make up the result of existing civility. We are all agreed that we have not on the instant better men to show than Plutarch's heroes. The world is al ways equal to itself. We cannot yet afford to drop Homer, nor ^Eschylus, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Archimedes. Later, each European nation, after the breaking up of the Roman Empire, had its ro mantic era, and the productions of that era in each rose to about the same height. Take for an exam ple in literature the Romance of Arthur, in Brit ain, or in the opposite province of Brittany; the Chansons de Roland, in France; the Chronicle of the Cid, in Spain; the Niebelungen Lied, in Germa ny; the Norse Sagas, in Scandinavia; and, I may add, the Arabian Nights, on the African coast. But if these works still survive and multiply, what shall we say of names more distant, or hidden through their very superiority to their coevals, — names of men who have left remains that certify a height of genius in their several directions not since sur passed, and which men in proportion to their wis dom still cherish, — as Zoroaster, Confucius, and the grand scriptures, only recently known to West ern nations, of the Indian Vedas, the Institutes of Menu, the Puranas, the poems of the Mahabarat and the Ramayana?
In modern Europe, the Middle Ages were called the Dark Ages. Who dares to call them so now? They are seen to be the feet on which we walk, the 192 PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
eyes with which we see. 'T is one of our triumphs to have reinstated them. Their Dante and Alfred and Wickliffe and Abelard and Bacon; their Magna Charta, decimal numbers, mariner's compass, gun powder, glass, paper, and clocks; chemistry, algebra, astronomy; their Gothic architecture, their paint ing, — are the delight and tuition of ours. Six hundred years ago Roger Bacon explained the pre cession of the equinoxes, and the necessity of reform in the calendar; looking over how many horizons as far as into Liverpool and New York, he an nounced that machines can be constructed to drive ships more rapidly than a whole galley of rowers could do, nor would they need anything but a pilot to steer; carriages, to move with incredible speed, without aid of animals; and machines to fly into the air like birds. Even the races that we still call savage or semi-savage, and which preserve their arts from immemorial traditions, vindicate their faculty by the skill with which they make their yam- cloths, pipes, bows, boats, and carved war-clubs. The war-proa of the Malays in the Japanese waters struck Commodore Perry by its close resemblance to the yacht "America."
As we find thus a certain equivalence in the ages, there is also an equipollence of individual genius to the nation which it represents. It is a curious fact, that a certain enormity of culture makes a man invisible to his contemporaries. 'T is PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 193 always hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it, you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But, from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon. The founders of nations, the wise men and inventors, who shine af terwards as their gods, were probably martyrs in their own time. All the transcendent writers and artists of the world, — 't is doubtful who they were, — they are lifted so fast into mythology, — Homer, Menu, Viasa, Daedalus, Hermes, Zoroaster, even Swedenborg and Shakspeare. The early names are too typical, — Homer, or blind man; Menu, or man; Viasa, compiler; Daedalus, cunning; Hermes, interpreter; and so on. Probably, the men were so great, so self-fed, that the recognition of them by others was not necessary to them. And every one has heard the remark (too often, I fear, politely made), that the philosopher was above his audience. I think I have seen two or three great men who, for that reason, were of no account among scholars.
But Jove is in his reserves. The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in the mi norities. Michel Angelo was the conscience of Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now; but in his own days, his friends were few; and you would need to hunt him in a conventicle with the Methodists of the era, name- 194 PKOGRESS OF CULTURE.
ly, Savonarola, Vittoria Colonna, Contarini, Pole, Occhino, — superior souls, the religious of that day, drawn to each other, and under some cloud with the rest of the world, — reformers, the radicals of the hour, banded against the corruptions of Rome, and as lonely and as hated as Dante before them.
