textfiles/etext/AUTHORS/EMERSON/emerson-lecture-233.txt

 
        LECTURE ON THE TIMES
 
        _Read at the Masonic Temple, Boston,
        December 2, 1841_

        The times, as we say -- or the present aspects of our social
state, theral Science, Agriculture, Art, Trade, Letters, have their
root in an invisible spiritual reality.  To appear in these aspects,
they must first exist, or have some necessary foundation.  Beside all
the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the
existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grand and
immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.  The Times are the
masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble
and majestic agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past
leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of to-day is
building up the Future.  The Times -- the nations, manners,
institutions, opinions, votes, are to be studied as omens, as sacred
leaves, whereon a weighty sense is inscribed, if we have the wit and
the love to search it out.  Nature itself seems to propound to us
this topic, and to invite us to explore the meaning of the
conspicuous facts of the day.  Everything that is popular, it has
been said, deserves the attention of the philosopher: and this for
the obvious reason, that although it may not be of any worth in
itself, yet it characterizes the people.

        Here is very good matter to be handled, if we are skilful; an
abundance of important practical questions which it behoves us to
understand.  Let us examine the pretensions of the attacking and
defending parties.  Here is this great fact of Conservatism,
entrenched in its immense redoubts, with Himmaleh for its front, and
Atlas for its flank, and Andes for its rear, and the Atlantic and
Pacific seas for its ditches and trenches, which has planted its
crosses, and crescents, and stars and stripes, and various signs and
badges of possession, over every rood of the planet, and says, `I
will hold fast; and to whom I will, will I give; and whom I will,
will I exclude and starve:' so says Conservatism; and all the
children of men attack the colossus in their youth, and all, or all
but a few, bow before it when they are old.  A necessity not yet
commanded, a negative imposed on the will of man by his condition a
deficiency in his force, is the foundation on which it rests.  Let
this side be fairly stated.  Meantime, on the other part, arises
Reform, and offers the sentiment of Love as an overmatch to this
material might.  I wish to consider well this affirmative side, which
has a loftier port and reason than heretofore, which encroaches on
the other every day, puts it out of countenance, out of reason, and
out of temper, and leaves it nothing but silence and possession.

        The fact of aristocracy, with its two weapons of wealth and
manners, is as commanding a feature of the nineteenth century, and
the American republic, as of old Rome, or modern England.  The reason
and influence of wealth, the aspect of philosophy and religion, and
the tendencies which have acquired the name of Transcendentalism in
Old and New England; the aspect of poetry, as the exponent and
interpretation of these things; the fuller development and the freer
play of Character as a social and political agent; -- these and other
related topics will in turn come to be considered.

        But the subject of the Times is not an abstract question.  We
talk of the world, but we mean a few men and women.  If you speak of
the age, you mean your own platoon of people, as Milton and Dante
painted in colossal their platoons, and called them Heaven and Hell.
In our idea of progress, we do not go out of this personal picture.
We do not think the sky will be bluer, or honey sweeter, or our
climate more temperate, but only that our relation to our fellows
will be simpler and happier.  What is the reason to be given for this
extreme attraction which _persons_ have for us, but that they are the
Age? they are the results of the Past; they are the heralds of the
Future.  They indicate, -- these witty, suffering, blushing,
intimidating figures of the only race in which there are individuals
or changes, how far on the Fate has gone, and what it drives at.  As
trees make scenery, and constitute the hospitality of the landscape,
so persons are the world to persons.  A cunning mystery by which the
Great Desart of thoughts and of planets takes this engaging form, to
bring, as it would seem, its meanings nearer to the mind.  Thoughts
walk and speak, and look with eyes at me, and transport me into new
and magnificent scenes.  These are the pungent instructors who thrill
the heart of each of us, and make all other teaching formal and cold.
How I follow them with aching heart, with pining desire!  I count
myself nothing before them.  I would die for them with joy.  They can
do what they will with me.  How they lash us with those tongues!  How
they make the tears start, make us blush and turn pale, and lap us in
Elysium to soothing dreams, and castles in the air!  By tones of
triumph; of dear love; by threats; by pride that freezes; these have
the skill to make the world look bleak and inhospitable, or seem the
nest of tenderness and joy.  I do not wonder at the miracles which
poetry attributes to the music of Orpheus, when I remember what I
have experienced from the varied notes of the human voice.  They are
an incalculable energy which countervails all other forces in nature,
because they are the channel of supernatural powers.  There is no
interest or institution so poor and withered, but if a new strong man
could be born into it, he would immediately redeem and replace it.  A
personal ascendency, -- that is the only fact much worth considering.
I remember, some years ago, somebody shocked a circle of friends of
order here in Boston, who supposed that our people were identified
with their religious denominations, by declaring that an eloquent
man, -- let him be of what sect soever, -- would be ordained at once
in one of our metropolitan churches.  To be sure he would; and not
only in ours, but in any church, mosque, or temple, on the planet;
but he must be eloquent, able to supplant our method and
classification, by the superior beauty of his own.  Every fact we
have was brought here by some person; and there is none that will not
change and pass away before a person, whose nature is broader than
the person which the fact in question represents.  And so I find the
Age walking about in happy and hopeful natures, in strong eyes, and
pleasant thoughts, and think I read it nearer and truer so, than in
the statute-book, or in the investments of capital, which rather
celebrate with mournful music the obsequies of the last age.  In the
brain of a fanatic; in the wild hope of a mountain boy, called by
city boys very ignorant, because they do not know what his hope has
certainly apprised him shall be; in the love-glance of a girl; in the
hair-splitting conscientiousness of some eccentric person, who has
found some new scruple to embarrass himself and his neighbors withal;
is to be found that which shall constitute the times to come, more
than in the now organized and accredited oracles.  For, whatever is
affirmative and now advancing, contains it.  I think that only is
real, which men love and rejoice in; not what they tolerate, but what
they choose; what they embrace and avow, and not the things which
chill, benumb, and terrify them.

