[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth cen-
tury avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and
twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates,
Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is re-
ally of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man,
and, in his turn, the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period
are only its costume, and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved
machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so
much in their shing-boats, as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equip-
ment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass,
discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since.
Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the
periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery, which were intro-
duced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius
returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war
among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the
bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor, and disencumbering
it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says
Las Casas, without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and car-
riages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive
his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself."
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it
20
is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to
the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation
to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments
which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from
themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious,
learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate as-
saults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They
measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each
is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect
for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental,
| came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not
having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there,
because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is,
does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living prop-
erty, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or re,
or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man
breathes. Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, is seeking after
thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it." Our dependence on these
foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political par-
ties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each
new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! The Democrats
from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself
stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner
the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in multitude. Not
so, O friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method
precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts o all foreign support, and
stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by
every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing
of men, and in the endless mutation, thou only rm column must presently
appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power
is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and
elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought,
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]