"Emerson, Ralph W. - The Method of Nature" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

Therefore man must be on his guard against this cup of
enchantments, and must look at nature with a supernatural eye. By
piety alone, by conversing with the cause of nature, is he safe and
commands it. And because all knowledge is assimilation to the object
of knowledge, as the power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so must
its science or the description of it be. The poet must be a
rhapsodist: his inspiration a sort of bright casualty: his will in it
only the surrender of will to the Universal Power, which will not be
seen face to face, but must be received and sympathetically known.
It is remarkable that we have out of the deeps of antiquity in the
oracles ascribed to the half fabulous Zoroaster, a statement of this
fact, which every lover and seeker of truth will recognize. "It is
not proper," said Zoroaster, "to understand the Intelligible with
vehemence, but if you incline your mind, you will apprehend it: not
too earnestly, but bringing a pure and inquiring eye. You will not
understand it as when understanding some particular thing, but with
the flower of the mind. Things divine are not attainable by mortals
who understand sensual things, but only the light-armed arrive at the
summit."

And because ecstasy is the law and cause of nature, therefore
you cannot interpret it in too high and deep a sense. Nature
represents the best meaning of the wisest man. Does the sunset
landscape seem to you the palace of Friendship, -- those purple skies
and lovely waters the amphitheatre dressed and garnished only for the
exchange of thought and love of the purest souls? It is that. All
other meanings which base men have put on it are conjectural and
false. You cannot bathe twice in the same river, said Heraclitus;
and I add, a man never sees the same object twice: with his own
enlargement the object acquires new aspects.

Does not the same law hold for virtue? It is vitiated by too
much will. He who aims at progress, should aim at an infinite, not
at a special benefit. The reforms whose fame now fills the land with
Temperance, Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor,
fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when
prosecuted for themselves as an end. To every reform, in proportion
to its energy, early disgusts are incident, so that the disciple is
surprised at the very hour of his first triumphs, with chagrins, and
sickness, and a general distrust: so that he shuns his associates,
hates the enterprise which lately seemed so fair, and meditates to
cast himself into the arms of that society and manner of life which
he had newly abandoned with so much pride and hope. Is it that he
attached the value of virtue to some particular practices, as, the
denial of certain appetites in certain specified indulgences, and,
afterward, found himself still as wicked and as far from happiness in
that abstinence, as he had been in the abuse? But the soul can be
appeased not by a deed but by a tendency. It is in a hope that she
feels her wings. You shall love rectitude and not the disuse of
money or the avoidance of trade: an unimpeded mind, and not a monkish