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

diet; sympathy and usefulness, and not hoeing or coopering. Tell me
not how great your project is, the civil liberation of the world, its
conversion into a Christian church, the establishment of public
education, cleaner diet, a new division of labor and of land, laws of
love for laws of property; -- I say to you plainly there is no end to
which your practical faculty can aim, so sacred or so large, that, if
pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence to
the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with
objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible
to the senses: then will it be a god always approached, -- never
touched; always giving health. A man adorns himself with prayer and
love, as an aim adorns an action. What is strong but goodness, and
what is energetic but the presence of a brave man? The doctrine in
vegetable physiology of the _presence_, or the general influence of
any substance over and above its chemical influence, as of an alkali
or a living plant, is more predicable of man. You need not speak to
me, I need not go where you are, that you should exert magnetism on
me. Be you only whole and sufficient, and I shall feel you in every
part of my life and fortune, and I can as easily dodge the
gravitation of the globe as escape your influence.

But there are other examples of this total and supreme
influence, besides Nature and the conscience. "From the poisonous
tree, the world," say the Brahmins, "two species of fruit are
produced, sweet as the waters of life, Love or the society of
beautiful souls, and Poetry, whose taste is like the immortal juice
of Vishnu." What is Love, and why is it the chief good, but because
it is an overpowering enthusiasm? Never self-possessed or prudent,
it is all abandonment. Is it not a certain admirable wisdom,
preferable to all other advantages, and whereof all others are only
secondaries and indemnities, because this is that in which the
individual is no longer his own foolish master, but inhales an
odorous and celestial air, is wrapped round with awe of the object,
blending for the time that object with the real and only good, and
consults every omen in nature with tremulous interest. When we speak
truly, -- is not he only unhappy who is not in love? his fancied
freedom and self-rule -- is it not so much death? He who is in love
is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the
object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those
virtues which it possesses. Therefore if the object be not itself a
living and expanding soul, he presently exhausts it. But the love
remains in his mind, and the wisdom it brought him; and it craves a
new and higher object. And the reason why all men honor love, is
because it looks up and not down; aspires and not despairs.

And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of
the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new
picture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it
proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward.
Talent finds its models, methods, and ends, in society, exists for