        And so why not draw for these times a portrait gallery?  Let us
paint the painters.  Whilst the Daguerreotypist, with camera-obscura
and silver plate, begins now to traverse the land, let us set up our
Camera also, and let the sun paint the people.  Let us paint the
agitator, and the man of the old school, and the member of Congress,
and the college-professor, the formidable editor, the priest, and
reformer, the contemplative girl, and the fair aspirant for fashion
and opportunities, the woman of the world who has tried and knows; --
let us examine how well she knows.  Could we indicate the indicators,
indicate those who most accurately represent every good and evil
tendency of the general mind, in the just order which they take on
this canvass of Time; so that all witnesses should recognise a
spiritual law, as each well known form flitted for a moment across
the wall, we should have a series of sketches which would report to
the next ages the color and quality of ours.

        Certainly, I think, if this were done, there would be much to
admire as well as to condemn; souls of as lofty a port, as any in
Greek or Roman fame, might appear; men of great heart, of strong
hand, and of persuasive speech; subtle thinkers, and men of wide
sympathy, and an apprehension which looks over all history, and
everywhere recognises its own.  To be sure, there will be fragments
and hints of men, more than enough: bloated promises, which end in
nothing or little.  And then truly great men, but with some defect in
their composition, which neutralizes their whole force.  Here is a
Damascus blade, such as you may search through nature in vain to
parallel, laid up on the shelf in some village to rust and ruin.  And
how many seem not quite available for that idea which they represent!
Now and then comes a bolder spirit, I should rather say, a more
surrendered soul, more informed and led by God, which is much in
advance of the rest, quite beyond their sympathy, but predicts what
shall soon be the general fulness; as when we stand by the seashore,
whilst the tide is coming in, a wave comes up the beach far higher
than any foregoing one, and recedes; and for a long while none comes
up to that mark; but after some time the whole sea is there and
beyond it.

        But we are not permitted to stand as spectators of the pageant
which the times exhibit: we are parties also, and have a
responsibility which is not to be declined.  A little while this
interval of wonder and comparison is permitted us, but to the end
that we shall play a manly part.  As the solar system moves forward
in the heavens, certain stars open before us, and certain stars close
up behind us; so is man's life.  The reputations that were great and
inaccessible change and tarnish.  How great were once Lord Bacon's
dimensions! he is now reduced almost to the middle height; and many
another star has turned out to be a planet or an asteroid: only a few
are the fixed stars which have no parallax, or none for us.  The
change and decline of old reputations are the gracious marks of our
own growth.  Slowly, like light of morning, it steals on us, the new
fact, that we, who were pupils or aspirants, are now society: do
compose a portion of that head and heart we are wont to think worthy
of all reverence and heed.  We are the representatives of religion
and intellect, and stand in the light of Ideas, whose rays stream
through us to those younger and more in the dark.  What further
relations we sustain, what new lodges we are entering, is now
unknown.  To-day is a king in disguise.  To-day always looks mean to
the thoughtless, in the face of an uniform experience, that all good
and great and happy actions are made up precisely of these blank
to-days.  Let us not be so deceived.  Let us unmask the king as he
passes.  Let us not inhabit times of wonderful and various promise
without divining their tendency.  Let us not see the foundations of
nations, and of a new and better order of things laid, with roving
eyes, and an attention preoccupied with trifles.

