_ INTELLECT.
GO, speed the stars of Thought
On to their shining goals;--
The sower scatters broad his seed,
The wheat thou strew'st be souls.
XI. INTELLECT.
Every substance is negatively electric to that which
stands above it in the chemical tables, positively to
that which stands below it. Water dissolves wood and
iron and salt; air dissolves water; electric fire
dissolves air, but the intellect dissolves fire,
gravity, laws, method, and the subtlest unnamed relations
of nature in its resistless menstruum. Intellect lies
behind genius, which is intellect constructive. Intellect
is the simple power anterior to all action or construction.
Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a natural history of
the intellect, but what man has yet been able to mark the
steps and boundaries of that transparent essence? The first
questions are always to be asked, and the wisest doctor is
gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a child. How can we
speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of
its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth,
since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act?
Each becomes the other. Itself alone is. Its vision is not
like the vision of the eye, but is union with the things
known.
Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear
consideration of abstract truth. The considerations of
time and place, of you and me, of profit and hurt
tyrannize over most men's minds. Intellect separates
the fact considered, from you, from all local and
personal reference, and discerns it as if it existed
for its own sake. Heraclitus looked upon the affections
as dense and colored mists. In the fog of good and
evil affections it is hard for man to walk forward in
a straight line. Intellect is void of affection and
sees an object as it stands in the light of science,
cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the
individual, floats over its own personality, and
regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine. He who
is immersed in what concerns person or place cannot
see the problem of existence. This the intellect always
ponders. Nature shows all things formed and bound. The
intellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects
intrinsic likeness between remote things and reduces all
things into a few principles.
The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. All
that mass of mental and moral phenomena which we do not
make objects of voluntary thought, come within the power
of fortune; they constitute the circumstance of daily
life; they are subject to change, to fear, and hope.
Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of
melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves,
so man, imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy
of coming events. But a truth, separated by the intellect,
is no longer a subject of destiny. We behold it as a god
upraised above care and fear. And so any fact in our life,
or any record of our fancies or reflections, disentangled
from the web of our unconsciousness, becomes an object
impersonal and immortal. It is the past restored, but
embalmed. A better art than that of Egypt has taken fear
and corruption out of it. It is eviscerated of care. It
is offered for science. What is addressed to us for
contemplation does not threaten us but makes us intellectual
beings.
The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every
expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the
times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God
enters by a private door into every individual. Long
prior to the age of reflection is the thinking of the
mind. Out of darkness it came insensibly into the
marvellous light of to-day. In the period of infancy it
accepted and disposed of all impressions from the
surrounding creation after its own way. Whatever any mind
doth or saith is after a law; and this native law remains
over it after it has come to reflection or conscious thought.
In the most worn, pedantic, introverted self-tormenter's
life, the greatest part is incalculable by him, unforeseen,
unimaginable, and must be, until he can take himself up by
his own ears. What am I? What has my will done to make me
that I am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought,
this hour, this connection of events, by secret currents of
might and mind, and my ingenuity and wilfulness have not
thwarted, have not aided to an appreciable degree.
Our spontaneous action is always the best. You
cannot with your best deliberation and heed come
so close to any question as your spontaneous glance
shall bring you, whilst you rise from your bed, or
walk abroad in the morning after meditating the
matter before sleep on the previous night. Our
thinking is a pious reception. Our truth of thought
is therefore vitiated as much by too violent direction
given by our will, as by too great negligence. We do
not determine what we will think. We only open our
senses, clear away as we can all obstruction from the
fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have little
control over our thoughts. We are the prisoners of
ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven
and so fully engage us that we take no thought for the
morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make
them our own. By and by we fall out of that rapture,
bethink us where we have been, what we have seen, and
repeat as truly as we can what we have beheld. As far
as we can recall these ecstasies we carry away in the
ineffaceable memory the result, and all men and all the
ages confirm it. It is called Truth. But the moment we
cease to report and attempt to correct and contrive, it
is not truth.
