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

which it exists, ere thou canst know the law. Known it will not be,
but gladly beloved and enjoyed.

The simultaneous life throughout the whole body, the equal
serving of innumerable ends without the least emphasis or preference
to any, but the steady degradation of each to the success of all,
allows the understanding no place to work. Nature can only be
conceived as existing to a universal and not to a particular end, to
a universe of ends, and not to one, -- a work of _ecstasy_, to be
represented by a circular movement, as intention might be signified
by a straight line of definite length. Each effect strengthens every
other. There is no revolt in all the kingdoms from the commonweal:
no detachment of an individual. Hence the catholic character which
makes every leaf an exponent of the world. When we behold the
landscape in a poetic spirit, we do not reckon individuals. Nature
knows neither palm nor oak, but only vegetable life, which sprouts
into forests, and festoons the globe with a garland of grasses and
vines.

That no single end may be selected, and nature judged thereby,
appears from this, that if man himself be considered as the end, and
it be assumed that the final cause of the world is to make holy or
wise or beautiful men, we see that it has not succeeded. Read
alternately in natural and in civil history, a treatise of astronomy,
for example, with a volume of French _Memoires pour servir_. When we
have spent our wonder in computing this wasteful hospitality with
which boon nature turns off new firmaments without end into her wide
common, as fast as the madrepores make coral, -- suns and planets
hospitable to souls, -- and then shorten the sight to look into this
court of Louis Quatorze, and see the game that is played there, --
duke and marshal, abbe and madame, -- a gambling table where each is
laying traps for the other, where the end is ever by some lie or
fetch to outwit your rival and ruin him with this solemn fop in wig
and stars, -- the king; one can hardly help asking if this planet is
a fair specimen of the so generous astronomy, and if so, whether the
experiment have not failed, and whether it be quite worth while to
make more, and glut the innocent space with so poor an article.

I think we feel not much otherwise if, instead of beholding
foolish nations, we take the great and wise men, the eminent souls,
and narrowly inspect their biography. None of them seen by himself
-- and his performance compared with his promise or idea, will
justify the cost of that enormous apparatus of means by which this
spotted and defective person was at last procured.

To questions of this sort, nature replies, `I grow.' All is
nascent, infant. When we are dizzied with the arithmetic of the
savant toiling to compute the length of her line, the return of her
curve, we are steadied by the perception that a great deal is doing;
that all seems just begun; remote aims are in active accomplishment.