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HISTORY.
There is no great
and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it
cometh, all things are
And it cometh everywhere.
I am owner of the
sphere,
Of the seven
stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand,
and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's
strain.
THERE is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is
an inlet to
the same and to all of the same. He
that is once admitted to the right
of reason is made a freeman of the
whole estate. What Plato has thought,
he may think; what a saint has
felt, he may feel; what at any time has
befallen any man, he can
understand. Who hath access to this universal
mind is a party to all that is or
can be done, for this is the only and
sovereign agent.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius
is
illustrated by the entire series of
days. Man is explicable by nothing
less than all his history. Without
hurry, without rest, the human spirit
goes forth from the beginning to
embody every faculty, every thought,
every emotion, which belongs to it,
in appropriate events. But the
thought is always prior to the
fact; all the facts of history preexist
in the mind as laws.
Each law in turn is made by circumstances
predominant, and the limits of
nature give power to but one at a time.
A man is the whole encyclopaedia
of facts. The creation of a thousand
forests is in one acorn, and
kingdom, empire, republic,
democracy, are merely the application of his
manifold spirit to the manifold
world.
This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The
Sphinx must
solve her own riddle. If the whole
of history is in one man, it is all
to be explained from individual
experience. There is a relation between
the hours of our life and the
centuries of time. As the air I breathe is
drawn from the great repositories
of nature, as the light on my book is
yielded by a star a hundred
millions of miles distant, as the poise
of my body depends on the
equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal
forces, so the hours should be
instructed by the ages and the ages
explained by the hours. Of the
universal mind each individual man is one
more incarnation.
All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in
his private experience flashes a
light on what great bodies of men
have done, and the crises of his
life refer to national crises. Every
revolution was first a thought in
one man's mind, and when the same
thought occurs to another man, it
is the key to that era. Every reform
was once a private opinion, and
when it shall be a private opinion again
it will solve the problem of the
age. The fact narrated must correspond
to something in me to be credible
or intelligible. We, as we read, must
become Greeks, Romans, Turks,
priest and king, martyr and executioner;
must fasten these images to some
reality in our secret experience, or we
shall learn nothing rightly.
What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the
mind's powers and depravations as
what has
befallen us. Each new law and
political movement has meaning for you.
Stand before each of its tablets and say, 'Under this mask did my
Proteus nature hide itself.' This
remedies the defect of our too great
nearness to ourselves. This throws
our actions into perspective; and
as crabs, goats, scorpions, the
balance and the waterpot lose their
meanness when hung as signs in the
zodiac, so I can see my own vices
without heat in the distant persons
of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.
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