Volume 2
1850 - September, 1851
I do not prefer one religion or philosophy to another. I have no sympathy with the bigotry and ignorance which make transient and partial and puerile distinctions between one man's faith or form of faith and another's -- as Christian and heathen. I pray to be delivered from narrowness, partiality, exaggeration, bigotry. To the philosopher, all sects, all nations, are alike. I like Brahma, Hari, Buddha, the Great Spirit, as well as God.
Man flows at once to God as soon as the channel of purity, physical, intellectual, and moral, is open.
Any reverence, even for a material thing, proceeds from an elevation of character.
Do a little more of that work which you have sometimes confessed to be good, which you feel that society and your justest judge rightly demands of you. Do what you reprove yourself for not doing. Know that you are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with yourself without reason. Let me say to you and to myself in one breath, Cultivate the tree which you have found to bear fruit in your soil.
It is not easy to make our lives respectable to ourselves by any course of activity. We have repeatedly to withdraw ourselves into our shells of thought like the tortoise, somewhat helplessly; and yet there is even more than philosophy in that. I do not love to entertain doubts and questions.
Everything has its use, and man seeks sedulously for the best particle for each use. The watchmaker finds the oil of the porpoise's jaw the best for oiling his watches. Man has a million eyes, and the race knows infinitely more than the individual. Consent to be wise through your race.
What is the beauty in the landscape but a certain fertility in me? I look in vain to see it realized but in my own life.
I find it to be the height of wisdom not to endeavor to oversee myself and live a life of prudence and common sense but to see over and above myself, entertaining sublime conjectures, to make myself the thoroughfare of thrilling thoughts, live all that can be lived. The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he not do?
I must live above all in the present.
We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!
If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man can serve that use which the author of this illustration did.
I think that we are not commonly aware that man is our contemporary, that in this strange, outlandish world, so barren, so prosaic, fit not to live in but merely pass through, that even here so divine a creature as man does actually live. Man, the crowning fact, the god we know. While the earth supports so rare an inhabitant, there is something to cheer us. Who shall say that there is no God, if there is a just man. It is only within a year that it has occurred to me that there is such a being actually existing on the globe. Now that I perceive it is so, many questions assume a new aspect. We have not only the idea and the vision of the divine ourselves, but we have brothers, it seems, who have this idea also. Methinks my neighbor is better than I, and his thought is better than mine. There is a representative of the divinity on earth, of [whom] all things fair and noble are to be expected. We have the material of heaven here. I think that the standing miracle to man is man. Behind the paling yonder, come rain or shine, hope or doubt, there dwells a man, an actual being who can sympathize with our sublimest thought.
I am struck by the fact that, though any important individual experience is rare, though it is so rare that the individual is conscious of a relation to his maker transcending time and space and earth, though any knowledge of, or communication from, "Providence" is the rarest thing in the world, yet men very easily, regarding themselves in the gross, speak of carrying out the designs of providence as nations.
To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it.
The hidden significance of these fables which is sometimes thought to have been detected, the ethics running parallel to the poetry and history, are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be made to express a variety of truths. As if they were the skeletons of still older and more universal truths than any whose flesh and blood for the time they are made to wear. It is like striving to make the sun, or the wind, or the sea symbols to signify exclusively the particular thoughts of our day. But what signifies it? In the myths a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn.
We believe that the possibilities of the future far exceed the accomplishments of the past. We review the past with common sense, but we anticipate the future with transcendental sense.
I am sane only when I have risen above my common sense, when I do not
take the foolish view of things which is commonly taken, when I do not
live for the low ends for which men commonly live. Wisdom is not
common. To what purposes have I senses, if I am thus absorbed in
affairs? My pulse must beat with nature. After a hard day's work
without a thought, turning my very brain into a mere tool, only in the
quiet of evening do I so far recover my senses as to hear the cricket,
which in fact has been chirping all day. In my better hours I am
conscious of the influx of a supreme and unquestionable wisdom which
partly unfits, and if I yielded to it more rememberingly would wholly
unfit me, for what is called the active business of life, for that
furnishes nothing on which the eye of reason can rest. What is that
other kind of life to which I am thus continually allured? which
alone I love? Is it a life for this world? Can a man feed and clothe
himself gloriously who keeps only the truth steadily before him? who
calls me in no evil to his aid? Are there duties which necessarily
interfere with the serene perception of truth? Are our serene moments
mere foretastes of heaven -- joys gratuitously vouchsafed to us as a
consolation -- or simply a transient realization of what might be the
whole tenor of our lives?
