TABLE
TALK
ALCOTT
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TABLE-TALK
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ARTES
18371
SCIENTIA
LIBRARY
VERITAS
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
E-PLURIBUS URUM
ADEBL
QUAERIS PENINSULAM AMOENAMI
CIRCUMSPICE


TABLE-TALK
کے ل
86950
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A BRONSON
BRONSON ALCOTT
>
"The art of writing books has not been discovered, but is on the point of
being discovered. Fragments of this kind are literary seed-corn. There may
be many a barren grain among them, however, if only some will sprout."
NOVALIS.
BOSTON
ROBERTS BROTHERS
1877.
COPYRIGIIT, 1877,
BY A, BRONSON ALCOTT.
1
Stereotyped and Printed by
ALFRED MUDGE & SON, BOSTON.
© 12-3-36
36 Jjm
-
Leisure's labors, genial seasons,
Yielding mild and mellow reasons,
Apples fair and fit to please,
Served from our Hesperides;
None to watch, who will may steal,
His choice may take, nor theft conceal,

GENERAL CONTENTS.
PAGE
BOOK I.-PRACTICAL
1
I. LEARNING
3
II. ENTERPRISE
III. PURSUITS
IV. NURTURE
V. HABITS.
27
41
55
65
VI. DISCOURSE
79
·
•
/VII.
CREEDS.
95
VIII. INTERLEAVES
109
•
BOOK II. - SPECULATIVE .
I. METHOD
123
•
125
•
II. GENESIS
139
III. PERSON
149
IV. LAPSE
161
V. IMMORTALITY
171

1
· I.
CONTENTS OF BOOK I.
PRACTICAL.
LEARNING
Books
QUOTATION
CRITICISM
•
LITERARY COURTESY
BALANCE MEN
AUTHORSHIP
LETTERS
DIARIES
•
BIOGRAPHY
IDEALISM
IDEALISTS
IDEAL METHODS
CLASSICS
ACADEMIC Groves
IDEAL CULTURE
NEW ACADEMY
CONCORD.
IL ENTERPRISE
EXPERIENCE
TRAVELLING
EPHEMERA
CHARIOTS
PAGE
3
5.
8
9
10
11
12
·
13
13
16
17
18
19
•
20
222** 27
23
24
25
29
29
30
31
viii
CONTENTS OF BOOK I.
PAGE
HIPPOGRIFFS
IDEAS
GENIUS
BUSINESS
31
35
36
37
SOCRATES' PRAYER
WORLD-CULTURE
SCALE OF CULTURE
III. PURSUITS
ONE'S STAR
CHARACTER
37
38
39
41
•
43
43
MISFORTUNE
AIMS
CALLINGS
GIFTS
44
46
46
48
NOBILITY
MISDIRECTION
49
49
BEGGING
49
LABOR
AGRICULTURE
LEISURE
\ INDIVIDUALISM
THE STATE
IV. NURTURE
CHILDHOOD
•
THE TEACHER
YOUTH AND AGE
PRIMITIVE EDEN
MOTHERS.
50
51
52
53
1
53
55
57
58
59
59
GO
REVERENCE
60
FAITH
61
SPIRITUAL CULTURE
62
V. HABITS
65
EPHEMERIS
67
MOODS
67
EXERCISE
69
SLEEP
70
i
CONTENTS OF BOOK I.
ix
PAGE
TEMPERANCE
71
RATIONS
72
•
DEBAUCHERY
CHASTITY
THE MYSTERIES
FRIENDSHIP
VI. DISCOURSE
73
74
75
76
79
HOSPITALITY
81
CONVERSATION
81
CANON OF CONVERSATION
83
DISPUTING
84
AGITATION
86
DISCRETION
87
IMPLICATION
88
SOCRATIC METHOD.
