Journals Of Ralph Waldo Emerson Vol 3 PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ... only pheno'menal. So it is with men. There is a revolution in this country now, is there? Well I am glad of it. But it don't convert nor punish the Jackson men, nor reward the others. The Jackson men have made their fortunes; grow old; die. It is the new comers who form this undulation. The party we wish to convince, condemn, loses its identity. Elect Webster President, -- and find the Jackson party if you can. All gone, dead, scattered, Webstermen, Southerners, Masons, any and everything. Judicial or even moral sentence seems no longer capable of being inflicted. France, we say, suffered and learned; but the red Revolutionists did not. France to-day is a new-born race that had no more to do with that regicide France than the Sandwich Islanders. May 3. The Idea according to which the Universe is made is wholly wanting to us; is it not? Yet it may or will be found to be constructed on as harmonious and perfect a thought, self-explaining, as a problem in geometry. The classification of all natural science is arbitrary, I believe; no method philosophical in any one. And yet in all the permutations and combinations supposable, might not a cabinet of shells or a Flora be i834] THE HIDDEN IDEA 293 thrown into one which should flash on us the very thought? We take them out of composition, and so lose their greatest beauty. The moon is an unsatisfactory sight if the eye be exclusively directed to it, and a shell retains but a small part of its beauty when examined separately.1 All our classifications are introductory and very convenient, but must be looked on as temporary, and the eye always watching for the glimmering of that pure, plastic Idea. If Swammerdam forgets that he is a man, and when you make any speculative suggestion as to the...