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

arrive at any result! how tardily they pass from it to another! The
crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological
structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata,
concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never
vertically. Here comes by a great inquisitor with auger and
plumb-line, and will bore an Artesian well through our conventions
and theories, and pierce to the core of things. But as soon as he
probes the crust, behold gimlet, plumb-line, and philosopher take a
lateral direction, in spite of all resistance, as if some strong wind
took everything off its feet, and if you come month after month to
see what progress our reformer has made, -- not an inch has he
pierced, -- you still find him with new words in the old place,
floating about in new parts of the same old vein or crust. The new
book says, `I will give you the key to nature,' and we expect to go
like a thunderbolt to the centre. But the thunder is a surface
phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does the sage. The wedge
turns out to be a rocket. Thus a man lasts but a very little while,
for his monomania becomes insupportably tedious in a few months. It
is so with every book and person: and yet -- and yet -- we do not
take up a new book, or meet a new man, without a pulse-beat of
expectation. And this invincible hope of a more adequate interpreter
is the sure prediction of his advent.

In the absence of man, we turn to nature, which stands next.
In the divine order, intellect is primary; nature, secondary; it is
the memory of the mind. That which once existed in intellect as pure
law, has now taken body as Nature. It existed already in the mind in
solution; now, it has been precipitated, and the bright sediment is
the world. We can never be quite strangers or inferiors in nature.
It is flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone. But we no longer
hold it by the hand; we have lost our miraculous power; our arm is no
more as strong as the frost; nor our will equivalent to gravity and
the elective attractions. Yet we can use nature as a convenient
standard, and the meter of our rise and fall. It has this advantage
as a witness, it cannot be debauched. When man curses, nature still
testifies to truth and love. We may, therefore, safely study the
mind in nature, because we cannot steadily gaze on it in mind; as we
explore the face of the sun in a pool, when our eyes cannot brook his
direct splendors.

It seems to me, therefore, that it were some suitable paean, if
we should piously celebrate this hour by exploring the _method of
nature_. Let us see _that_, as nearly as we can, and try how far it
is transferable to the literary life. Every earnest glance we give
to the realities around us, with intent to learn, proceeds from a
holy impulse, and is really songs of praise. What difference can it
make whether it take the shape of exhortation, or of passionate
exclamation, or of scientific statement? These are forms merely.
Through them we express, at last, the fact, that God has done thus or
thus.