If we consider what persons have stimulated and
profited us, we shall perceive the superiority of
the spontaneous or intuitive principle over the
arithmetical or logical. The first contains the
second, but virtual and latent. We want in every man
a long logic; we cannot pardon the absence of it, but
it must not be spoken. Logic is the procession or
proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its
virtue is as silent method; the moment it would appear
as propositions and have a separate value it is worthless.
In every man's mind, some images, words and facts
remain, without effort on his part to imprint them,
which others forget, and afterwards these illustrate
to him important laws. All our progress is an unfolding,
like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then
an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud
and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can
render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it
to the end, it shall ripen into truth and you shall know
why you believe.
Each mind has its own method. A true man never
acquires after college rules. What you have aggregated
in a natural manner surprises and delights when it is
produced. For we cannot oversee each other's secret.
And hence the differences between men in natural endowment
are insignificant in comparison with their common wealth.
Do you think the porter and the cook have no anecdotes,
no experiences, no wonders for you? Every body knows as
much as the savant. The walls of rude minds are scrawled
all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day
bring a lantern and read the inscriptions. Every man, in
the degree in which he has wit and culture, finds his
curiosity inflamed concerning the modes of living and
thinking of other men, and especially of those classes
whose minds have not been subdued by the drill of school
education.
This instinctive action never ceases in a healthy mind,
but becomes richer and more frequent in its informations
through all states of culture. At last comes the era of
reflection, when we not only observe, but take pains to
observe; when we of set purpose sit down to consider an
abstract truth; when we keep the mind's eye open whilst
we converse, whilst we read, whilst we act, intent to
learn the secret law of some class of facts.
What is the hardest task in the world? To think. I would
put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract
truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side
and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man
can see God face to face and live. For example, a man
explores the basis of civil government. Let him intend his
mind without respite, without rest, in one direction. His
best heed long time avails him nothing. Yet thoughts are
flitting before him. We all but apprehend, we dimly forebode
the truth. We say I will walk abroad, and the truth will
take form and clearness to me. We go forth, but cannot find
it. It seems as if we needed only the stillness and composed
attitude of the library to seize the thought. But we come in,
and are as far from it as at first. Then, in a moment, and
unannounced, the truth appears. A certain wandering light
appears, and is the distinction, the principle, we wanted.
But the oracle comes because we had previously laid siege
to the shrine. It seems as if the law of the intellect
resembled that law of nature by which we now inspire, now
expire the breath; by which the heart now draws in, then
hurls out the blood,--the law of undulation. So now you must
labor with your brains, and now you must forbear your
activity and see what the great Soul showeth.
The immortality of man is as legitimately preached
from the intellections as from the moral volitions.
Every intellection is mainly prospective. Its present
value is its least. Inspect what delights you in
Plutarch, in Shakspeare, in Cervantes. Each truth that
a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full
on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind,
and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered
his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his
private biography becomes an illustration of this new
principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by
its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where did he get
this? and think there was something divine in his life.
But no; they have myriads of facts just as good, would
they only get a lamp to ransack their attics withal.
We are all wise. The difference between persons is
not in wisdom but in art. I knew, in an academical
club, a person who always deferred to me; who, seeing
my whim for writing, fancied that my experiences had
somewhat superior; whilst I saw that his experiences
were as good as mine. Give them to me and I would make
the same use of them. He held the old; he holds the
new; I had the habit of tacking together the old and
the new which he did not use to exercise. This may
hold in the great examples. Perhaps if we should meet
Shakspeare we should not be conscious of any steep
inferiority; no, but of a great equality,--only that
he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying,
his facts, which we lacked. For notwithstanding our
utter incapacity to produce anything like Hamlet and
Othello, see the perfect reception this wit and immense
knowledge of life and liquid eloquence find in us all.