89
CHRIST'S METHOD
89
THE SEER
CONVERSATIONS
NEW DIVINITY
PREACHING
VII. CREEDS.
CATHOLICITY
CHRISTIANITY
90
91
91
235
93
95
97
•
99
•
IMMANUEL
100
PURITANISM
101
PIETY
103
SPIRITUALITY
104
•
•
SCRIPTURE
104
BIBLICAL STUDIES
MYTHOLOGIES
REVELATIONS
AUTHORITY
DOGMAS
105
106
•
106
•
107
107
SCIENCE AND RELIGION
•
108
X
CONTENTS OF BOOK II.
ཟས་༔
VIII.
INTERLEAVES.
(From the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.)
I. THE PRACTICAL AS INTRODUCTORY TO
SPECULATIVE
II. THE SPECULATIVE
1. THE FIRST PRINCIPLE¸.
2. THE DESCENT OR LAPSE OF SOULS
THE GENESIS OR HIERARCHY
ci ci
3.
CONTENTS OF BOOK II.
I. METHOD
INDEX
METHODISTS
MATTER
•
OBSERVATORY
SPECULATIVE.
METACHEMISTRY
THE BECOMING
ORBIS PICTUS
REASON ABSOLUTE
IDEAS
INTUITION
INSTINCT
•
SELF-FINDING
LIFE'S LADDER
THE PRESENCE
II. GENESIS
CREATION
IDEAS
PAGE
THE
109
115
•
115
•
116
118
125
127
128
129
..
130
130
•
•
131
131
•
132
132
133
133
135
135
137
139
•
141
•
1
141
CONTENTS OF BOOK II.
;
TYPES
SEX
•
INCARNATION
ANCESTRY
TEMPERAMENTS
III. PERSON
PERSONAL IDENTITY
THE ONE AND THE MANY
ATHEISM
•
MAN AND Brute
WILL
CHOICE
FREEDOM
•
CONSCIENCE
IV. THE LAPSE
DEGENERACY
SIN ORIGINAL
THE TEMPTER
DESCENT
DURANCE
•
•
•
GOOD AND Evil
COMPASSION
SYMPATHY
•
V. IMMORTALITY
DECEASE
HOME
REMINISCENCE
PRE-EXISTENCE
OBLIVION
•
SLEEP
LIFE EVERLASTING
•
xi
PAGE
142
•
144
145
•
115
147
149
151
•
152
154
156
156
157
158
159
•
•
161
•
163
164
•
164
165
166
•
167
167
169
170
+
171
173
174″
•
174
•
175
176
177
TABLE-TALK.
Book J.
PRACTICAL.
"The problems of philosophy are to be enjoyed as much as
possible as if they were ambrosia and nectar. For the pleasure
arising from them is genuine, incorruptible, and divine, and
though they cannot make us eternal beings, yet they enable us
to obtain a scientific knowledge of eternal natures."
-Jamblichus.
{
I.
LEARNING.
"We fall down in tearful thankfulness before the writers of
books,
"Serene creators of immortal things."
- Landor.

TABLE-TALK.
!
BOOKS.
NE cannot celebrate books sufficiently. After
saying his best, still something better remains to
be spoken in their praise. As with friends, one finds
new beauties at every interview, and would stay
long in the presence of those choice companions.
As with friends, he may dispense with a wide ac-
quaintance. Few and choice.
Few and choice. The richest minds need
not large libraries. That is a good book which is
opened with expectation and closed with profit.
Lord Shaftesbury, writing of the literature of his
time, thus happily portrays the qualities of a good
book. “No work of wit," he says, "can be esteemed
perfect without that strength and boldness of hand
which give it body and proportion. A good piece,
the painters say, must have good muscling, as well as
coloring and drapery. And surely no writing or dis-
course of any great moment can seem other than ener-
6
TABLE-TALK.
vated, when neither strong reason, nor antiquity, nor
the record of things, nor the natural history of man,
nor anything which can be called knowledge, dares
accompany it except in some ridiculous habit which
may give it an air of play and dalliance."
Of books in our time the variety is so voluminous,
and they follow so fast from the press, that one must be
a swift reader to acquaint himself even with their titles,
and wise to discern what are worth the reading. It is
a wise book that is good from title-page to the end.