I find the single mind equipollent to a multitude of minds, say to a nation of minds, as a drop of wa ter balances the sea; and under this view the prob lem of culture assumes wonderful interest. Culture implies all which gives the mind possession of its own powers; as languages to the critic, telescope to the astronomer. Culture alters the political status of an individual. It raises a rival royalty in a mon archy. 'T is king against king. It is ever the ro mance of history in all dynasties, — the co-presence of the revolutionary force in intellect. It creates a personal independence which the monarch cannot look down, and to which he must often succumb. If a man know the laws of nature better than other men, his nation cannot spare him; nor if he know the power of numbers, the secret of geometry, of algebra, on which the computations of astronomy, of navigation, of machinery, rest. If he can con verse better than any other, he rules the minds of men wherever he goes; if he has imagination, he intoxicates men. If he has wit, he tempers despot ism by epigrams: a song, a satire, a sentence, has played its part in great events. Eloquence a hun- PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 195 dred times has turned the scale of war and peace at will. The history of Greece is at one time reduced to two persons, — Philip, or the successor of Philip, on one side, and Demosthenes, a private citizen, on the other. If he has a military genius, like Beli- sarius, or administrative faculty, like Chatham or Bismarck, he is the king's king. If a theologian of deep convictions and strong understanding carries his country with him, like.Luther, the state be comes Lutheran, in spite of the Emperor, as Thomas a Becket overpowered the English Henry. Wit has a great charter. Popes and kings and Councils of Ten are very sharp with their censorships and in quisitions, but it is on dull people. Some Dante or Angelo, Rabelais, Hafiz, Cervantes, Erasmus, Beranger, Bettine von Arnim, or whatever genuine wit of the old inimitable class, is always allowed. Kings feel that this is that which they themselves represent; this is no red-kerchiefed, red-shirted rebel, but loyalty, kingship. This is real kingship, and their own only titular. Even manners are a distinction, which, we sometimes see, are not to be overborne by rank or official power, or even by other eminent talents, since they too proceed from a certain deep innate perception of fit and fair.
It is too plain that a cultivated laborer is worth many untaught laborers; that a scientific engineer, with instruments and steam, is worth many hun dred men, many thousands; that Archimedes or 196 PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
Napoleon is worth for labor a thousand thousands; .and that in every wise and genial soul we have England, Greece, Italy, walking, and can dispense with populations of navvies.
Literary history and all history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one. Every book is written with a constant secret ref erence to the few intelligent persons whom the writer believes to exist in the million. The artist has always the masters in his eye, though he affect to flout them. Michel Angelo is thinking of Da Vinci, and liaffaelle is thinking of Michel Angelo. Tennyson would give liis fame for a verdict in his favor from Wordsworth. Agassiz and Owen and Huxley affect to address the American and Eng lish people, but are really writing to each other. Everett dreamed of Webster. McKay, the ship builder, thinks of George Steers; and Steers, of Pook, the naval constructor. The names of the masters at the head of each department of sci ence, art, or function are often little known to the world, but are always known to the adepts; as Robert Brown in botany, and Gauss in mathe matics. Often the master is a hidden man, but not to the true student; invisible to all the rest, resplendent to him. All his own work and cul ture form the eye to see the master. In politics, mark the importance of minorities of one, as of Phocion, Cato, Lafayette, Arago. The -importance PEOGKESS OF CULTURE. 197 of the one person who has the truth over nations who have it not, is because power obeys reality, and not appearance; according to quality, and not quantity. How much more are men than nations! the wise and good souls, the stoics in Greece and Rome, Socrates in Athens, the saints in Judsea, Alfred the king, Shakspeare the poet, Newton the philosopher, the perceiver, and obeyer of truth, — than the foolish and sensual millions around them! so that, wherever a true man appears, everything usually reckoned great dwarfs itself; he is the only great event, and it is easy to lift him into a mytho logical personage.
Then the next step in the series is the equiva lence of the soul to nature. I said that one of the distinctions of our century has been the devo tion' of cultivated men to natural science. The benefits thence derived to the arts and to civili zation are signal and immense. They are felt in navigation, in agriculture, in manufactures, in as tronomy, in mining, and in war. But over all their utilities, I must hold their chief value to be metaphysical. The chief value is not the useful powers he obtained, but the test it has been of the scholar. He has accosted this immeasurable nature, and got clear answers. He understood what he read. He found agreement with himself. It taught him anew the reach of the human mind, and that it was citizen of the universe.
198 PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
The first quality we know in matter is centrality, — we call it gravity, — which holds the universe together, which remains pure and indestructible in each mote, as in masses and planets, and from each atom rays out illimitable influence. To this material essence answers Truth, in the intellectual world, — Truth, whose centre is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere, whose existence we cannot disimagine, — the soundness and health of things, against which no blow can be struck but it recoils on the striker, — Truth, on whose side we always heartily are. And the first measure of a mind is its centrality, its capacity of truth, and its adhesion to it.