        The two omnipresent parties of History, the party of the Past
and the party of the Future, divide society to-day as of old.  Here
is the innumerable multitude of those who accept the state and the
church from the last generation, and stand on no argument but
possession.  They have reason also, and, as I think, better reason
than is commonly stated.  No Burke, no Metternich has yet done full
justice to the side of conservatism.  But this class, however large,
relying not on the intellect but on instinct, blends itself with the
brute forces of nature, is respectable only as nature is, but the
individuals have no attraction for us.  It is the dissenter, the
theorist, the aspirant, who is quitting this ancient domain to embark
on seas of adventure, who engages our interest.  Omitting then for
the present all notice of the stationary class, we shall find that
the movement party divides itself into two classes, the actors, and
the students.

        The actors constitute that great army of martyrs who, at least
in America, by their conscience and philanthropy, occupy the ground
which Calvinism occupied in the last age, and compose the visible
church of the existing generation.  The present age will be marked by
its harvest of projects for the reform of domestic, civil, literary,
and ecclesiastical institutions.  The leaders of the crusades against
War, Negro slavery, Intemperance, Government based on force, Usages
of trade, Court and Custom-house Oaths, and so on to the agitators on
the system of Education and the laws of Property, are the right
successors of Luther, Knox, Robinson, Fox, Penn, Wesley, and
Whitfield.  They have the same virtues and vices; the same noble
impulse, and the same bigotry.  These movements are on all accounts
important; they not only check the special abuses, but they educate
the conscience and the intellect of the people.  How can such a
question as the Slave trade be agitated for forty years by all the
Christian nations, without throwing great light on ethics into the
general mind?  The fury, with which the slave-trader defends every
inch of his bloody deck, and his howling auction-platform, is a
trumpet to alarm the ear of mankind, to wake the dull, and drive all
neutrals to take sides, and to listen to the argument and the
verdict.  The Temperance-question, which rides the conversation of
ten thousand circles, and is tacitly recalled at every public and at
every private table, drawing with it all the curious ethics of the
Pledge, of the Wine-question, of the equity of the manufacture and
the trade, is a gymnastic training to the casuistry and conscience of
the time.  Antimasonry had a deep right and wrong, which gradually
emerged to sight out of the turbid controversy.  The political
questions touching the Banks; the Tariff; the limits of the executive
power; the right of the constituent to instruct the representative;
the treatment of the Indians; the Boundary wars; the Congress of
nations; are all pregnant with ethical conclusions; and it is well if
government and our social order can extricate themselves from these
alembics, and find themselves still government and social order.  The
student of history will hereafter compute the singular value of our
endless discussion of questions, to the mind of the period.

        Whilst each of these aspirations and attempts of the people for
the Better is magnified by the natural exaggeration of its advocates,
until it excludes the others from sight, and repels discreet persons
by the unfairness of the plea, the movements are in reality all parts
of one movement.  There is a perfect chain, -- see it, or see it not,
-- of reforms emerging from the surrounding darkness, each cherishing
some part of the general idea, and all must be seen, in order to do
justice to any one.  Seen in this their natural connection, they are
sublime.  The conscience of the Age demonstrates itself in this
effort to raise the life of man by putting it in harmony with his
idea of the Beautiful and the Just.  The history of reform is always
identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact.  Our modes
of living are not agreeable to our imagination.  We suspect they are
unworthy.  We arraign our daily employments.  They appear to us
unfit, unworthy of the faculties we spend on them.  In conversation
with a wise man, we find ourselves apologizing for our employments;
we speak of them with shame.  Nature, literature, science, childhood,
appear to us beautiful; but not our own daily work, not the ripe
fruit and considered labors of man.  This beauty which the fancy
finds in everything else, certainly accuses that manner of life we
lead.  Why should it be hateful?  Why should it contrast thus with
all natural beauty?  Why should it not be poetic, and invite and
raise us?  Is there a necessity that the works of man should be
sordid?  Perhaps not.  -- Out of this fair Idea in the mind springs
the effort at the Perfect.  It is the interior testimony to a fairer
possibility of life and manners, which agitates society every day
with the offer of some new amendment.  If we would make more strict
inquiry concerning its origin, we find ourselves rapidly approaching
the inner boundaries of thought, that term where speech becomes
silence, and science conscience.  For the origin of all reform is in
that mysterious fountain of the moral sentiment in man, which, amidst
the natural, ever contains the supernatural for men.  That is new and
creative.  That is alive.  That alone can make a man other than he
is.  Here or nowhere resides unbounded energy, unbounded power.