"Were I to be judge and no other to be gratified,”
says Howell, "I think I should silence whole libraries
of authors and reduce the world of books into a parcel;
whereas, were another to sit censor, it may be all those
I had spared would be condemned to darkness and
obtain no exemption from those ruins; and were all to
be suppressed which some think unworthy of the light,
no more would be left than were before Moses and
Trismegistus."
I confess to being drawn rather to the antiques, and
turn with a livelier expectancy the dingy leaves, finding
often inside the worn covers more for my reading than
on the snowy pages of most opened by frequenters at
the bookstores. I fancy that I am guided by a select-
ing instinct to lay my hand upon the very volume that
had long been seeking my acquaintance. There are
patterns of bindings, moreover, that ensure wise con-
tents, wisdom being not less an ancient than contempo-
rary, and retains the physiognomy of its times. One
13
LEARNING.
7
may remember that time gathers and preserves the best
along with the worthless, and the selection is thus the
wider. And time must determine those of modern
date which may attain immortality. The fewest of any
period will hardly be remembered beyond their authors'
life-time; and how large the number that never gain
general perusal.
An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths
of his own thoughts serves him best, and at the same
time teaches the modesty of authorship.
The more life embodied in the book, the more com-
panionable. Like a friend, the volume salutes one
pleasantly at every opening of its leaves, and enter-
tains; we close it with charmed memories, and come
again and again to the entertainment. The books that
charmed us in youth recall the delight ever afterwards;
we are hardly persuaded there are any like them, any
deserving equally our affections. Fortunate if the best
fall in our way during this susceptible and forming
period of our lives.
4
I value books for their suggestiveness even more
than for the information they may contain, works that
may be taken in hand and laid aside, read at moments,
containing sentences that quicken my thoughts and
prompt to following these into their relations with life
and things. I am stimulated and exalted by the pe-
rusal of books of this kind, and should esteem myself
fortunate if I might add another to the few which the
world shall take to its affections.
8
TABLE-TALK.
QUOTATION.
One reads for thought and for quotation not less; if
he find his thought more finely conceived and aptly ex-
pressed by another, let him quote without hesitation or
apology. He has the highest authority for the practice.
How rich is Plutarch's page, Montaigne's, Bacon's!
And what they borrow is of a piece with their own text,
giving it added strength and grace. I know the fashion
of our time affects disdain of borrowing. But who is
rich enough to refuse, or plead honorably for his exclu-
siveness? Somehow the printer happens to forget his
quotation marks, and the credit of originality goes to
the writer none the less.
The plea is that quoting often implies sterility and
bad taste. Then Shakespeare and his contemporaries
were wanting in wit and fine rhetoric. Hear how Mon-
taigne justifies his practice:-
"Let nobody insist upon the matter I write but
my method in writing. Let them observe in what I
borrow, if I have known how to choose what is proper
to raise or relieve invention, which is always my own;
for I make others say for me what, either for want of
language or want of sense, I cannot myself well ex-
press. I do not number my borrowings, I weigh them.
And had I designed to raise their estimate by their
number, I had made twice as many."
One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.
And then what service is rendered his reader by ad-
LEARNING.
9
vertising him where the good things are, besides the
modesty of the practice. An author should esteem
himself honored in his wisely quoted sentences; his
fame is published the more widely as the volume cir-
culates and is read.
•
CRITICISM.
Aubrey relates that, speaking of Lord Bacon's "History
of Henry VII,” "Sir John Danvers told me that when
his lordship had written this history, he sent the manu-
script copy to him to desire his opinion of it before it
was printed. Quoth Sir John, 'Your lordship knows
that I am no scholar.' "Tis no matter,' said my lord.
'I know what a scholar can say. I would know what
you can say.' Sir John read it, and gave his opinion
of what he misliked (which I am sorry I have forgot),
which my lord acknowledged to be true, and mended it.
"Why,' said he, a scholar would never have told me
that.'