When the correlation of the sciences was an nounced by Oersted and his colleagues, it was no surprise; we were found already prepared for it. The fact stated accorded with the auguries or divi nations of the human mind. Thus, if we should analyze Xewton's discovery, we should say that if it had not been anticipated by him, it would not have been found. "We are told that, in posting his books, after the French had measured on the earth a degree of the meridian, when he saw that his theoretic results were approximating that em pirical one, his hand shook, the figures danced, and he was so agitated that he was forced to call in an assistant to finish the computation. Why agi tated? — but because, when he saw, in the fall of PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 199 an apple to the ground, the fall of the earth to the sun, of the sun and of all suns to the centre, that perception was accompanied by the spasm of delight by which the intellect greets a fact more immense still, a fact really universal, — holding in intellect as in matter, in morals as in intellect, — that atom draws to atom throughout nature, and truth to truth throughout spirit? His law was only a par ticular of the more universal law of centrality. Every law in nature, as gravity, centripetence, re pulsion, polarity, undulation, has a counterpart in the intellect. The laws above are sisters of the laws below. Shall we study the mathematics of the sphere, and not its causal essence also? Na ture is a fable, whose moral blazes through it. There is no use in Copernicus, if the robust perio dicity of the solar system does not show its equal perfection in the mental sphere, — the periodicity, the compensatory errors, the grand reactions. I shall never believe that centrifugence and centri petence balance, unless mind heats and meliorates, as well as the surface and soil of the globe.
On this power, this all-dissolving unity, the em phasis of heaven and earth is laid. Nature is brute but as this soul quickens it; Nature always the effect, mind the flowing cause. Nature, we find, is ever as is our sensibility; it is hostile to igno rance; — plastic, transparent, delightful, to knowl edge. Mind carries the law; history is the slow 200 PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
and atomic unfolding. All things admit of this extended sense, and the universe at last is only prophetic, or, shall we say, symptomatic, of vaster interpretation and results. Nature an enormous system, but in mass and in particle curiously avail able to the humblest need of the little creature that walks on the earth! The immeasurableness of Nature is not more astounding than his power to gather all her omnipotence into a manageable rod or wedge, bringing it to a hair-point for the eye and hand of the philosopher.
Here stretches out of sight, out of conception even, this vast Nature, daunting, bewildering, but all penetrable, all self-similar, — an unbroken unity, — and the mind of man is a key to the whole. lie finds that the universe, as ^ewton said, " was made at one cast "; the mass is like the atom, — the same chemistry, gravity, and conditions. The asteroids are the chips of an old star, and a mete oric stone is a chip of an asteroid. As language is in the alphabet, so is entire Nature — the play of all its laws — in one atom. The good wit finds the law from a single observation, — the law, and its limitations, and its correspondences, — as the farmer finds his cattle by a footprint. " State the sun, and you state the planets, and conversely."
Whilst its power is offered to his hand, its laws to his science, not less its beauty speaks to his taste, imagination, and sentiment. Nature is sana- PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 201 tive, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity un der roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the pow ers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age, — lasting as space and time, — embosomed in time and space. And time and space, — what are they? Our first problems, which we ponder all our lives through, and leave where we found them; whose outrunning immensity, the old Greeks believed, astonished the gods themselves; of whose dizzy vastitudes all the worlds of God are a mere dot on the margin; impossible to deny, impossible to believe. Yet the moral element in man counter poises this dismaying immensity, and bereaves it of terror. The highest flight to which the muse of Horace ascended was in that triplet of lines in which he described the souls which can calmly confront the sublimity of nature: — " Htmc solem, et stellas, et decedentia certis Tempora moraentis, suut qui formidine nulla Imbuti spectant."
The sublime point of experience is the value of a sufficient man. Cube this value by the meeting 9* 202 PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
of two such, — of two or more such, — who under stand and support each other, and you have organ ized victory. At- any time, it only needs the con temporaneous appearance of a few superior and at tractive men to give a new and noble turn to the public mind.
The benefactors we have indicated were excep tional men, and great because exceptional. The question which the present age urges with increas ing emphasis, day by day, is, whether the high qualities which distinguished them can be im parted? The poet Wordsworth asked, " What one is, why may not millions be? " Why not? Knowl edge exists to be imparted. Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret. The inquisitiveness of the child to hear runs to meet the eagerness of the parent to explain. The air does not rush to fill a vacuum with such speed as the mind to catch the expected fact. Every artist was first an amateur. The ear outgrows the tongue, is sooner ripe and perfect; but the tongue is always learning to say what the ear has taught it, and the hand obeys the same lesson.
There is anything but humiliation in the homage men pay to a great man; it is sympathy, love of the same things, effort to reach them, — the expres sion of their hope of what they shall become, when the obstructions of their mal-formation and mal- education shall be trained away. Great men shall PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 203 not impoverish, but enrich us. Great men, — the age goes on their credit; but all the rest, when their wires are continued, and not cut, can do as signal things, and in new parts of nature. " No an gel in his heart acknowledges any one superior to himself but the Lord alone." There is not a person here present to whom omens that should astonish have not predicted his future, have not uncovered his past. The dreams of the night supplement by their divination the imperfect experiments of the day. Every soliciting instinct is only a hint of a coming fact, as the air and water that hang invis ibly around us hasten to become solid in the oak and the animal. But the recurrence to high sources is rare. In our daily intercourse, we go with the crowd, lend ourselves to low fears and hopes, be come the victims of our own arts and implements, and disuse our resort to the Divine oracle. It is only in the sleep of the soul that we help ourselves by so many ingenious crutches and machineries. What is the use of telegraphs? What of news papers? To know in each social crisis how men feel in Kansas, in California, the wise man waits for no mails, reads no telegrams. He asks his own heart. If they are made as he is, if they breathe the like air, eat of the same wheat, have wives and children, he knows that their joy or resentment rises to the same point as his own. The inviolate soul is in perpetual telegraphic communication with 204 PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
the Source of events, has earlier information, a pri vate despatch, which relieves him of the terror which presses on the rest of the community.