        The new voices in the wilderness crying "Repent," have revived
a hope, which had well nigh perished out of the world, that the
thoughts of the mind may yet, in some distant age, in some happy
hour, be executed by the hands.  That is the hope, of which all other
hopes are parts.  For some ages, these ideas have been consigned to
the poet and musical composer, to the prayers and the sermons of
churches; but the thought, that they can ever have any footing in
real life, seems long since to have been exploded by all judicious
persons.  Milton, in his best tract, describes a relation between
religion and the daily occupations, which is true until this time.

        "A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and to his profits,
finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many piddling
accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock going
upon that trade.  What should he do?  Fain he would have the name to
be religious; fain he would bear up with his neighbors in that.  What
does he, therefore, but resolve to give over toiling, and to find
himself out some factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the
whole managing of his religious affairs; some divine of note and
estimation that must be.  To him he adheres, resigns the whole
warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys, into his
custody; and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion;
esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and
commendatory of his own piety.  So that a man may say, his religion
is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual moveable, and
goes and comes near him, according as that good man frequents the
house.  He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him;
his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped, and
sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted, and after the malmsey,
or some well spiced beverage, and better breakfasted than he whose
morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs between Bethany
and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his
kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his religion."

        This picture would serve for our times.  Religion was not
invited to eat or drink or sleep with us, or to make or divide an
estate, but was a holiday guest.  Such omissions judge the church; as
the compromise made with the slaveholder, not much noticed at first,
every day appears more flagrant mischief to the American
constitution.  But now the purists are looking into all these
matters.  The more intelligent are growing uneasy on the subject of
Marriage.  They wish to see the character represented also in that
covenant.  There shall be nothing brutal in it, but it shall honor
the man and the woman, as much as the most diffusive and universal
action.  Grimly the same spirit looks into the law of Property, and
accuses men of driving a trade in the great boundless providence
which had given the air, the water, and the land to men, to use and
not to fence in and monopolize.  It casts its eye on Trade, and Day
Labor, and so it goes up and down, paving the earth with eyes,
destroying privacy, and making thorough-lights.  Is all this for
nothing?  Do you suppose that the reforms, which are preparing, will
be as superficial as those we know?

        By the books it reads and translates, judge what books it will
presently print.  A great deal of the profoundest thinking of
antiquity, which had become as good as obsolete for us, is now
re-appearing in extracts and allusions, and in twenty years will get
all printed anew.  See how daring is the reading, the speculation,
the experimenting of the time.  If now some genius shall arise who
could unite these scattered rays!  And always such a genius does
embody the ideas of each time.  Here is great variety and richness of
mysticism, each part of which now only disgusts, whilst it forms the
sole thought of some poor Perfectionist or "Comer out," yet, when it
shall be taken up as the garniture of some profound and
all-reconciling thinker, will appear the rich and appropriate
decoration of his robes.

        These reforms are our contemporaries; they are ourselves; our
own light, and sight, and conscience; they only name the relation
which subsists between us and the vicious institutions which they go
to rectify.  They are the simplest statements of man in these
matters; the plain right and wrong.  I cannot choose but allow and
honor them.  The impulse is good, and the theory; the practice is
less beautiful.  The Reformers affirm the inward life, but they do
not trust it, but use outward and vulgar means.  They do not rely on
precisely that strength which wins me to their cause; not on love,
not on a principle, but on men, on multitudes, on circumstances, on
money, on party; that is, on fear, on wrath, and pride.  The love
which lifted men to the sight of these better ends, was the true and
best distinction of this time, the disposition to trust a principle
more than a material force.  I think _that_ the soul of reform; the
conviction, that not sensualism, not slavery, not war, not
imprisonment, not even government, are needed, -- but in lieu of them
all, reliance on the sentiment of man, which will work best the more
it is trusted; not reliance on numbers, but, contrariwise, distrust
of numbers, and the feeling that then are we strongest, when most
private and alone.  The young men, who have been vexing society for
these last years with regenerative methods, seem to have made this
mistake; they all exaggerated some special means, and all failed to
see that the Reform of Reforms must be accomplished without means.