It was just what the scholar's eyes would not discern
that Lord Bacon would know, and hence his appeal to
a man of the world like Sir John. The skill won from
the study of books is no substitute for thought that
comes from dealing directly with affairs. The accom-
plished scholar has both, and with such aids and attain-
ments he may venture upon criticism of books and affairs
with confidence.
Nor can any afford to ignore or undervalue the public
10
TABLE-TALK.
sentiment regarding men or books, authors or ideas.
Mankind may be inappreciative and unjust at times, but
just in the main. A work of real merit finds favor at
last. It may run the gauntlet of praise and blame, but
will honor itself and author in due time. Doubtless a
great writer is the better critic of his own productions.
Only what is wholesome will find general acceptance and
endure. If one submitted his writing to a jury of his
contemporaries his work would hardly reach a wider
publicity.
Time is the best critic, tolerates not an infirmity,
holds us fast to the canons of truth and of good taste.
Time is one's best friend, teaching best of all the wisdom
of silence. Were all we think and speak, all we venture
to write, at once photographed to our eyes, what volu-
minous dunces were we seen to be. To what coverts
should we flee.from the rays of Helios, the strict life-
limner, always there above taking his profiles! More
gratifying for Narcissus to look into the pool reflecting
his egotism so charmingly.
LITERARY COURTESY.
Literary courtesy is due from contemporary authors
to one another respecting their works. I readily excuse
silence where one cannot praise, only blame another.
But praise is always in fine keeping with friendship.
That code which carefully abstains from speaking to an
author about his book, from a mistaken delicacy,
LEARNING.
11
appears to me wanting in real sympathy and refine-
ment of courtesy, and, to the extent in which it is
practised, vitiates the truest literary fellowship. Even
where authors move in different walks of thought, the
haughty bearing that disdains to recognize humble
merit is unworthy of the liberal scholar and true gentle-
man. Very true, that not every scholar is competent
to pronounce upon the merits of another in provinces
of thought or styles of writing differing greatly from his
own; yet this does not debar him from expressing his
views diffidently or even critically in the matter. The
more character in each, the more sincere and frank the
criticism; nor should any excuse of want of time, or
preconceived estimate of one's genius or manner, stand
as a sufficient excuse for indifference or want of perusal.
A new work added to literature is an event of sig-
nificance, and is entitled to a perusal and a verdict.
"'T is a generous kind of civility to report always the
best."
BALANCE MEN.
I profess no special partiality for the critic who,
with balance in hand, weighs eagerly whatsoever of learn-
ing comes to his counter. I rather query whether he
is not thinking less of his author's weight than of the
polish of his scales, never questioning their accuracy or
his own levity. Still it must be admitted these balance
men are not without their usefulness, being convenient
for appraising present market values,
12
TABLE-TALK.
!
AUTHORSHIP.
The habit of journalizing becomes a life-long lesson
taken in the art of composition, an informal schooling
for authorship. And were the process of preparing
their works for publication faithfully detailed by dis-
tinguished writers, it would appear how large were
their indebtedness to their diary and commonplaces.
How carefully should we peruse Shakespeare's notes
used in compiling his plays—what was his, what an-
other's showing how these were fashioned into the
shapely whole we read, how Milton composed, - Mon-
taigne, Goethe; by what happy strokes of thought,
flashes of wit, apt figures, fit quotations snatched from
vast fields of learning, their rich pages were wrought
forth. This were to give the keys of great authorship.
The ready reader hardly comprehends how much he
owes to his author's skill in compiling his notes, how
much to omission, revision, and how imperfect he re-
gards his work after his last touches. One's book is
never completed. It still invites correction while the
sheets go through the press, and fails to satisfy when he
holds the volume in covers. The labor is so pleasurable,
nevertheless, and the name of author falls so pleasantly
upon the ear, that genius even may not blush at the sound.
"'Tis a virtuous egotism that disseminates virtuous
ideas. And its disseminators, though but clay, may be
spoken of in the terms of the beautiful Persian apologue :
If not the rose, they have been near the rose, and left
its fragrance in their writings."
LEARNING.
13
LETTERS.
