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_ CIRCLES
NATURE centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.
X. CIRCLES
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it
forms is the second; and throughout nature this
primary figure is repeated without end. It is the
highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St.
Augustine described the nature of God as a circle
whose centre was everywhere and its circumference
nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious
sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already
deduced, in considering the circular or compensatory
character of every human action. Another analogy we
shall now trace, that every action admits of being
outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth
that around every circle another can be drawn; that
there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning;
that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon,
and under every deep a lower deep opens.
This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of
the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the
hands of man can never meet, at once the inspirer and
the condemner of every success, may conveniently serve
us to connect many illustrations of human power in
every department.
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is
fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of
degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent
law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the
fact and holds it fluid. Our culture is the
predominance of an idea which draws after it this
train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into
another idea: they will disappear. The Greek
sculpture is all melted away, as if it had been
statues of ice; here and there a solitary figure or
fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of
snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts in June
and July. For the genius that created it creates now
somewhat else. The Greek letters last a little longer,
but are already passing under the same sentence and
tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation
of new thought opens for all that is old. The new
continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet;
the new races fed out of the decomposition of the
foregoing. New arts destroy the old. See the investment
of capital in aqueducts made useless by hydraulics;
fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by
railways; sails, by steam; steam by electricity.
You admire this tower of granite, weathering the
hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand
built this huge wall, and that which builds is
better than that which is built. The hand that
built can topple it down much faster. Better than
the hand and nimbler was the invisible thought
which wrought through it; and thus ever, behind
the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being
narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer
cause. Every thing looks permanent until its secret
is known. A rich estate appears to women a firm and
lasting fact; to a merchant, one easily created out
of any materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good
tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold
mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a large farmer,
not much more fixed than the state of the crop. Nature
looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a
cause like all the rest; and when once I comprehend
that, will these fields stretch so immovably wide,
these leaves hang so individually considerable?
Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial.
Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying
though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is
the idea after which all his facts are classified. He
can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which
commands his own. The life of man is a self-evolving
circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes
on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and
that without end. The extent to which this generation
of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on
the force or truth of the individual soul. For it is
the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself
into a circular wave of circumstance,--as for instance
an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious
rite,--to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify and
hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong it
bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands
another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into
a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But
the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and
narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast
force and to immense and innumerable expansions.
Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series.
Every general law only a particular fact of some more
general law presently to disclose itself. There is no
outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The
man finishes his story,--how good! how final! how it
puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo!
on the other side rises also a man and draws a circle
around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of
the sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man,
but only a first speaker. His only redress is forthwith
to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men
do by themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the
mind and cannot be escaped, will presently be abridged
into a word, and the principle that seemed to explain
nature will itself be included as one example of a bolder
generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a
power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the
literatures of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven
which no epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is not
so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of
that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.
Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder: the
steps are actions; the new prospect is power. Every
several result is threatened and judged by that which
follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by the
new; it is only limited by the new. The new statement
is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in
the old, comes like an abyss of scepticism. But the
eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye and it are
effects of one cause; then its innocency and benefit
appear, and presently, all its energy spent, it pales
and dwindles before the revelation of the new hour.
Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look
crass and material, threatening to degrade thy theory
of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to refine and raise
thy theory of matter just as much.
There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness.
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and
if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the
divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last
chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened;
there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is,
every man believes that he has a greater possibility.
Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am
full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see
no reason why I should not have the same thought,
the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write,
whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the
world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this
direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence,
I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so
many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this
will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am
God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.
The continual effort to raise himself above himself,
to work a pitch above his last height, betrays itself
in a man's relations. We thirst for approbation, yet
cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of nature is
love; yet, if I have a friend I am tormented by my
imperfections. The love of me accuses the other party.
If he were high enough to slight me, then could I love
him, and rise by my affection to new heights. A man's
growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a
better. I thought as I walked in the woods and mused
on my friends, why should I play with them this game of
idolatry? I know and see too well, when not voluntarily
blind, the speedy limits of persons called high and
worthy. Rich, noble and great they are by the liberality
of our speech, but truth is sad. O blessed Spirit, whom
I forsake for these, they are not thou! Every personal
consideration that we allow costs us heavenly state. We
sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent
pleasure.
How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to
interest us when we find their limitations. The only
sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a
man's limitations, it is all over with him. Has he
talents? has he enterprise? has he knowledge? It boots
not. Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you
yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in; now, you
have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care
not if you never see it again.
Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty
seemingly discordant facts, as expressions of one
law. Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective
heads of two schools. A wise man will see that
Aristotle platonizes. By going one step farther back
in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled by
being seen to be two extremes of one principle, and
we can never go so far back as to preclude a still
higher vision.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this
planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a
conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no
man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There
is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned
to-morrow; there is not any literary reputation, not
the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be
revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the
thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the
manners and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of
a new generalization. Generalization is always a new
influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill
that attends it.
Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so
that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be
out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands.
This can only be by his preferring truth to his past
apprehension of truth, and his alert acceptance of it
from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that
his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity,
his world, may at any time be superseded and decease.
There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play
with it academically, as the magnet was once a toy.
Then we see in the heyday of youth and poetry that it
may be true, that it is true in gleams and fragments.
Then its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see
that it must be true. It now shows itself ethical and
practical. We learn that God is; that he is in me; and
that all things are shadows of him. The idealism of
Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of
Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact
that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing
and organizing itself. Much more obviously is history and
the state of the world at any one time directly dependent
on the intellectual classification then existing in the
minds of men. The things which are dear to men at this
hour are so on account of the ideas which have emerged
on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order
of things, as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of
culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system
of human pursuits.
Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation
we pluck up the termini which bound the common of
silence on every side. The parties are not to be
judged by the spirit they partake and even express
under this Pentecost. To-morrow they will have receded
from this high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find
them stooping under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us
enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on our walls.
When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates
us from the oppression of the last speaker, to oppress
us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own
thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem
to recover our rights, to become men. O, what truths
profound and executable only in ages and orbs, are
supposed in the announcement of every truth! In common
hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand
waiting, empty,--knowing, possibly, that we can be full,
surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to
us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god and
converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of
his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things,
and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer,
of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts
which loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday,--property,
climate, breeding, personal beauty and the like, have
strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned
settled shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities,
climates, religions, leave their foundations and dance
before our eyes. And yet here again see the swift
circumspection! Good as is discourse, silence is better,
and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the
distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer.
If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no
words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts,
no words would be suffered.
Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle
through which a new one may be described. The use of
literature is to afford us a platform whence we may
command a view of our present life, a purchase by
which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient
learning, install ourselves the best we can in Greek,
in Punic, in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier
see French, English and American houses and modes of
living. In like manner we see literature best from the
midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or
from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen
from within the field. The astronomer must have his
diameter of the earth's orbit as a base to find the
parallax of any star.
Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all
the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise
on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the
sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline to repeat
my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in
the power of change and reform. But some Petrarch or
Ariosto, filled with the new wine of his imagination,
writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full of daring
thought and action. He smites and arouses me with his
shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits, and
I open my eye on my own possibilities. He claps wings
to the sides of all the solid old lumber of the world,
and I am capable once more of choosing a straight path
in theory and practice.
We have the same need to command a view of the religion
of the world. We can never see Christianity from the
catechism:--from the pastures, from a boat in the pond,
from amidst the songs of wood-birds we possibly may.
Cleansed by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the
sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may
chance to cast a right glance back upon biography.
Christianity is rightly dear to the best of mankind; yet
was there never a young philosopher whose breeding had
fallen into the Christian church by whom that brave text
of Paul's was not specially prized:--"Then shall also the
Son be subject unto Him who put all things under him, that
God may be all in all." Let the claims and virtues of
persons be never so great and welcome, the instinct of man
presses eagerly onward to the impersonal and illimitable,
and gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of bigots with
this generous word out of the book itself.
The natural world may be conceived of as a system of
concentric circles, and we now and then detect in
nature slight dislocations which apprise us that this
surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding.
These manifold tenacious qualities, this chemistry and
vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to
stand there for their own sake, are means and methods
only,--are words of God, and as fugitive as other words.
Has the naturalist or chemist learned his craft, who
has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective
affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law
whereof this is only a partial or approximate statement,
namely that like draws to like, and that the goods which
belong to you gravitate to you and need not be pursued
with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate
also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not
through subtle subterranean channels need friend and fact
be drawn to their counterpart, but, rightly considered,
these things proceed from the eternal generation of the
soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.
The same law of eternal procession ranges all that
we call the virtues, and extinguishes each in the
light of a better. The great man will not be prudent
in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much
deduction from his grandeur. But it behooves each to
see, when he sacrifices prudence, to what god he
devotes it; if to ease and pleasure, he had better
be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can well
spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot
instead. Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through
the woods, that his feet may be safer from the bite
of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In many
years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it
seems to me that with every precaution you take against
such an evil you put yourself into the power of the evil.