If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or
hoe corn, and then retire within doors and shut your
eyes and press them with your hand, you shall still see
apples hanging in the bright light with boughs and leaves
thereto, or the tasselled grass, or the corn-flags, and
this for five or six hours afterwards. There lie the
impressions on the retentive organ, though you knew it
not. So lies the whole series of natural images with which
your life has made you acquainted, in your memory, though
you know it not; and a thrill of passion flashes light on
their dark chamber, and the active power seizes instantly
the fit image, as the word of its momentary thought.
It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our
history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing
to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still
run back to the despised recollections of childhood,
and always we are fishing up some wonderful article
out of that pond; until by and by we begin to suspect
that the biography of the one foolish person we know is,
in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase
of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.
In the intellect constructive, which we popularly
designate by the word Genius, we observe the same
balance of two elements as in intellect receptive.
The constructive intellect produces thoughts, sentences,
poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of
the mind, the marriage of thought with nature. To genius
must always go two gifts, the thought and the publication.
The first is revelation, always a miracle, which no
frequency of occurrence or incessant study can ever
familiarize, but which must always leave the inquirer
stupid with wonder. It is the advent of truth into the
world, a form of thought now for the first time bursting
into the universe, a child of the old eternal soul, a
piece of genuine and immeasurable greatness. It seems,
for the time, to inherit all that has yet existed and
to dictate to the unborn. It affects every thought of
man and goes to fashion every institution. But to make
it available it needs a vehicle or art by which it is
conveyed to men. To be communicable it must become
picture or sensible object. We must learn the language
of facts. The most wonderful inspirations die with their
subject if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.
The ray of light passes invisible through space and
only when it falls on an object is it seen. When the
spiritual energy is directed on something outward, then
it is a thought. The relation between it and you first
makes you, the value of you, apparent to me. The rich
inventive genius of the painter must be smothered and
lost for want of the power of drawing, and in our happy
hours we should be inexhaustible poets if once we could
break through the silence into adequate rhyme. As all
men have some access to primary truth, so all have some
art or power of communication in their head, but only in
the artist does it descend into the hand. There is an
inequality, whose laws we do not yet know, between two
men and between two moments of the same man, in respect
to this faculty. In common hours we have the same facts
as in the uncommon or inspired, but they do not sit for
their portraits; they are not detached, but lie in a web.
The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the power of
picture or expression, in the most enriched and flowing
nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain control over
the spontaneous states, without which no production is
possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the
rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgment, with a
strenuous exercise of choice. And yet the imaginative
vocabulary seems to be spontaneous also. It does not flow
from experience only or mainly, but from a richer source.
Not by any conscious imitation of particular forms are the
grand strokes of the painter executed, but by repairing to
the fountain-head of all forms in his mind. Who is the first
drawing-master? Without instruction we know very well the
ideal of the human form. A child knows if an arm or a leg
be distorted in a picture; if the attitude be natural or
grand or mean; though he has never received any instruction
in drawing or heard any conversation on the subject, nor
can himself draw with correctness a single feature. A good
form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any
science on the subject, and a beautiful face sets twenty
hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the
mechanical proportions of the features and head. We may owe
to dreams some light on the fountain of this skill; for as
soon as we let our will go and let the unconscious states
ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are! We entertain
ourselves with wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals,
of gardens, of woods and of monsters, and the mystic pencil
wherewith we then draw has no awkwardness or inexperience,
no meagreness or poverty; it can design well and group well;
its composition is full of art, its colors are well laid on
and the whole canvas which it paints is lifelike and apt to
touch us with terror, with tenderness, with desire and with
grief. Neither are the artist's copies from experience ever
mere copies, but always touched and softened by tints from
this ideal domain.
