ely
alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to
swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care
not if you never see it again.
Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly discordant
facts, as expressions of one law. Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the
respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle
platonizes. By going one step farther back in thought, discordant
opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of one
principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still higher
vision.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all
things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a
great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There
is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there
is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of
fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the
thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals
of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization. Generalization
is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill
that attends it.
Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have
his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you
will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past
apprehension of truth, and his alert acceptance of it from whatever
quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to
society, his Christianity, his world, may at any time be superseded and
decease.
There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it
academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday
of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and
fragments. Then its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that
it must be true. It now shows itself ethical and practical. We learn
that God is; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows of him.
The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of
Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact that all nature
is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself. Much
more obviously is history and the state of the world at any one time
directly dependent on the intellectual classification then existing in
the minds of
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