【国外英文文学】自立.doc

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1、【国外英文文学】自立Self-Reliance and Other EssaysCatalogI. HistoryThere is no great and no smallTo the Soul that maketh all:And where it cometh, all things are;And it cometh everywhere.I am owner of the sphere,Of the seven stars and the solar year,Of Caesars hand, and Platos brain,Of Lord Christs heart, and

2、Shakspeares strain.ESSAY I HistoryThere is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato hasthought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; w

3、hat at any time has be-fallen any man, he canunderstand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is theonly and sovereign agent.Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man isexplicable

4、by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forthfrom the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it inappropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind

5、as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power tobut one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in oneacorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

6、 Epoch afterepoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit tothe manifold world.This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the wholeof history is in one man, it is all to be explained from indiv

7、idual experience. There is a relation betweenthe hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories ofnature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of mybody depends on the equilibrium of cen

8、trifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructedby the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one moreincarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light onwhat great bodies of men

9、have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolutionwas first a thought in one mans mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key tothat era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it willsolve the pro

10、blem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible orintelligible. We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner,must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. Whatbefe

11、ll Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the minds powers and depravations as whathas befallen us. Each new law and political movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of itstablets and say, Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself. This remedies the defect of our to

12、ogreat nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective: and as crabs, goats, scorpions, thebalance, and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my ownvices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.It is the unive

13、rsal nature which gives worth to particular men and things. Human life as containing this ismysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence theirultimate reason; all express more or less distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence.Prop

14、erty also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it withswords and laws, and wide and complex combinations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is the lightof all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for education, for justice, for charity, the fo

15、undation offriendship and love, and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of self-reliance. It isremarkable that involuntarily we always read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, theromancers, do not in their stateliest pictures - in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in t

16、he triumphs ofwill or of genius - anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for bettermen; but rather is it true, that in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakspeare says ofthe king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true

17、of himself. We sympathize in thegreat moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; -because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for us,as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded

18、.We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich, because they have externallythe freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said of thewise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, des

19、cribes hisunattained but attainable self. All literature writes the character of the wise man. Books, monuments,pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is forming. The silent and theeloquent praise him and accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by per

20、sonal allusions. Atrue aspirant, therefore, never needs look for allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears thecommendation, not of himself, but more sweet, of that character he seeks, in every word that is saidconcerning character, yea, further, in every fact and circumstance, - in the

21、 running river and the rustlingcorn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows from mute nature, from the mountains and the lightsof the firmament.These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day. The student is to readhistory actively and not passively; to esteem hi

22、s own life the text, and books the commentary. Thuscompelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. I haveno expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, bymen whose names have resounded far, has

23、any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society or mode of action inhistory, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful mannerto abbreviate itself and yield its own virtu

24、e to him. He should see that he can live all history in his ownperson. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but knowthat he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world; he must transfer the pointof view from which history is

25、 commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London to himself, and notdeny his conviction that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have any thing to say to him, he will trythe case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yieldtheir secret sens

26、e, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature,betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether thesolid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre,P

27、alestine, and even early Rome, are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standingstill in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have madea constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go

28、thesame way. What is History, said Napoleon, but a fable agreed upon? This life of ours is stuck roundwith Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court, and Commerce, as with so manyflowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. I believe in Eternit

29、y. Ican find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the Islands, - the genius and creative principle of each and of alleras in my own mind.We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying themhere. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is p

30、roperly no history; only biography. Everymind must know the whole lesson for itself, - must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, whatit does not live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipularconvenience, it will lose all the good of verifyi

31、ng for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere,sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that loss by doing the work itself. Fergusondiscovered many things in astronomy which had long been known. The better for him.History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the stat

32、e enacts indicates a fact in human nature;that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, - see how it could and must be.So stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon,before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney,

33、 of Marmaduke Robinson, before a French Reign ofTerror, and a Salem hanging of witches, before a fanatic Revival, and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or inProvidence. We assume that we under like influence should be alike affected, and should achieve the like;and we aim to master intellectually the s

34、teps, and reach the same height or the same degradation, thatour fellow, our proxy, has done.All inquiry into antiquity, - all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, theOhio Circles, Mexico, Memphis, - is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There o

35、rThen, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits andpyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself.When he has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as h

36、e, soarmed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself should also have worked, the problem is solved;his thought lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them allwith satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are now.A Gothic cathedral affirms tha

37、t it was done by us, and not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we findit not in our man. But we apply ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves into the placeand state of the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the firsttype, and the d

38、ecoration of it as the wealth of the nation increased; the value which is given to wood bycarving led to the carving over the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. When we have gone throughthis process, and added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its Saints daysan

39、d image-worship, we have, as it were, been the man that made the minster; we have seen how it couldand must be. We have the sufficient reason.The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some men classify objects by color andsize and other accidents of appearance; others by intri

40、nsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect.The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To thepoet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy,all men divine. For the e

41、ye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical substance,every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, whyshould we be such h

42、ard pedants, and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or ofmagnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play withthem as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and, farback in the womb

43、 of things, sees the rays parting from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinitediameters. Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis ofnature. Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, theconstant individu

44、al; through countless individuals, the fixed species; through many species, the genus;through all genera, the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity.Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same. She casts the same thought into troops offorms, a

45、s a poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and toughness of matter, asubtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The adamant streams into soft but precise form before it,and, whilst I look at it, its outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as form; y

46、et neverdoes it quite deny itself. In man we still trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges ofservitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus,transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how changed, when as Isis in Egypt she me

47、ets Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman, with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the splendidornament of her brows!The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious. There is at the surface infinitevariety of things; at the centre there is simplicity of cau

48、se. How many are the acts of one man in whichwe recognize the same character! Observe the sources of our information in respect to the Greek genius.We have the _civil history_ of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have givenit; a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were, and what they did. We have the samenational mind expressed for us again in their _literature_, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy;a very complete form. Then we have it once more in their _architecture_, a beauty as of temperance