The source of thought evolves its own rules, its own virtues, its own religion. Its whole equipment is new, and it can only fight with its own weapons. Is there only one courage, one gratitude, one benevolence? No, but as many as there are men. Every constitution has its own health and diseases. A new constitution, a new fever, say the physicians. I think the rea- son why men fail in their conflicts is because they wear other armor than their own. Each must have all, but by no means need he have it in your form. Each must be rich, but not only in money or lands, he may have instead the riches of riches, — creative supplying power."
Within this magical power derived from fidel- ity to his nature, he adds also the mechanical force of perseverance. He shall keep the law which shall keep him...In persistency, he knows the strength of Nature, and the immor- tality of man to lie. A man must do the work with that faculty he has now. But that faculty is the accumulation of past days. That you have done long ago helps you now. No rival can rival backward. What you have learned and done, is safe and fruitful. Work and learn 86 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT in evil days, in barren days, in days of depres- sion and calamity. ‘There is but one only liberator in this life from the demons that invade us, and that is, Endeavor, — earnest, entire, perennial endeavor.”
Follow this leading, nor ask too curiously whither. To follow it is thy part. And what if it lead, as men say, to an excess, to partiality, to individualism? Follow it still. His art shall suffice this artist, his flame this lover, his inspi- ration this poet. The artist must be sacrificed. Take it sadly home to thy heart, — the artist must pay for his learning and doing with his life. The old Herschel must choose between the night and the day, and draw on his night- cap when the sun rises, and defend his eyes for nocturnal use. Michael Angelo must paint Sis- tine ceilings till he can no longer read, except by holding the book over his head. Nature deals with all her children so. See the poor flies, lately so wanton, now fixed to the wall or the tree, exhausted and presently blown away. Men likewise, they put their lives into their deed. ioc.
There is a probity of the Intellect, which de- mands, if possible, virtues more costly than any INSTINCT AND INSPIRATION 87 Bible has consecrated. It consists in an absolute devotion to truth, founded in a faith in truth...« Lhevirtue of the Intellect is its own, as its courage is of its own kind: and at last, it will be justified, though for the time it seem hostile to that which it most reveres...I will speak the truth in my heart, or think the truth against what is called God...One polarity is impressed on the universe and on its particles. As the whole has its law, so each individual has his genius. Obedience to its genius (to speak a little scholastically) is the particular of faith; perception that the tendency of the whole is to the benefit of the individual is the universal of faith. Do not truck for your private immortality. If immortality, in the sense in which you seek it, is best, you shall be immortal. If it is up to the dignity of that order of things you know, it is secure. The sky, the sea, the plants, the rocks, astronomy, chemistry, keep their word. Morals and the genius of humanity will also. In short, the whole moral of modern science is the transference of that trust which is felt in Nature’s admired arrange- ments, to the sphere of freedom and of rational life? Yoces These studies seem to me to derive an im- 88 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT portance from their bearing on the universal question of modern times, the question of Reli- gion. It seems to me, as if men stood craving a more stringent creed than any of the pale and enervating systems to which they have had recourse. The Buddhist who finds gods masked in all his friends and enemies, and reads the issue of the conflict beforehand in the rank of the actors, is calm. The old Greek was respect- able and we are not yet able to forget his dramas,—who found the genius of tragedy in the conflict between Destiny and the strong should, and not like the moderns, in the weak would.’.«..
Our books are full of generous biographies of Saints, who knew not that they were such; of men and of women who lived for the benefit and healing of nature. But one fact I read in them all,—that there is a religion which sur- vives immutably all persons and fashions, and is worshipped and pronounced with emphasis again and again by some holy person;— and men, with their weak incapacity for principles, and their passion for persons, have run mad for the pronouncer, and forgot the religion. But there is surely enough for the heart and the imagination in the religion itself.’
INSTINCT AND INSPIRATION 89 The joy of knowledge, the late discovery that the veil which hid all things from him is really transparent, transparent everywhere to pure eyes, and the heart of trust which every percep- tion fortifies, — renew life for him. He finds that events spring from the same root as per- sons; the universe understands itself, and all the parts play with a sure harmony.