The conditions essential to a constructive mind do
not appear to be so often combined but that a good
sentence or verse remains fresh and memorable for a
long time. Yet when we write with ease and come out
into the free air of thought, we seem to be assured
that nothing is easier than to continue this
communication at pleasure. Up, down, around, the
kingdom of thought has no inclosures, but the Muse
makes us free of her city. Well, the world has a
million writers. One would think then that good thought
would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of
each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count
all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse
for twenty years. It is true that the discerning intellect
of the world is always much in advance of the creative,
so that there are many competent judges of the best book,
and few writers of the best books. But some of the
conditions of intellectual construction are of rare
occurrence. The intellect is a whole and demands integrity
in every work. This is resisted equally by a man's devotion
to a single thought and by his ambition to combine too many.
Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his
attention on a single aspect of truth and apply himself
to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted
and not itself but falsehood; herein resembling the air,
which is our natural element, and the breath of our
nostrils, but if a stream of the same be directed on the
body for a time, it causes cold, fever, and even death.
How wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, the
political or religious fanatic, or indeed any possessed
mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a
single topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is
a prison also. I cannot see what you see, because I am
caught up by a strong wind and blown so far in one direction
that I am out of the hoop of your horizon.
Is it any better if the student, to avoid this offence,
and to liberalize himself, aims to make a mechanical
whole of history, or science, or philosophy, by a
numerical addition of all the facts that fall within
his vision? The world refuses to be analyzed by addition
and subtraction. When we are young we spend much time
and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions
of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope
that in the course of a few years we shall have condensed
into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories
at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year
our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover
that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.
Neither by detachment neither by aggregation is the
integrity of the intellect transmitted to its works,
but by a vigilance which brings the intellect in its
greatness and best state to operate every moment. It
must have the same wholeness which nature has. Although
no diligence can rebuild the universe in a model by
the best accumulation or disposition of details, yet
does the world reappear in miniature in every event, so
that all the laws of nature may be read in the smallest
fact. The intellect must have the like perfection in its
apprehension and in its works. For this reason, an index
or mercury of intellectual proficiency is the perception
of identity. We talk with accomplished persons who appear
to be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the turf,
the bird are not theirs, have nothing of them; the world
is only their lodging and table. But the poet, whose verses
are to be spheral and complete, is one whom Nature cannot
deceive, whatsoever face of strangeness she may put on.
He feels a strict consanguinity, and detects more likeness
than variety in all her changes. We are stung by the desire
for new thought; but when we receive a new thought it is
only the old thought with a new face, and though we make
it our own we instantly crave another; we are not really
enriched. For the truth was in us before it was reflected
to us from natural objects; and the profound genius will
cast the likeness of all creatures into every product of
his wit.
But if the constructive powers are rare and it is
given to few men to be poets, yet every man is a
receiver of this descending holy ghost, and may
well study the laws of its influx. Exactly parallel
is the whole rule of intellectual duty to the rule
of moral duty. A self-denial no less austere than
the saint's is demanded of the scholar. He must
worship truth, and forego all things for that, and
choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in
thought is thereby augmented.
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and
repose. Take which you please,--you can never have both.
Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom
the love of repose predominates will accept the first
creed, the first philosophy, the first political party
he meets,--most likely his father's. He gets rest,
commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of
truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates will
keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He
will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the
opposite negations between which, as walls, his being
is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense
and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth,
as the other is not, and respects the highest law of
his being.
The circle of the green earth he must measure with
his shoes to find the man who can yield him truth.
He shall then know that there is somewhat more blessed
and great in hearing than in speaking. Happy is the
hearing man; unhappy the speaking man. As long as I
hear truth I am bathed by a beautiful element and am
not conscious of any limits to my nature. The suggestions
are thousandfold that I hear and see. The waters of the
great deep have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I
speak, I define, I confine and am less. When Socrates
speaks, Lysis and Menexenus are afflicted by no shame
that they do not speak. They also are good. He likewise
defers to them, loves them, whilst he speaks. Because a
true and natural man contains and is the same truth which
an eloquent man articulates; but in the eloquent man,
because he can articulate it, it seems something the less
to reside, and he turns to these silent beautiful with the
more inclination and respect. The ancient sentence said,
Let us be silent, for so are the gods. Silence is a solvent
that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great
and universal. Every man's progress is through a succession
of teachers, each of whom seems at the time to have a
superlative influence, but it at last gives place to a new.