        The Reforms have their high origin in an ideal justice, but
they do not retain the purity of an idea.  They are quickly organized
in some low, inadequate form, and present no more poetic image to the
mind, than the evil tradition which they reprobated.  They mix the
fire of the moral sentiment with personal and party heats, with
measureless exaggerations, and the blindness that prefers some
darling measure to justice and truth.  Those, who are urging with
most ardor what are called the greatest benefits of mankind, are
narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as the insane do.
They bite us, and we run mad also.  I think the work of the reformer
as innocent as other work that is done around him; but when I have
seen it near, I do not like it better.  It is done in the same way,
it is done profanely, not piously; by management, by tactics, and
clamor.  It is a buzz in the ear.  I cannot feel any pleasure in
sacrifices which display to me such partiality of character.  We do
not want actions, but men; not a chemical drop of water, but rain;
the spirit that sheds and showers actions, countless, endless
actions.  You have on some occasion played a bold part.  You have set
your heart and face against society, when you thought it wrong, and
returned it frown for frown.  Excellent: now can you afford to forget
it, reckoning all your action no more than the passing of your hand
through the air, or a little breath of your mouth?  The world leaves
no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast
idea.  To the youth diffident of his ability, and full of compunction
at his unprofitable existence, the temptation is always great to lend
himself to public movements, and as one of a party accomplish what he
cannot hope to effect alone.  But he must resist the degradation of a
man to a measure.  I must act with truth, though I should never come
to act, as you call it, with effect.  I must consent to inaction.  A
patience which is grand; a brave and cold neglect of the offices
which prudence exacts, so it be done in a deep, upper piety; a
consent to solitude and inaction, which proceeds out of an
unwillingness to violate character, is the century which makes the
gem.  Whilst therefore I desire to express the respect and joy I feel
before this sublime connection of reforms, now in their infancy
around us, I urge the more earnestly the paramount duties of
self-reliance.  I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey
my sense of the sacredness of private integrity.  All men, all
things, the state, the church, yea the friends of the heart are
phantasms and unreal beside the sanctuary of the heart.  With so much
awe, with so much fear, let it be respected.

        The great majority of men, unable to judge of any principle
until its light falls on a fact, are not aware of the evil that is
around them, until they see it in some gross form, as in a class of
intemperate men, or slaveholders, or soldiers, or fraudulent persons.
Then they are greatly moved; and magnifying the importance of that
wrong, they fancy that if that abuse were redressed, all would go
well, and they fill the land with clamor to correct it.  Hence the
missionary and other religious efforts.  If every island and every
house had a Bible, if every child was brought into the Sunday School,
would the wounds of the world heal, and man be upright?

 
        But the man of ideas, accounting the circumstance nothing,
judges of the commonwealth from the state of his own mind.  `If,' he
says, `I am selfish, then is there slavery, or the effort to
establish it, wherever I go.  But if I am just, then is there no
slavery, let the laws say what they will.  For if I treat all men as
gods, how to me can there be such a thing as a slave?' But how
frivolous is your war against circumstances.  This denouncing
philanthropist is himself a slaveholder in every word and look.  Does
he free me?  Does he cheer me?  He is the state of Georgia, or
Alabama, with their sanguinary slave-laws walking here on our
north-eastern shores.  We are all thankful he has no more political
power, as we are fond of liberty ourselves.  I am afraid our virtue
is a little geographical.  I am not mortified by our vice; that is
obduracy; it colors and palters, it curses and swears, and I can see
to the end of it; but, I own, our virtue makes me ashamed; so sour
and narrow, so thin and blind, virtue so vice-like.  Then again, how
trivial seem the contests of the abolitionist, whilst he aims merely
at the circumstance of the slave.  Give the slave the least elevation
of religious sentiment, and he is no slave: you are the slave: he not
only in his humility feels his superiority, feels that much deplored
condition of his to be a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too.
He is the master.  The exaggeration, which our young people make of
his wrongs, characterizes themselves.  What are no trifles to them,
they naturally think are no trifles to Pompey.