To be calm, to be serene! There is the calmness of the lake when
there is not a breath of wind; there is the calmness of a stagnant
ditch. So it is with us. Sometimes we are clarified and calmed
healthily, as we never were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but
by some unconscious obedience to the all-just laws so that we become
like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths
are revealed to ourselves. All the world goes by us and is reflected
in our deeps. Such clarity! obtained by such pure means! by simple
living, by honesty of purpose. We live and rejoice. I awoke into a
music which no one about me heard. Whom shall I thank for it? The
luxury of wisdom! the luxury of virtue! Are there any intemperate in
these things? I feel my Maker blessing me. To the sane man the world
is a musical instrument. The very touch affords an exquisite
pleasure.
It is unavoidable, the theory of transmigration; not merely a fancy of the past, but an instinct of the race.
Be ever so little distracted, your thoughts so little confused, your engagements so few, your attention so free, your existence so mundane, that in all places and all hours you can hear the sound of crickets in those seasons when they are to be heard. It is a mark of serenity and health of mind when a person hears this sound much.
My greatest skill has been to want but little.
It plainly makes me sad to think. Hence pensiveness is akin to sadness.
This is a world where there are flowers.
I deal with the truths that recommend themselves
to me -- please me --
not those merely which any system has voted to accept.
Some institutions -- most institutions, indeed -- have had a divine
origin. But of most that we see prevailing in society, nothing but
the form, the shell, is left; the life is extinct, and there is
nothing divine in them.
I fear that the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming more distinct and scientific; that in exchange for views as wide as heaven's cope, I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope. I see details, not wholes nor the shadow of the whole.
While the farmer is concerned about the crops which his fields bear, I will be concerned about the fertility of my human farm. I will watch the winds and the rains as they affect the crop of thought -- the crop of crops, ripe thoughts, which glow and fill the air with fragrance for centuries.
No doubt, like plants, we are fed through the atmosphere, and the varying atmospheres of various seasons of the year feed us variously. How often we are sensible of being thus fed and invigorated. And all nature contributes to this aerial diet its food of finest quality. Methinks that in the fragrance of the fruits I get a finer flavor, and in beauty (which is appreciated by sight -- the taste and smell of the eye), a finer still.
All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.
All wisdom is the reward of discipline, conscious or unconscious.
Cultivate reverence. It is as if you were so much more respectable yourself.
Our ecstatic states, which appear to yield so little fruit, have this value at least: though in the seasons when our genius reigns we may be powerless for expression, yet, in calmer seasons, when our talent is active, the memory of those rarer moods comes to color our picture and is the permanent paint-pot, as it were, into which we dip our brush. Thus no life or experience goes unreported at last; but if it be not solid gold, it is gold-leaf which gilds the furniture of the mind. It is an experience of infinite beauty on which we unfailingly draw, which enables us to exaggerate ever truly.
The scenery which is truly seen reacts on the life of the seer. How to live. How to get the most life. As if you were to teach the young hunter how to entrap his game. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. This is my everyday business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble over all fields on that errand and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax. I am like a bee searching the livelong day for the fruits of nature. Do I not impregnate and intermix the flowers, produce rare and finer varieties by transferring my eyes from one to another? I do as naturally and as joyfully, with my own humming music, seek honey all the day. With what honeyed thought any experience yields me as I take a bee line to my cell. It is with flowers I would deal. Where is the flower, there is the honey -- which is perchance the nectarous portion of the fruit - here is to be the fruit, and no doubt flowers are thus colored and painted to guide the bees. So by the dawning or radiance of beauty are we advertised where is the honey and the fruit of thought, of discourse, and of action. We are first attracted by the beauty of the flower, before we discover the honey which is a foretaste of the future fruit.
The art of spending a day. If by watching all day and all night I may detect some trace of the ineffable, then will it not be worth the while to watch? Watch and pray without ceasing, but not necessarily in sadness. Be of good cheer.
We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery. May we not probe it, pry into it, employ ourselves about it a little? To devote your life to the discovery of the divinity in nature or to the eating of oysters, would they not be attended with very different results?
How happens it that there are few men so well employed -- so much to their mind -- but that a little money or fame would buy them off from their present pursuits?
At the entrance to the Deep Cut, I heard the telegraph wire vibrating like an aeolian harp. It reminded me suddenly -- reservedly -- with a beautiful paucity of communication, even silently, such was its effects on my thoughts -- It reminded me, I say, with a certain apathetic moderation, of what finer and deeper stirrings I was susceptible, which grandly set all argument and dispute aside, a triumphant though transient exhibition of the truth. It told me by the faintest imaginable strain, it told me by the faintest strain that a human ear can hear, yet conclusively and past all refutation, that there were higher, infinitely higher, planes of life which it behooved me never to forget.