The finer essences of life find choicest expression in
letters. What like a loved correspondent for prompt-
ing to the freest and freshest utterances of sentiment?
One imparts what would not have been written other-
wise, nor thought even, much less spoken, - especially
when women are addressed. The finer literature, indeed,
is characterized by a certain suffusion of the feminine
flavor, the finer, the more ideal, thought plumed with
sentiment; even science loves to spring from its feet,
philosophy affect the clouds to inspire and edify.
Which will you have, O beloved correspondent! pure
facts, pure thoughts, or pure sentiments?—three essen-
tial elements in intercourse.
The Practical Man: Facts, pure facts, for me, neither
more nor less.
The Poet: Thoughts, pure thoughts, ideas; others I
have already.
Woman: Oh, sentiments, these surely. Sentiments
forever!
Philosopher: Fusion of the three.
Child: I want only what I have already, and please
be silent about all of them.
DIARIES.
I value the diary. Having kept one from my youth to
the present time, I may commend the practice on many
33
14
TABLE-TALK.
accounts, and add, the earlier it is begun the better.
One's life should be sufficiently interesting to furnish
entertainment in the record. What transpires around
and within, what one thinks and speaks, the books he
reads, the company he keeps, his friendships, occupa-
tions, these, interfused with his feelings, motives, the
scenery in which he dwells, current events, form the
staple for his writing. Surely to this array he cannot
be indifferent if he have any stake in affairs.
At best, his transcript may prove a very unsatisfactory
chronicle of himself and surroundings. Were he always
the same in moments, his days and years would hardly
deserve record or remembrance. What is in transition
-his flowing life-invites his pen.
"We live in deeds, not years, in thoughts, not breaths,
In feelings, not in figures on the dial."
Nor let him mistake the mere record of the facts as
his main business: not the facts, but sentiments inwoven
with these, the spirit which these embody and symbolize,
chiefly. The facts are the form, the substance is spirit,
the essence of the truthful record. There is a subtile
mythology woven into the threads of our personality.
Nor should any insight, the faintest, into one's ex-
perience be thought insignificant; trifles even, seem-
ingly worthless at the time, rise into importance wher
viewed afterwards in their relation to the whole of
existence. Perspective is necessary to see the whole
as it is.
LEARNING.
15
The substance of a worthy life, fully and faithfully
portrayed, becomes a part of that of the race, and a
good man's correspondence adds a priceless contribu-
tion to literature. The best of a true life is its private
part; all men take an interest in it. Nor unless one's
doings are useful and beautiful does he belong either
to human society properly, or art, or letters, which
celebrate the beauty and truth in all.
"Some drop of time's strange glass life holds,
So much endurance it enfolds,
Or base, or small, or broadly meant,
One may not spill God's element."
Who so
With whom should one become better acquainted than
with his most familiar companion, himself?
interesting?
Marcus Aurelius, whose life has even become a model
to later times, placed this motto before his me-
moirs :
"Of the things concerning myself.”
Time ripens the substance of a life as the seasons
mellow and perfect its fruits. The best apples fall
latest and keep the longest. And the fruits of a life-
time, harvested and housed in a book, were a sheaf
worth binding and preserving for all time.
Imperfect and unsatisfactory as his record may be,
he shall find it the most stimulating of readings when-
soever he chance to open its leaves. And as the years
pass by he will feel the more grateful to the examples
16
TABLE-TALK.
of any who may have suggested the keeping of a chron-
icle of his privatest thoughts and humblest deeds.
"In everything there grows a natural charm,
A balsamine to keep it fresh and warm."
BIOGRAPHY.
No spot has a permanent interest for any till it
become the scene of some deed worthy of mankind.
Man, the skies, the landscape, are alike parts of
greatness, the artist giving lustre to the union and per-
petuating it. One and the chief value of biography lies
in its rendering the earth and mankind thereafter illus-
trious.
The history of books shows the humblest origin of
some of the most valued, wrought as these were out of
obscure materials by persons whose names thereafter
became illustrious. The thumbed volumes, now so
precious to thousands, were compiled from personal
experiences and owe their interest to touches of inspi-
ration of which the writer was less author than aman-
uensis, himself the voiced word of life for all times.