II] MEMORY EMORY is a primary and fundamental faculty, without which none other can work; the cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the other faculties are embedded; or it is the thread on which the beads of man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral action. Without it all life and thought were an unrelated succession. As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves.
We like longevity, we like signs of riches and extent of nature in an individual. And most of all we like a great memory. The lowest life remembers. The sparrow, the ant, the worm, have the same memory as we. If you bar their path, or offer them somewhat disagreeable to their senses, they make one or two trials, and then once for all avoid it.
Every machine must be perfect of its sort. It is essential to a locomotive that it can reverse its movement, and run backward and forward MEMORY gi with equal celerity. The builder of the mind found it not less needful that it should have retroaction, and command its past act and deed. Perception, though it were immense and could pierce through the universe, was not sufficient.
Memory performs the impossible for man by the strength of his divine arms; holds together past and present, beholding both, existing in both, abides in the flowing, and gives continuity and dignity to human life. It holds us to our family, to our friends. Hereby a home is pos- sible; hereby only a new fact has value.
Opportunities of investment are useful only to those who have capital. Any piece of know- ledge I acquire to-day, a fact that falls under my eyes, a book I read, a piece of news I hear, has a value at this moment exactly proportioned to my skill to deal with it. To-morrow, when I know more, I recall that piece of knowledge and use it better.
The Past has a new value every moment to the active mind, through the incessant purifica- tion and better method of its memory. Once it joined its facts by color and form and sensuous relations. Some fact that had a childish signi- ficance to your childhood and was a type in the nursery, when riper intelligence recalls it means 92 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT more and serves you better as an illustration; and perhaps in your age has new meaning. What was an isolated, unrelated belief or conjec- ture, our later experience instructs us how to place in just connection with other views which confirm and expand it. The old whim or per- ception was an augury of a broader insight, at which we arrive later with securer conviction. This is the companion, this the tutor, the poet, the library, with which you travel. It does not lie, cannot be corrupted, reports to you not what you wish, but what really befell. You say, “I can never think of some act of neglect, of selfishness, or of passion without pain.” Well, that is as it should be. That is the police of the Universe: the angels are set to punish you, so long as you are capable of such crime. But in the history of character the day comes when you are incapable of such crime. Then you suffer no more, you look on it as heaven looks on it, with wonder at the deed, and with applause at the pain it has cost you.’
Memory is not a pocket, but a living in- structor, with a prophetic sense of the values which he guards; a guardian angel set there within you to record your life, and by record- ing to animate you to uplift it. It is a scripture MEMORY 93 written day by day from the birth of the man; all its records full of meanings which open as he lives on, explaining each other, explaining the world to him and expanding their sense as he advances, until it shall become the whole law of Nature and life.
As every creature is furnished with teeth to seize and eat, and with stomach to digest its food, so the memory is furnished with a perfect apparatus. There is no book like the memory, none with such a good index, and that of every kind, alphabetic, systematic, arranged by names of persons, by colors, tastes, smells, shapes, like- ness, unlikeness, by all sorts of mysterious hooks and eyes to catch and hold, and contriv-. ances for giving a hint.
~The memory collects and re-collects. We figure it as if the mind were a kind of looking- glass, which being carried through the street of time receives on its clear plate every image that passes; only with this difference, that our plate is iodized so that every image sinks into it, and is held there. But in addition to this property it has one more, this, namely, that of all the million images that are imprinted, the very one we want reappears in the centre of the plate in the moment when we want it.
94 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT We can tell much about it, but you must not ask us what it is. On seeing a face I am aware that I have seen it before, or that I have not seen it before. On hearing a fact told I am aware that I knew it already. You say the first words of the old song, and I finish the line and stanza. But where I have them, or what be- comes of them when I am not thinking of them for months and years, that they should lie so still, as if they did not exist, and yet so nigh that they come on the instant when they are called for, never any man was so sharp-sighted, or could turn himself inside out quick enough to find.
"Tis because of the believed incompatibil- ity of the affirmative and advancing attitude of the mind with tenacious acts of recollection that people are often reproached with living in their memory. Late in life we live by memory, and in our solstices or periods of stagnation; as the starved camel in the desert lives on his humps. Memory was called by the schoolmen vespertina cognitio, evening knowledge, in dis- tinction from the command of the future which we have by the knowledge of causes, and which they called matutina cognitio, or morning knowledge.’
