be: “The notions, I am, and This is mine, which influence mankind, are but delusions of the mother of the world. Dispel, O Lord of all creatures! the conceit of knowledge which proceeds from ignorance.” And the beatitude of man they hold to lie in being freed from fascination.
The intellect is stimulated by the statement of truth in a trope, and the will by clothing the laws of life in illusions. ”

“ Cold and sea will train an imperial Saxon race, which nature cannot bear to lose, and, after cooping it up for a thousand years in yonder England, gives a hundred Englands, a hundred Mexicos. All the bloods it shall absorb and domineer: and more than Mexicos—the secrets of water and steam, the spasms of electricity, the ductility of metals, the chariot of the air, the ruddered balloon, are awaiting you. ”

“ The first and worst races are dead. The second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the maturing of higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and praise he extorts from his fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into freedom. Liberation of the will from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is the end and aim of this world. Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint; and where his endeavors do not yet fully avail, they tell as tendency. ”

“ Ah! if I could show you this! if I could show you these men and women, all the world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honor, the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to escape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their doom; they are condemned to some nobility ”

“ For, though Fate is immense, so is power, which is the other fact in the dual world, immense. If Fate follows and limits power, power attends and antagonizes Fate. We must respect Fate as natural history, but there is more than natural history. For who and what is this criticism that pries into the matter? Man is not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and members, link in a chain, nor any ignominious baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the Universe. ”

“ I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bauble or another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi’s Mocking,—for the Power has many names,—is stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo. Few have overheard the gods, or surprised their secret. Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. [Pg 259] All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle. There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snowstorm. We wake from one dream into another dream. ”

“ I tell you truly that, as I strive more with this strange lethargy and trance in myself, and awake to the meaning and power of life, it seems daily more amazing to me that men such as these should dare to play with the most precious truths (or the most deadly untruths) by which the whole human race listening to them could be informed, or deceived—all the world their audiences forever, with pleased ear, and passionate heart; and yet, to this submissive infinitude of souls, and evermore succeeding and succeeding multitude, hungry for bread of life, they do but play upon sweetly modulated pipes ”

“ Our fingers are too few, it seems, to twist together some poor covering for our bodies. We set our streams to work for us, and choke the air with fire, to turn our spinning-wheels—and—are we yet clothed? Are not the streets of the capitals of Europe foul with sale of cast clouts and rotten rags? Is not the beauty of your sweet children left in wretchedness of disgrace, while, with better honor, nature clothes the brood of the bird in its nest, and the suckling of the wolf in her den? ”

“ Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to genuine creation; in literature we must never forget that. But what true man of letters ever can forget it? It is no such common matter for a gifted nature to come into possession of a current of true and living ideas, and to produce amidst the inspiration of them, that we are likely to underrate it. The epochs of Æschylus and Shakespeare make us feel their preëminence. In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life of literature; there is the promised land, toward which criticism can only beckon. ”

“ Looking back, then, in this last year of the eighteen hundreds, on the century which is drawing to a close, while we may see in the history of scientific inquiry much which, telling the man of science of his shortcomings and his weakness, bids him be humble, we also see much, perhaps more, which gives him hope. Hope is, indeed, one of the watchwords of science. In the latter-day writings of some who know not science much may be read which shows that the writer is losing, or has lost, hope in the future of mankind. ”