Frankly let him accept it all. Jesus says, Leave father,
mother, house and lands, and follow me. Who leaves all,
receives more. This is as true intellectually as morally.
Each new mind we approach seems to require an abdication of
all our past and present possessions. A new doctrine seems
at first a subversion of all our opinions, tastes, and
manner of living. Such has Swedenborg, such has Kant, such
has Coleridge, such has Hegel or his interpreter Cousin
seemed to many young men in this country. Take thankfully
and heartily all they can give. Exhaust them, wrestle with
them, let them not go until their blessing be won, and after
a short season the dismay will be overpast, the excess of
influence withdrawn, and they will be no longer an alarming
meteor, but one more bright star shining serenely in your
heaven and blending its light with all your day.
But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly to that
which draws him, because that is his own, he is to
refuse himself to that which draws him not, whatsoever
fame and authority may attend it, because it is not
his own. Entire self-reliance belongs to the intellect.
One soul is a counterpoise of all souls, as a capillary
column of water is a balance for the sea. It must treat
things and books and sovereign genius as itself also a
sovereign. If Aeschylus be that man he is taken for, he
has not yet done his office when he has educated the
learned of Europe for a thousand years. He is now to
approve himself a master of delight to me also. If he
cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him nothing
with me. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand
Aeschyluses to my intellectual integrity. Especially
take the same ground in regard to abstract truth, the
science of the mind. The Bacon, the Spinoza, the Hume,
Schelling, Kant, or whosoever propounds to you a philosophy
of the mind, is only a more or less awkward translator of
things in your consciousness which you have also your way
of seeing, perhaps of denominating. Say then, instead of
too timidly poring into his obscure sense, that he has not
succeeded in rendering back to you your consciousness. He
has not succeeded; now let another try. If Plato cannot,
perhaps Spinoza will. If Spinoza cannot, then perhaps Kant.
Anyhow, when at last it is done, you will find it is no
recondite, but a simple, natural, common state which the
writer restores to you.
But let us end these didactics. I will not, though
the subject might provoke it, speak to the open
question between Truth and Love. I shall not presume
to interfere in the old politics of the skies;--"The
cherubim know most; the seraphim love most." The gods
shall settle their own quarrels. But I cannot recite,
even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without
remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men
who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-
priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the
expounders of the principles of thought from age to
age. When at long intervals we turn over their abstruse
pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these
few, these great spiritual lords who have walked in the
world,--these of the old religion,--dwelling in a worship
which makes the sanctities of Christianity look parvenues
and popular; for "persuasion is in soul, but necessity is
in intellect." This band of grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus,
Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus,
Synesius and the rest, have somewhat so vast in their
logic, so primary in their thinking, that it seems
antecedent to all the ordinary distinctions of rhetoric
and literature, and to be at once poetry and music and
dancing and astronomy and mathematics. I am present at
the sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of
sunbeams the soul lays the foundations of nature. The
truth and grandeur of their thought is proved by its scope
and applicability, for it commands the entire schedule and
inventory of things for its illustration. But what marks
its elevation and has even a comic look to us, is the
innocent serenity with which these babe-like Jupiters sit
in their clouds, and from age to age prattle to each other
and to no contemporary. Well assured that their speech is
intelligible and the most natural thing in the world, they
add thesis to thesis, without a moment's heed of the
universal astonishment of the human race below, who do not
comprehend their plainest argument; nor do they ever relent
so much as to insert a popular or explaining sentence, nor
testify the least displeasure or petulance at the dulness
of their amazed auditory. The angels are so enamored of
the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not
distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects
of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who
understand it or not. _