"Biography," says Carlyle, "is almost the one thing
needful, and man is perennially interesting to man; nay,
if we look strictly to it, there is nothing else interest-
ing." How attractive to all ages the few such, the
choice pieces of a life-time, too few in any literature,
rare in ours, the autobiographies of lasting repute.
"Could you have the life of any man really portrayed
LEARNING.
17
to you, sundrawn as it were, its hopes, its fears, its
revolutions of opinions; in each day its most anxious
wishes attained, and then, perhaps, crystallizing into its
blackest regrets, — such a work would go far to contain all
histories, and be the grandest lesson of love, humanity,
and tolerance that man had ever seen."
Moreover, one must have lived greatly whose record
would bear the full light of day from beginning to its
close only the chance strokes tell. But a diary comes
nearest to a clearing of the breast, and were not worth-
less though it but poorly disclosed the life of the hum-
blest of the race, since it would contain the story of a
human heart.
IDEALISM.
Life and literature need the inspiration which idealism
quickens and promotes, the history of thought showing
that a people given over to sensationalism and the lower
forms of materialism have run to ruin. Only that which
inspires life and nobility of thought can maintain and
preserve itself from speedy and ignoble decay. And we
have too palpable evidence of corruption, public and
private, to leave us in doubt as to the tendency of not a
little of the speculation and teachings current in our time.
"Prevailing studies," says Bishop Berkeley, "are of
no small consequence to a state, the religion, manners,
and civil government of a country ever taking some
bias from its philosophy which affects not only the minds
of its professors and students, but also the opinions of
18
TABLE-TALK.
•
:
all the better sort and the practice of the whole people,
remotely and consequentially indeed, though not incon-
siderably. Have not the polemic and scholastic phil-
osophy been observed to produce controversies in law
and religion? And have not fatalism and Sadduceeism
gained ground during the general passion for the cor-
puscular and mechanical philosophy which has prevailed
for about a century? This indeed might usefully enough
have employed some share of the leisure and curiosity of
inquisitive persons. But when it entered the seminaries
of learning as a necessary accomplishment and most im-
portant part of education, by engrossing men's thoughts
and fixing their minds so much on corporeal objects and
the laws of motion, it has, however undesignedly, in-
directly and by accident yet not a little indisposed them
for spiritual, moral, and intellectual matters. Certainly
had the philosophy of Plato and Socrates and Pythagoras
prevailed in this age, among those who think them-
selves too wise to receive the dictates of the gospel, we
should not have seen interest take so general and fast
hold on the minds of men, uor public spirit reputed to be
a generous folly among those who are reckoned to be the
most knowing as well as the most getting part of man-
kind."
THE IDEALISTS.
The idealists have given deeper insights into life and
nature than other schools of thought. If inclined to
visionariness and seeming to stand sometimes on the
LEARNING.
19
verge of lunacy even, they have revealed depths of
being, a devotion to the spirit of universality, that
render their works most edifying. They more than any
have held the balance betwixt mind and matter, and
illuminated literature while they furthered the science,
art and religion of all times. An age deficient in
idealism has ever been one of immorality and superficial
attainment, since without the sense of ideas, nobility of
character becomes of rare attainment, if possible.
IDEAL METHODS.
A discipline in the methods of the great idealists
were an education in itself, yet this is sparingly given
in our universities. If Plato and Aristotle are studied,
it is less for mastering their dialectic than their rhetoric,
the tongue they spoke and wrote. We drift doubtingly
rather in the regions of probabilities, confine our re-
searches mostly to the visible and material, venturing
but timidly into the invisible and ideal. Physics are
studied with an eager enthusiasm, while metaphysics
we deem unprofitable, blind the while to the fact that
only as mind masters matter, neither science, nor art,
nor life itself become available to the humblest uses,
all pure power being ideal and one with the creative
mind. Who knows the mind has the key to all things
else. "The essence of nothing is reached into by the
senses looking outward, but by the mind looking inward
into itself."
