ate as natural history, but there is more than
natural history. For who and what is this criticism that pries into the
matter? Man is not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and members, link
in a chain, nor any ignominious baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a
dragging together of the poles of the Universe. He betrays his relation to
what is below him--thick-skulled, small-brained, fishy,
quadrumanous--quadruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into biped, and has
paid for the new powers by loss of some of the old ones. But the lightning
which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him.
On one side, elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges,
peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and, on the other part, thought, the
spirit which composes and decomposes nature--here they are, side by side,
god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm,
riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.

Nor can he blink the freewill. To hazard the contradiction--freedom is
necessary. If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and say,
Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man. Forever
wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul. Intellect annuls
Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. And though nothing is more
disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and
the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a
"Declaration of Independence," or the statute right to vote, by those who
have never dared to think or to act, yet it is wholesome to man to look,
not at Fate, but the other way: the practical view is the other. His sound
relation to these facts is to use and command, not to cringe to them.
"Look not on nature, for her name is fatal," said the oracle. The too much
contemplation of these limits induces meanness. They who talk much of
destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and
invite the evils they fear.

I cited the instinctive and heroic races as proud believers in Destiny.
They conspire with it; a loving resignation is with the event. But the
dogma makes a different impression, when it is held by the weak and lazy.
'Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of
Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature. Rude and
invincible except by themselves are the elements. So let man be. Let him
empty his breast of his windy con