Resumo de Essay Iii _compensation*part 1*

The documents, too, from which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed myfancy by their endless variety, and lay always before me, even in sleep; forthey are the tools in our hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions ofthe street, the farm, and the dwelling-house, greetings, relations, debts andcredits, the influence of character, the nature and endowment of all men. Thepreacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the ordinary manner thedoctrine of the Last Judgment. The blindness of the preacher consisted indeferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a manlysuccess, instead of confronting and convicting the world from the truth;announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of the will: and so establishingthe standard of good and ill, of success and falsehood. I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the day,and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men when occasionally they treatthe related topics. POLARITY, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; indarkness and light; in heat and cold; in maleand female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in theequation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body; in thesystole and diastole of the heart; in the undulations of fluids, and of sound;in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, andchemical affinity. If the south attracts, the north repels. There is somewhatthat resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night, man and woman, in asingle needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in each individual of everyanimal tribe. If the head and neck are enlarged, the trunk and extremities arecut short. The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain inpower is lost in time; and the converse. The periodic or compensating errors ofthe planets is another instance. The influences of climate and soil inpolitical history are another. The cold climate invigorates. The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. There isalways some levelling circumstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong,the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all others. Thusshe contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar, takes the boar out andputs the lamb in, and keeps her balance true. He who by force of will or ofthought is great, and overlooks thousands, has the charges of that eminence. This law writes the laws of cities and nations. If the government iscruel, the governor's life is not safe. Under all governments the influence ofcharacter remains the same, ? in Turkey and in New England about alike. These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented inevery one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers ofnature. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. Ifthe good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if theforce, so the limitation. Thus is the universe alive. "It is in the world, and the world wasmade by it." Justice is not postponed. Men call the circumstance theretribution. The causal retribution is in the thing, and is seen by the soul. Punishmentis a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure whichconcealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot besevered; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in themeans, the fruit in the seed. Whilst thus the world will be whole, and refuses to be disparted, weseek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example, ? to gratify thesenses, we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs of the character. Thesoul says, Eat; the body would feast. The soul says, The man and woman shall beone flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Havedominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the powerover things to its own ends. It would be the only fact. They think tat to begreat is to possess one side of nature, ? the sweet, without the other side, ?the bitter. So signal is the failure of all attempts to make this separation ofthe good from the tax, that the experiment would not be tried, ? since to tryit is to be mad, ? but for the circumstance, that when the disease began in thewill, of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once infected, so thatthe man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to see the sensualallurement of an object, and not see the sensual hurt; he sees the mermaid'shead, but not the dragon's tail; and thinks he can cut off that which he wouldhave, from that which he would not have. A plain confession of the in-working of the All, and of its moral aim. It came from thought above the will of the writer. Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs ofall nations, which are always the literature of reason, or the statements of anabsolute truth, without qualification. Proverbs, like the sacred books of eachnation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. And this law of laws which thepulpit, the senate, and the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets andworkshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omnipresentas that of birds and flies

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