MEMORY 95 Am I asked whether the thoughts clothe themselves in words? I answer, Yes, always; but they are apt to be instantly forgotten. Never was truer fable than that of the Sibyl’s writing on leaves which the wind scatters. The differ- ence between men is that in one the memory with inconceivable swiftness flies after and re- collects the flying leaves, — flies on wing as fast as that mysterious whirlwind, and the envious Fate is baffled.
This command of old facts, the clear behold- ing at will of what is best in our experience, is our splendid privilege. ‘ He who calls what is vanished back again into being enjoys a bliss like that of creating,” says Niebuhr. The mem- ory plays a great part in settling the intellectual rank of men. We estimate a man by how much he remembers. A seneschal of Parnassus is Mnemosyne. This power will alone make a man remarkable; and it is found in all good wits. Therefore the poets represented the Muses as the daughters of Memory, for the power exists in some marked and eminent degree in men of an ideal determination. Quintilian reckoned it the measure of genius. Tantum ingentt quantum memoria.
We are told that Boileau having recited to 96 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT Daguesseau one day an epistle or satire he had just been composing, Daguesseau tranquilly told him he knew it already, and in proof set himself to recite it from end to end. Boileau, astonished, was much distressed until he per- ceived that it was only a feat of memory.
The mind disposes all its experience after its affection and to its ruling end; one man by puns and one by cause and effect, one to heroic benefit and one to wrath and animal desire. This is the high difference, the quality of the association by which a man remembers. In the minds of most men memory is nothing but a farm-book or a pocket-diary. On such a day I paid my note; on the next day the cow. calved; on the next I cut my finger; on the next the banks suspended payment. But another man’s memory is the history of science and art and civility and thought; and still an- other deals with laws and perceptions that are the theory of the world.
This thread or order of remembering, this classification, distributes men, one remembering by shop-rule or interest; one by passion; one by trifling external marks, as dress or money. And one rarely takes an interest in how the facts really stand, in the order of cause and effect, MEMORY 97 without self-reference. This is an intellectual man. Nature interests him; a plant, a fish, time, space, mind, being, in their own method and law. Napoleon is such, and that saves him.
But this mysterious power that binds our life together has its own vagaries and interruptions. It sometimes occurs that Memory has a per- sonality of its own, and volunteers or refuses its informations at its will, not at mine. One sometimes asks himself, Is it possible that it is only a visitor, not a resident? Is it some old aunt who goes in and out of the house, and occasionally recites anecdotes of old times and persons which I recognize as having heard before, and she being gone again I search in vain for any trace of the anecdotes?
We can help ourselves to the modus of men- tal processes only by coarse material experiences. A knife with a good spring, a forceps whose lips accurately meet and match, a steel-trap, a loom, a watch, the teeth or jaws of which fit and play perfectly, as compared with the same tools when badly put together, describe to us the difference between a person of quick and strong percep- tion, like Franklin or Swift or Webster or Rich- ard Owen, and a heavy man who witnesses the same facts or shares experiences like theirs. ’T is XII 98 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT like the impression made by the same stamp in sand or in wax. The way in which Burke or Sheridan or Webster or any orator surprises us is by his always having a sharp tool that fits the present use. He has an old story, an odd circum- stance, that illustrates the point he is now prov- ing, and is better than an argument. The more he is heated, the wider he sees; he seems to remember all he ever knew; thus certifying us that he is in the habit of seeing better than other people; that what his mind grasps it does not let go. ’Tis the bull-dog bite; you must cut off the head to loosen the teeth, * We hate this fatal shortness of Memory, these docked men whom we behold. We gathered up what a rolling snow-ball as we came along, — much of it professedly for the future, as capital stock of knowledge. Where is it now? Look behind you. I cannot see that your train is any longer than it was in childhood. The facts of the last two or three days or weeks are all you have with you, — the reading of the last month’s books. Your conversation, action, your face and manners report of no more, of no greater wealth of mind. Alas! you have lost something for everything you have gained, and cannot grow. Only so much iron will the loadstone draw; it MEMORY 99 gains new particles all the way as you move it, but one falls off for every one that adheres.