I suppose that the highest prudence is the lowest prudence.
Is this too sudden a rushing from the centre to the verge
of our orbit? Think how many times we shall fall back into
pitiful calculations before we take up our rest in the
great sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new
centre. Besides, your bravest sentiment is familiar to
the humblest men. The poor and the low have their way of
expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you.
"Blessed be nothing" and "The worse things are, the better
they are" are proverbs which express the transcendentalism
of common life.
One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's
beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's
folly; as one beholds the same objects from a higher
point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts,
and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is
very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait
tediously. But that second man has his own way of
looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay
first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor?
the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind,
of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is no
other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of
trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the
aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach
one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate
my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me
live onward; you shall find that, though slower, the
progress of my character will liquidate all these debts
without injustice to higher claims. If a man should
dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this
be injustice? Does he owe no debt but money? And are all
claims on him to be postponed to a landlord's or a banker's?
There is no virtue which is final; all are initial.
The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The
terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast
away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed
such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser
vices:--
"Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,
Those smaller faults, half converts to the right."
It is the highest power of divine moments that they
abolish our contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth
and unprofitableness day by day; but when these waves
of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost time. I no
longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what
remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments
confer a sort of omnipresence and omnipotence which asks
nothing of duration, but sees that the energy of the mind
is commensurate with the work to be done, without time.
And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader
exclaim, you have arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an
equivalence and indifferency of all actions, and would
fain teach us that if we are true, forsooth, our crimes
may be lively stones out of which we shall construct the
temple of the true God!
I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am
gladdened by seeing the predominance of the saccharine
principle throughout vegetable nature, and not less by
beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of
the principle of good into every chink and hole that
selfishness has left open, yea into selfishness and sin
itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself without
its extreme satisfactions. But lest I should mislead any
when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind
the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set
the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on
what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as
true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me
sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless
seeker with no Past at my back.
Yet this incessant movement and progression which all
things partake could never become sensible to us but
by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability
in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of circles
proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central
life is somewhat superior to creation, superior to
knowledge and thought, and contains all its circles.
For ever it labors to create a life and thought as
Large and excellent as itself, but in vain, for that
which is made instructs how to make a better.
Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation,
but all things renew, germinate and spring. Why
should we import rags and relics into the new hour?
Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only
disease; all others run into this one. We call it by
many names,--fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity
and crime; they are all forms of old age; they are
rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness,
not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need
of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do
not grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive,
aspiring, with religious eye looking upward, counts
itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction
flowing from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy
assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they
renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary
and talk down to the young. Let them, then, become organs
of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold
truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed,
they are perfumed again with hope and power. This old age
ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment
is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the
coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life,
transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound
by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love.
No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in
the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only
as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day
the mood, the pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we
are building up our being. Of lower states, of acts of
routine and sense, we can tell somewhat; but the
masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal
movements of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable.
I can know that truth is divine and helpful; but how it
shall help me I can have no guess, for so to be is the
sole inlet of so to know. The new position of the
advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has
them all new. It carries in its bosom all the energies
of the past, yet is itself an exhalation of the morning.
I cast away in this new moment all my once hoarded
knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now, for the first time
seem I to know any thing rightly. The simplest words,--we
do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire.
The difference between talents and character is
adroitness to keep the old and trodden round, and
power and courage to make a new road to new and
better goals. Character makes an overpowering present;
a cheerful, determined hour, which fortifies all the
company by making them see that much is possible and
excellent that was not thought of. Character dulls
the impression of particular events. When we see the
conqueror we do not think much of any one battle or
success. We see that we had exaggerated the difficulty.
It was easy to him. The great man is not convulsible or
tormentable; events pass over him without much impression.
People say sometimes, 'See what I have overcome; see how
cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed over
these black events.' Not if they still remind me of the
black event. True conquest is the causing the calamity
to fade and disappear as an early cloud of insignificant
result in a history so large and advancing.
The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to
forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety,
to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without
knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing
great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life
is wonderful; it is by abandonment. The great moments of
history are the facilities of performance through the
strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion.
"A man" said Oliver Cromwell "never rises so high as when
he knows not whither he is going." Dreams and drunkenness,
the use of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit
of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction
for men. For the like reason they ask the aid of wild passions,
as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames and
generosities of the heart. _
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