20
TABLE-TALK.
The naturalist cannot urge too strongly the claims of
physics, nor the plea for metaphysics be less vigor-
ously urged by the idealist. Both have their legitimate
place and importance in a comprehensive and complete
discipline, but neither as yet takes rank according to
its respective claims, and thought lingers far behind
the demands of the mind and our time.
Liberal learning can hardly be in flourishing condi-
tion while natural knowledge is promoted above moral
and metaphysical, memory supplanting imagination,
and the study of the mother tongue ranking secondary
to that of the ancient classical languages.
It seems superfluous to add that the first and neces-
sary qualification of a scholar is that he speak and write
his mother tongue with accuracy and elegance; then if
time and taste favor, as many of the learned tongues as
he may. But first and especially the full command of
his own.
Landor said that "to talk well we must
drop our Greek and Latin out of sight," and Coleridge
thought it “ a kind of Providence that our Bible was
translated about the time of the greatest strength of the
language."
CLASSICS.
I know it is still an open question, discussed with
more or less of heat and discrimination, the relative
values of the ancient and modern learning as means of
literary culture, the admission being general that in
whatsoever gives subtility and splendor, the Greek
LEARNING.
21
+
intellect surpasses the modern; and there is nothing
surprising in the enthusiasm of scholars concerning this
wonderful people. The great names of Solon, Pericles,
Plato, Aristotle, Pindar, Demosthenes, Eschylus, Phi-
dias, suggest whatsoever is superior in human culture
and accomplishment. I, though no Grecian, almost
wish at times that it had fallen for me to have been
favored with an advent into that age of philosophic
thought and elegant scholarship. In physical science,
political liberty, social comforts, popular education, it
is readily conceded that great advance has been made
upon the Athenian culture, and yet the Greek classics
still take rank before all others in our universities.
How many social reforms, esteemed modern, has Plato
anticipated in his "Ideal Republic," while as regards
the principles and methods of thought, of human cul-
ture, the great educators of Greece, Pythagoras, Plato,
Aristotle, surpassed any the world has known. Even
in the science of nature, modern thought has scarcely
outstripped the mind of Aristotle, to whom the eminent
naturalists of our time look with reverence for the
breadth and sagacity of his genius,* as the idealists to
* "In some ways the study of natural history," says Agassiz, "has lost
rather than gained in modern civilization. You would be surprised to learn
how well informed the Greeks were, for instance, about the structure of ani
mals. All college students know that the ancients delighted in critical analysis
of intellectual problems, as well as in dramatic and poetical composition, and
in all beauty of sculpture and architecture. But I think their familiarity
with nature is not so well known as their culture in letters and art. Aristotle
knew more of certain kinds of animals and of their general relations than is
known now. For instance, he never confounded sharks and skates with
22
TABLE-TALK.
Plato for the subtility and scope of his. Conceive what
either would have done with their omniscient intelligence
brought to bear directly upon the added attainments
made since their day in the lines of observation and of
ideas.
ACADEMIC GROVES.
Cities with all their advantages have something hostile
to liberal learning, the seductions are so subtle and
accost the senses so openly on all sides. A suburban
neighborhood at least, if not a rural, were most friendly
and inviting. Nor can I conceive an academic cul-
ture fairly conducted without the stimulus which
sylvan surroundings afford the student; not without
its moral had the ancient schools their academic groves
and walks, their gardens and rural influences. A pro-
fessorship were those for genius and the Graces. The
woods have a strange charm singularly sane and whole-
some; a walk in forest paths at all seasons lends a
ordinary fishes, while modern naturalists would put them in one and the
same class. Strange to say, I have studied the Selacians on the South
American coast by the light of Aristotle's researches upon them in the Med-
iterranean Sea, made by him more than two thousand years ago. I can fairly
add that the knowledge of Aristotle on those topics is so far ahead of the
current information recorded in modern works of natural history that his
statements can only be understood by one who has made a special study of
those animals. The community evidently shared his knowledge, for he re-
fers to text-books of natural history, which must, from the details he gives
about them, have been superior to those we have now. You may seek in
vain in the anatomical atlases of Wagner or Carus for information about the
structure of the reproductive apparatus of Selacians, to which he alludes as
contained in the text-books of anatomists and belonging to the current knowl
edge of the time."- Prof. Agassiz's Harvard Lecture, 1873.