As there is strength in the wild horse which is never regained when he is once broken by training, and as there is a sound sleep of children and of savages, profound as the hibernation of bears, which never visits the eyes of civil gen- tlemen and ladies, so there is a wild memory in children and youth which makes what is early © learned impossible to forget; and perhaps in the beginning of the world it had most vigor. Plato deplores writing as a barbarous invention which would weaken the memory by disuse. The Rhap- sodists in Athens it seems could recite at once any passage of Homer that was desired.
If writing weakens the memory, we may say as much and more of printing. What is the newspaper but a sponge or invention for obliv- ion? the rule being that for every fact added to the memory, one is crowded out, and that only what the affection animates can be remem- bered.
The mind has a better secret in generalization than merely adding units to its list of facts. The reason of the short memory is shallow thought.’ As deep as the thought, so great is the attrac- tion. An act of the understanding will marshal 100 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT and concatenate a few facts; a principle of the reason will thrill and magnetize and redistribute the whole world.
But defect of memory is not always want of genius. By no means. It is sometimes owing to excellence of genius. Thus men of great presence of mind who are always equal to the occasion do not need to rely on what they have stored for use, but can think in this moment as well and deeply as in any past moment, and if they cannot remember the rule they can make one. Indeed it is remarked that invent- ive men have bad memories. Sir Isaac Newton was embarrassed when the conversation turned on his discoveries and results; he could not recall them; but if he was asked why things were so or so, he could find the reason on the spot.
A man would think twice about learning a new science or reading a new paragraph, if he believed the magnetism was only a constant amount, and that he lost a word ora thought for every word he gained. But the experience is not quite so bad. In reading a foreign language, every new word mastered is a lamp lighting up related words and so assisting the memory. Ap- prehension of the whole sentence aids to fix the MEMORY 10!
MEMORY 10!
precise meaning of a particular word, and what familiarity has been acquired with the genius of the language, and the writer, helps in fixing the exact meaning of the sentence. So is it with every fact in a new science: they are mutually explaining, and each one adds transparency to the whole mass.
The damages of forgetting are more than compensated by the large values which new thoughts and knowledge give to what we al- ready know. If new impressions sometimes efface old ones, yet we steadily gain insight; and because all Nature has one law and meaning, — part corresponding to part, —all we have known aids us continually to the knowledge of the rest of Nature. Thus, all the facts in this chest of memory are property at interest. And who shall set a boundary to this mounting value? Shall we not on higher stages of being remem- ber and understand our early history better?
They say in Architecture, “An arch never sleeps;’’ I say, the Past will not sleep, it works still. With every new fact a ray of light shoots up from the long buried years. Who can judge the new book? He who has read many books. Who, the new assertion? He who has heard many the like. Who, the new man? He that 102 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT has seen men. The experienced and cultivated man is lodged in a hall hung with pictures which every new day retouches, and to which every step in the march of the soul adds a more sublime perspective.
We learn early that there is great disparity of value between our experiences; some thoughts perish in the using. Some days are bright with thought and sentiment, and we live a year ina day.* Yet these best days are not always those which memory can retain. This water once spilled cannot be gathered. There are more inventions in the thoughts of one happy day than ages could execute, and I suppose I speak the sense of most thoughtful men when I say, I would rather have a perfect recollection of all I have thought and felt in a day or a week of high activity than read all the books that have been published in a century.
The memory is one of the compensations which Nature grants to those who have used their days well; when age and calamity have bereaved them of their limbs or organs, then they retreat on mental faculty and concentrate on that. The poet, the philosopher, lamed, old, blind, sick, yet disputing the ground inch by inch against fortune, finds a strength against MEMORY 103 the wrecks and decays sometimes more invulner- able than the heyday of youth and talent.
I value the praise of Memory. And how does memory praise? By holding fast the best. A thought takes its true rank in the memory by surviving other thoughts that were once pre- ferred. Plato remembered Anaxagoras by one of his sayings. If we recall our own favorites, we shall usually find that it is for one crowning act or thought that we hold them dear.
