ertainly, I should say, very different from what those systems
are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since
Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly
they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that
man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil,
is the centre and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains
and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert. From what,
indeed, does the society of nature liberate you, that you find it so
sweet? It is hardly (is it?) that you wish to forget your past, or
your friends, or that you have any secret contempt for your present
ambitions. You respect these, you respect them perhaps too much; you
are not suffered by the genteel tradition to criticise or to reform
them at all radically. No; it is the yoke of this genteel tradition
itself that these primeval solitudes lift from your shoulders. They
suspend your forced sense of your own importance not merely as
individuals, but even as men. They allow you, in one happy moment, at
once to play and to worship, to take yourselves simply, humbly, for
what you are, and to salute the wild, indifferent, non-censorious
infinity of nature. You are admonished that what you can do avails
little materially, and in the end nothing. At the same time, through
wonder and pleasure, you are taught speculation. You learn what you
are really fitted to do, and where lie your natural dignity and joy,
namely, in representing many things, without being them, and in
letting your imagination, through sympathy, celebrate and echo their
life. Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for
reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of
these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the
interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes
that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper
happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate
men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so
many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be
frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.

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