The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral sentiment. This is the fountain of power, preserves its eternal newness, draws its own rent out of every novelty in science. Science cor rects the old creeds; sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms; and necessi tates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses. Yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment. That was older, and awaited expectant these larger insights.
The affections are the wings by which the intel lect launches on the void, and is borne across it. Great love is the inventor and expander of the frozen powers, the feathers frozen to our sides. It was the conviction of Plato, of Van Ilelmont, of Pascal, of Swedenborg, that piety is an essential condition of science, that great thoughts come from the heart. It happens sometimes that poets do not believe their own poetry; they are so much the less poets. But great men are sincere. Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfilment. Every generalization shows the way to a larger. Men say, Ah! if a man could impart his talent, instead of his performance, what mountains of guineas would PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 205 be paid! Yes, but in the measure of his absolute veracity he does impart it. When he does not play a part, does not wish to shine, when he talks to men with the unrestrained frankness which children use with each other, he communicates himself, and not his vanity. All vigor is contagious, and when we see creation we also begin to create. Depth of character, height of genius, can only find nourish ment in this soil. The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be an alyzed. Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understand ing. Hope never spreads her golden wings but on unfathomable seas. The same law holds for the in tellect as for the will. When the will is absolutely surrendered to the moral sentiment, that is virtue; when the wit is surrendered to intellectual truth, that is genius. Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor. I know well to what assembly of educated, reflecting, successful, and powerful persons I speak. Yours is the part of those who have re ceived much. It is an old legend of just men, Noblesse oblige; or, superior advantages bind you to larger generosity. Now I conceive that, in this economical world, where every drop and every crumb is husbanded, the transcendent powers of mind were not meant to be misused. The Divine 206 PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
Nature carries on its administration by good men. Here you are set down, scholars and idealists, as in a barbarous age; amidst insanity, to calm and guide it; amidst fools and blind, to see the right done; among violent proprietors, to check self-interest, stone-blind and stone-deaf, by considerations of hu manity to the workman and to his child; amongst angry politicians swelling with self-esteem, pledged to parties, pledged to clients, you are to make valid the large considerations of equity and good sense; under bad governments, to force on them, by your persistence, good laws. Around that immovable persistency of yours, statesmen, legislatures, must revolve, denying you, but not less forced to obey.
We wish to put the ideal rules into practice, to offer liberty instead of chains, and see whether liberty will not disclose its proper checks; believ ing that a free press will prove safer than the cen sorship; to ordain free trade, and believe that it will not bankrupt us; universal suffrage, believing that it will not carry us to mobs, or back to kings again. I believe that the checks are as sure as the springs. It is thereby that men are great, and have great allies. And who are the allies? Rude oppo sition, apathy, slander, — even these. Difficulties exist to be surmounted. The great heart will no more complain -of the obstructions that make suc cess hard, than of the iron walls of the gun which hinder the shot from scattering. It was walled PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 207 round with iron tube with that purpose, to give it irresistible force in one direction. A strenuous soul hates cheap successes. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defender. The great are not tender at being obscure, despised, insulted. Such only feel themselves in adverse fortune. Strong men greet war, tempest, hard times, which search till they find resistance and bottom. They wish, as Pindar said, " to tread the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron." Periodicity, reaction, are laws of mind as well as of matter. Bad kings and governors help us, if only they are bad enough. In England, it was the game laws which exasperated the farmers to carry the Eeform Bill. It was what we call plantation manners which drove peaceable, forgiving New England to eman cipation without phrase. In the Eebellion, who were our best allies? Always the enemy. The community of scholars do not know their own power, and dishearten each other by tolerating political baseness in their members. Now, nobody doubts the power of manners, or that wherever high society exists, it is very well able to exclude pretenders. The intruder finds himself uncomfort able, and quickly departs to his own gang. It has been our misfortune that the politics of America have been often immoral. It has had the worst effect on character. We are a complaisant, for giving people, presuming, perhaps, on a feeling of