Have you not found memory an apotheosis or deification? The poor short lone fact dies at the birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven, and bathes it in immortal waters. Then a thousand times over it lives and acts again, each time transfigured, ennobled. In solitude, in darkness, we tread over again the sunny walks of youth; confined now in populous streets you behold again the green fields, the shadows of the gray birches; by the solitary river hear again the joyful voices of early com- panions, and vibrate anew to the tenderness and dainty music of the poetry your boyhood fed upon. At this hour the stream is still flowing, though you hear it not; the plants are still drinking their accustomed life and repaying it with their beautiful forms. But you need not 104 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT wander thither. It flows for you, and they grow for you, in the returning images of former sum- mers. In low or bad company you fold your- self in your cloak,’ withdraw yourself entirely from all the doleful circumstance, recall and sur- round yourself with the best associates and the fairest hours of your life: — << Passing sweet are the domains of tender memory.’”?
You may perish out of your senses, but not out of your memory or imagination.
The memory has a fine art of sifting out the pain and keeping all the joy. The spring days when the bluebird arrives have usually only few hours of fine temperature, are sour and un- lovely; but when late in autumn we hear rarely a bluebird’s notes they are sweet by reminding us of the spring. Well, it is so with other tricks of memory. Of the most romantic fact the memory is more romantic; and this power of sinking the pain of any experience and of recalling the saddest with tranquillity, and even with a wise pleasure, is familiar. —The memory is as the affection. Sampson Reed says, “ The true way to store the memory is to develop the affections.” A souvenir is a token of love. Re- member me means, Do not cease to love me.
MEMORY 105 We remember those things which we love and those things which we hate. The memory of all men is robust on the subject of a debt due to them, or of an insult inflicted on them. ‘They can remember,” as Johnson said, “ who kicked them last.”
Every artist is alive on the subject of his art. The Persians say, “A real singer will never forget the song he has once learned.” Michael Angelo, after having once seen a work of any other artist, would remember it so perfectly that if it pleased him to make use of any por- tion thereof, he could do so, but in such a manner that none could perceive it.
We remember what we understand, and we understand best what we like; for this doubles our power of attention, and makes it our own. - Captain John Brown, of Ossawatomie, said he had in Ohio three thousand sheep on his farm, and could tell a strange sheep in his flock as soon as he saw its face. One of my neighbors, a grazier, told me that he should know again every cow, ox, or steer that he ever saw. Abel Lawton knew every horse that went up and down through Concord to the towns in the county. And in higher examples each man’s memory is in the line of his action.
106 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT Nature trains us on to see illusions and prodigies with no more wonder than our toast and omelet at breakfast. Talk of memory and cite me these fine examples of Grotius and Daguesseau, and I think how awful is that power and what privilege and tyranny it must confer. Then I come to a bright school-girl who remembers all she hears, carries thousands of nursery rhymes and all the poetry in all the readers, hymn-books, and pictorial ballads in her mind; and ’tis a mere drug. She carries it so carelessly, it seems like the profusion of hair on the shock heads of all the village boys and village dogs; it grows like grass. *T is a bushel- basket memory of all unchosen knowledge, heaped together in a huge hamper, without method, yet securely held, and ready to come at call; so that an old scholar, who knows what to do with a memory, is full of wonder and pity that this magical force should be squan- dered on such frippery.
He is a skilful doctor who can give me a recipe for the cure of a bad memory. And yet we have some hints from experience on this subject. And first, health. It is found that we remember best when the head is clear, when we are thoroughly awake. When the body is MEMORY 107 in a quiescent state in the absence of the passions, in the moderation of food, it yields itself a willing medium to the intellect. For the true river Lethe is the body of man, with its belly and uproar of appetite and mountains of indigestion and bad humors and quality of darkness. And for this reason, and observing some mysterious continuity of mental operation during sleep or when our will is suspended, tis an old rule of scholars, that which Fuller records, “’ Tis best knocking in the nail over- night and clinching it next morning.” Only I should give extension to this rule and say, Yes, drive the nail this week and clinch it the next, and drive it this year and clinch it the next. But Fate also is an artist. We forget also according to beautiful laws. Thoreau said, “ Of what significance are the things you can forget. A little thought is sexton to all the world.” We must be severe with ourselves, and what we wish to keep, we must once thoroughly possess. Then the thing seen will no longer be what it was, a mere sensuous object before the eye or ear, but a reminder of its law, a pos- session for the intellect. Then we relieve ourselves of all task in the matter, we put the onus of being remembered on the object, 108 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT instead of on our will. We shall do as we do with all our studies, prize the fact or the name of the person by that predominance it takes in our mind after near acquaintance. I have several times forgotten the name of Flamsteed, never that of Newton; and can drop easily many poets out of the Elizabethan chronology, but not Shakspeare.