        We say, then, that the reforming movement is sacred in its
origin; in its management and details timid and profane.  These
benefactors hope to raise man by improving his circumstances: by
combination of that which is dead, they hope to make something alive.
In vain.  By new infusions alone of the spirit by which he is made
and directed, can he be re-made and reinforced.  The sad Pestalozzi,
who shared with all ardent spirits the hope of Europe on the outbreak
of the French Revolution, after witnessing its sequel, recorded his
conviction, that "the amelioration of outward circumstances will be
the effect, but can never be the means of mental and moral
improvement." Quitting now the class of actors, let us turn to see
how it stands with the other class of which we spoke, namely, the
students.

 
        A new disease has fallen on the life of man.  Every Age, like
every human body, has its own distemper.  Other times have had war,
or famine, or a barbarism domestic or bordering, as their antagonism.
Our forefathers walked in the world and went to their graves,
tormented with the fear of Sin, and the terror of the Day of
Judgment.  These terrors have lost their force, and our torment is
Unbelief, the Uncertainty as to what we ought to do; the distrust of
the value of what we do, and the distrust that the Necessity (which
we all at last believe in) is fair and beneficent.  Our Religion
assumes the negative form of rejection.  Out of love of the true, we
repudiate the false: and the Religion is an abolishing criticism.  A
great perplexity hangs like a cloud on the brow of all cultivated
persons, a certain imbecility in the best spirits, which
distinguishes the period.  We do not find the same trait in the
Arabian, in the Hebrew, in Greek, Roman, Norman, English periods; no,
but in other men a natural firmness.  The men did not see beyond the
need of the hour.  They planted their foot strong, and doubted
nothing.  We mistrust every step we take.  We find it the worst thing
about time, that we know not what to do with it.  We are so
sharp-sighted that we can neither work nor think, neither read Plato
nor not read him.

        Then there is what is called a too intellectual tendency.  Can
there be too much intellect?  We have never met with any such excess.
But the criticism, which is levelled at the laws and manners, ends in
thought, without causing a new method of life.  The genius of the day
does not incline to a deed, but to a beholding.  It is not that men
do not wish to act; they pine to be employed, but are paralyzed by
the uncertainty what they should do.  The inadequacy of the work to
the faculties, is the painful perception which keeps them still.
This happens to the best.  Then, talents bring their usual
temptations, and the current literature and poetry with perverse
ingenuity draw us away from life to solitude and meditation.  This
could well be borne, if it were great and involuntary; if the men
were ravished by their thought, and hurried into ascetic
extravagances.  Society could then manage to release their shoulder
from its wheel, and grant them for a time this privilege of sabbath.
But they are not so.  Thinking, which was a rage, is become an art.
The thinker gives me results, and never invites me to be present with
him at his invocation of truth, and to enjoy with him its proceeding
into his mind.

        So little action amidst such audacious and yet sincere
profession, that we begin to doubt if that great revolution in the
art of war, which has made it a game of posts instead of a game of
battles, has not operated on Reform; whether this be not also a war
of posts, a paper blockade, in which each party is to display the
utmost resources of his spirit and belief, and no conflict occur; but
the world shall take that course which the demonstration of the truth
shall indicate.

        But we must pay for being too intellectual, as they call it.
People are not as light-hearted for it.  I think men never loved life
less.  I question if care and doubt ever wrote their names so legibly
on the faces of any population.  This _Ennui_, for which we Saxons
had no name, this word of France has got a terrific significance.  It
shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light.  Old age begins in
the nursery, and before the young American is put into jacket and
trowsers, he says, `I want something which I never saw before;' and
`I wish I was not I.' I have seen the same gloom on the brow even of
those adventurers from the intellectual class, who had dived deepest
and with most success into active life.  I have seen the authentic
sign of anxiety and perplexity on the greatest forehead of the state.
The canker worms have crawled to the topmost bough of the wild elm,
and swing down from that.  Is there less oxygen in the atmosphere?
What has checked in this age the animal spirits which gave to our
forefathers their bounding pulse?

        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?

