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

We can point nowhere to anything final; but tendency appears on all
hands: planet, system, constellation, total nature is growing like a
field of maize in July; is becoming somewhat else; is in rapid
metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be man, than
yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a comet, a
globe, and parent of new stars. Why should not then these messieurs
of Versailles strut and plot for tabourets and ribbons, for a season,
without prejudice to their faculty to run on better errands by and
by?

But nature seems further to reply, `I have ventured so great a
stake as my success, in no single creature. I have not yet arrived
at any end. The gardener aims to produce a fine peach or pear, but
my aim is the health of the whole tree, -- root, stem, leaf, flower,
and seed, -- and by no means the pampering of a monstrous pericarp at
the expense of all the other functions.'

In short, the spirit and peculiarity of that impression nature
makes on us, is this, that it does not exist to any one or to any
number of particular ends, but to numberless and endless benefit;
that there is in it no private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the
whole is oppressed by one superincumbent tendency, obeys that
redundancy or excess of life which in conscious beings we call
_ecstasy_.

With this conception of the genius or method of nature, let us
go back to man. It is true, he pretends to give account of himself
to himself, but, at last, what has he to recite but the fact that
there is a Life not to be described or known otherwise than by
possession? What account can he give of his essence more than _so it
was to be_? The _royal_ reason, the Grace of God seems the only
description of our multiform but ever identical fact. There is
virtue, there is genius, there is success, or there is not. There is
the incoming or the receding of God: that is all we can affirm; and
we can show neither how nor why. Self-accusation, remorse, and the
didactic morals of self-denial and strife with sin, is a view we are
constrained by our constitution to take of the fact seen from the
platform of action; but seen from the platform of intellection, there
is nothing for us but praise and wonder.

The termination of the world in a man, appears to be the last
victory of intelligence. The universal does not attract us until
housed in an individual. Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility?
The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen
with the shore or the ship. Who would value any number of miles of
Atlantic brine bounded by lines of latitude and longitude? Confine
it by granite rocks, let it wash a shore where wise men dwell, and it
is filled with expression; and the point of greatest interest is
where the land and water meet. So must we admire in man, the form of
the formless, the concentration of the vast, the house of reason, the