We forget rapidly what should be forgotten. The universal sense of fables and anecdotes is marked by our tendency to forget name and date and geography. ‘‘ How in the right are children,” said Margaret Fuller, “to forget name and date and place.”
You cannot overstate our debt to the past, but has the present no claim? This past mem- ory is the baggage, but where is the troop? The divine gift is not the old but the new. The divine is the instant life that receives and uses, the life that can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which it makes all things new.’
The acceleration of mental process is equiva- lent to the lengthening of life. If a great many thoughts pass through your mind, you will believe a long time has elapsed, many hours or days. In dreams a rush of many thoughts, MEMORY 109 or seeming experiences, of spending hours and going through a great variety of actions and companies, and when we start up and look at the watch, instead of a long night we are sur- prised to find it was a short nap. The opium- eater says, “‘ I sometimes seemed to have lived seventy or a hundred years in one night.” You know what is told of the experience of some persons who have been recovered from drowning. They relate that their whole life’s history seemed to pass before them in review. They remembered in a moment all that they ever did.
If we occupy ourselves long on this wonder- ful faculty, and see the natural helps of it in the mind, and the way in which new knowledge calls upon old knowledge— new giving un- dreamed-of value to old; every relation and suggestion, so that what one had painfully held by strained attention and recapitulation now falls into place and is clamped and locked by inevitable connection as a planet in its orbit (every other orb, or the law or system of which it is a part, being a perpetual reminder), — we cannot fail to draw thence a sublime hint that thus there must be an endless increase in the power of memory only through its use; that 110 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT there must be a proportion between the power of memory and the amount of knowables; and since the Universe opens to us, the reach of the memory must be as large.
With every broader generalization which the mind makes, with every deeper insight, its retro- spect is also wider. With every new insight into the duty or fact of to-day we come into new possession of the past.
When we live by principles instead of tra- ditions, by obedience to the law of the mind instead of by passion, the Great Mind will enter into us, not as now in fragments and detached thoughts, but the light of to-day will shine backward and forward.
Memory is a presumption of a possession of the future. Now we are halves, we see the past but not the future, but in that day will the hemisphere complete itself and foresight be as perfect as aftersight.
II THE CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE STUDENTS OF TUFTS COLLEGE, JULY 10, 1861 By Sybarites beguiled, He shall no task decline; Merlin’s mighty line Extremes of nature reconciled — Bereaved a tyrant of his will, And made the lion mild.
I know the mighty bards, I listen when they sing, And now I know The secret store Which these explore When they with torch of genius pierce The tenfold clouds that cover The riches of the universe From God’s adoring lover.
And if to me it is not given To fetch one ingot hence Of the unfading gold of Heaven His merchants may dispense, Yet well I know the royal mine And know the sparkle of its ore, Know Heaven’s truths from lies that shine — Explored, they teach us to explore.