        I do not wish to be guilty of the narrowness and pedantry of
inferring the tendency and genius of the Age from a few and
insufficient facts or persons.  Every age has a thousand sides and
signs and tendencies; and it is only when surveyed from inferior
points of view, that great varieties of character appear.  Our time
too is full of activity and performance.  Is there not something
comprehensive in the grasp of a society which to great mechanical
invention, and the best institutions of property, adds the most
daring theories; which explores the subtlest and most universal
problems?  At the manifest risk of repeating what every other Age has
thought of itself, we might say, we think the Genius of this Age more
philosophical than any other has been, righter in its aims, truer,
with less fear, less fable, less mixture of any sort.

        But turn it how we will, as we ponder this meaning of the
times, every new thought drives us to the deep fact, that the Time is
the child of the Eternity.  The main interest which any aspects of
the Times can have for us, is the great spirit which gazes through
them, the light which they can shed on the wonderful questions, What
we are? and Whither we tend?  We do not wish to be deceived.  Here we
drift, like white sail across the wild ocean, now bright on the wave,
now darkling in the trough of the sea; -- but from what port did we
sail?  Who knows?  Or to what port are we bound?  Who knows?  There
is no one to tell us but such poor weather-tossed mariners as
ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some signal,
or floated to us some letter in a bottle from far.  But what know
they more than we?  They also found themselves on this wondrous sea.
No; from the older sailors, nothing.  Over all their
speaking-trumpets, the gray sea and the loud winds answer, Not in us;
not in Time.  Where then but in Ourselves, where but in that Thought
through which we communicate with absolute nature, and are made aware
that, whilst we shed the dust of which we are built, grain by grain,
till it is all gone, the law which clothes us with humanity remains
new? where, but in the intuitions which are vouchsafed us from
within, shall we learn the Truth?  Faithless, faithless, we fancy
that with the dust we depart and are not; and do not know that the
law and the perception of the law are at last one; that only as much
as the law enters us, becomes us, we are living men, -- immortal with
the immortality of this law.  Underneath all these appearances, lies
that which is, that which lives, that which causes.  This ever
renewing generation of appearances rests on a reality, and a reality
that is alive.

        To a true scholar the attraction of the aspects of nature, the
departments of life, and the passages of his experience, is simply
the information they yield him of this supreme nature which lurks
within all.  That reality, that causing force is moral.  The Moral
Sentiment is but its other name.  It makes by its presence or absence
right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, genius or depravation.  As the
granite comes to the surface, and towers into the highest mountains,
and, if we dig down, we find it below the superficial strata, so in
all the details of our domestic or civil life, is hidden the
elemental reality, which ever and anon comes to the surface, and
forms the grand men, who are the leaders and examples, rather than
the companions of the race.  The granite is curiously concealed under
a thousand formations and surfaces, under fertile soils, and grasses,
and flowers, under well-manured, arable fields, and large towns and
cities, but it makes the foundation of these, and is always
indicating its presence by slight but sure signs.  So is it with the
Life of our life; so close does that also hide.  I read it in glad
and in weeping eyes: I read it in the pride and in the humility of
people: it is recognized in every bargain and in every complaisance,
in every criticism, and in all praise: it is voted for at elections;
it wins the cause with juries; it rides the stormy eloquence of the
senate, sole victor; histories are written of it, holidays decreed to
it; statues, tombs, churches, built to its honor; yet men seem to
fear and to shun it, when it comes barely to view in our immediate
neighborhood.

        For that reality let us stand: that let us serve, and for that
speak.  Only as far as _that_ shines through them, are these times or
any times worth consideration.  I wish to speak of the politics,
education, business, and religion around us, without ceremony or
false deference.  You will absolve me from the charge of flippancy,
or malignity, or the desire to say smart things at the expense of
whomsoever, when you see that reality is all we prize, and that we
are bound on our entrance into nature to speak for that.  Let it not
be recorded in our own memories, that in this moment of the Eternity,
when we who were named by our names, flitted across the light, we
were afraid of any fact, or disgraced the fair Day by a pusillanimous
preference of our bread to our freedom.  What is the scholar, what is
the man _for_, but for hospitality to every new thought of his time?
Have you leisure, power, property, friends? you shall be the asylum
and patron of every new thought, every unproven opinion, every
untried project, which proceeds out of good will and honest seeking.
All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will of course at first
defame what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the
times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it: and the highest
compliment man ever receives from heaven, is the sending to him its
disguised and discredited angels.
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