THE CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT CANNOT consent to wander from the duties of this day into the fracas of politics. The brute noise of cannon has, I know, a most poetic echo in these days when it is an instrument of freedom and the primal sentiments of humanity. Yet it is but representative and a far-off means and servant: but here in the col- lege we are in the presence of the constituency and the principle itself. Here is, or should be, the majesty of reason and the creative cause; and it were a compounding of all gradation and reverence to suffer the flash of swords and the boyish strife of passion and the feebleness of military strength to intrude on this sanctity and omnipotence of Intellectual Law. Against the heroism of soldiers I set the heroism of scholars, which consists in ignoring the other. You shall not put up in your Academy the statue of Cesar or Pompey, of Nelson or Wellington, of Washington or Napoleon, of Garibaldi, but of Archimedes, of Milton, of Newton. Archi- medes disdained to apply himself to the useful arts, only to the liberal or the causal arts. Hiero XII 114 CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT the king reproached him with his barren stud- ies. Like Thales, he was willing to show him that he was quite able in rude matters, if he could condescend to them, and he conducted the defence of Syracuse against the Romans. Then he returned to his geometry; and when the Roman soldier, at the sack of Syracuse, broke into his study, the philosopher could not rise from his chair and his diagram, and took his death without resistance. Michael Angelo gave himself to art, despising all meaner pursuits. When the war came to his own city, he lent his genius, and defended Florence as long as he was obeyed. Milton congratulates the Parliament that, whilst London is besieged and blocked, the Thames infested, inroads and excursions round, and battle oft rumored to be marching up to her walls and suburb trenches, — yet then are the people, or the greater part, more than at other times wholly taken up with the study of highest and most important matters to be reformed, — they reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to a rarity and admiration, things not before discoursed or written, and the fact argues a just confidence in the grandeur and self-subsistency of the cause of religious liberty which made all material war an impertinence.
CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT 115 For either science and literature is a hypo- crisy, or it is not. If it be, then resign your charter to the Legislature, turn your college into barracks and warehouses, and divert the funds of your founders into the stock of a rope-walk or a candle-factory, a tan-yard or some other un- doubted conveniency for the surrounding pop- ulation. But if the intellectual interest be, as I hold, no hypocrisy, but the only reality, — then it behooves us to enthrone it, obey it; and give it possession of us and ours; to give, among other possessions, the college into its hand cast- ing down every idol, every pretender, every hoary lie, every dignified blunder that has crept into its administration.
At this season, the colleges keep their anni- versaries, and in this country where education is a primary interest, every family has a represent- ative in their halls, a son, a brother, or one of our own kindred is there for his training. But even if we had no son or friend therein, yet the college is part of the community, and it is there for us, is training our teachers, civilizers and inspirers. It is essentially the most radiating and public of agencies, like, but better than, the light-house, or the alarm-bell, or the sentinel who fires a signal-cannon, or the telegraph 116 CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT which speeds the local news over the land. Be- sides, it deals with a force which it cannot monopolize or confine; cannot give to those who come to it and refuse to those outside. I have no doubt of the force, and for me the only question is, whether the force is inside.
This power which it deals is dear to all. If the colleges were better, if they had any monopoly of it, nay, if they really had it, had the power of imparting valuable thought, creative principles, truths which become powers, thoughts which become talents, —if they could cause that a mind not profound should become profound, — we should all rush to their gates: instead of contriving inducements to draw students, you would need to set police at the gates to keep order in the in-rushing multitude.
These are giddy times, and, you say, the col- lege will be deserted. No, never was it so much needed. But I say, those were the giddy times which went before these, and the new times are the times of arraignment, times of trial and times of judgment. ’T is because the college was false to its trust, because the scholars did not learn and teach, because they were traders and left their altars and libraries and worship of truth and played the sycophant to presidents and CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT P17 generals and members of Congress, and gave degrees and literary and social honors to those whom they ought to have rebuked and exposed, incurring the contempt of those whom they ought to have put in fear; then the college is suicidal; ceases to be a school; power oozes out of it just as fast as truth does; and instead of overawing the strong, and upholding the good, it isa hospital for decayed tutors.
This Integrity over all partial knowledge and skill, homage to truth— how rare! Few men wish to know how the thing really stands, what is the law of it without reference to persons. Other men are victims of their means — sanity consists in not being subdued by your means.
Two men cannot converse together on any topic without presently finding where each stands in moral judgment; and each learns whether the other’s view commands, or is com- manded by, his own. I presently know whether my companion has more candor or less, more hope for men or less, whether his sense of duty ts more or less severe and his generosity larger than mine; whether he stands for ideal justice, or for a timorous expediency.
Society is always idolatrous and exaggerates the merits of those who work to vulgar ends.
118 CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT But genius may be known by its probity. Never. was pure valor — and almost I might say, never pure ability — shown in a bad cause. For am- bition makes insane."