LEARNING.
23
certain enchantment to the fancy and stimulates to
thought. Alone, or in company with another, one is
enriched with luxuriant images, his philosophy becomes
harmonized with life, and he is resolved, for the mo-
ment, into his primitive freshness and innocency.
"Truth has her pleasure grounds, her haunts of ease
And easy contemplation, gay parterres
And labyrinthine walks, her sunny glades,
And shady groves for recreation formed."
"Truth, whatever the poets may tell us, never
comes without her veil, diaphanous or opaque,” and
only those who have been privileged with her company
in private have beheld her serene countenance, hidden
from the stranger who would rudely tear it aside from
her brow. Only to the wise and good are her charms
fully revealed, the lovers of liberal learning and the
aspirants for excellence.
"If those who differ on spec-
ulative points would walk together now and then in the
country they might find many objects that must unite
them. The same bodily feeling is productive in some
degree of the same mental one. Enjoyment from sun
and air, from exercise and odors, brings hearts together
that schools and council-chambers and popular assem-
blies have stood between for years."
IDEAL CULTURE.
One allows himself but the narrowest range of obser
'vation and thought in our stirring time, if he fail of
24
TABLE-TALK.
participating in the free spirit of inquiry pervading all
classes of the community. And a most hopeful indica-
tion is seen in the growing class of young persons who
seek a wider and freer culture than even the most liberal
universities favor. Instead of deriving information from
inheritance alone or authority, they are ambitious of
entering upon the study of the human spirit, its origin,
duties, and destinies, thus founding their faith upon the
immutable laws of psychology, studying in the spirit of
the heaven-descended precept, "Know thyself."
The school of thought which a quarter of a century
since stirred New England, and has produced a liter-
ature indigenous and American, and upon which a suc-
ceeding generation has been nurtured, now awaits an
institution in which our brilliant youth may study the
latest thought along with that of all time, and establish
for the new what a profound and varied scholarship has
effected for the old countries.
NEW ACADEMY.
Like its suburban neighbor beside the Charles, our
village seated along the banks of its Indian stream
spreads a rural cradle for the fresher literature; and
aside from these advantages it well deserves its name
for its quiet scenery and plain population. Moreover,
few spots in New England have won a like literary re-
pute. The rural muse has traversed these fields,
meadows, woodlands, the brook-sides, the river; caught
i
LEARNING.
25
the harmony of its changing skies, and portrayed
their spirit in books which are fit to live while letters
delight and Nature charms her lovers. Had Homer,
had Virgil fairer promptings than our landscape affords?
Had Shakespeare or Goethe a more luxuriant simplicity
than ours? Only the wit to say or sing these the poet
needs; and of this our neighborhood has not less than
many sounding cities.
CONCORD.
Plain as our landscape is, it has special attractions for
the scholar who courts quiet surroundings, scenery not
too exciting, yet stimulating to genial and uninterrupted
studies. If the hills command no very broad horizon, the
prospect is sufficiently sylvan to give an agreeable variety
without confusing the mind, while the river in good part
compensates for the sameness as it winds sluggishly
along the confines of the village, flowing by the monu-
ment into the distance through the meadows. Thoreau,
writing of it, jocosely says, "It is remarkable for the
gentleness of its current, which is hardly perceptible,
and some have ascribed to its influence the proverbial
moderation of the inhabitants of Concord, as celebrated
in the Revolution and on other occasions. It has been
proposed that the town should adopt for its coat of arms
a field verdant, with the Concord River circling nine
times round it."
II.
ENTERPRISE.
"Whoever would accomplish great things must divest objects of
their materiality, adding spirit to matter; otherwise he will perform
nothing great.”
- Maxwell.

BSERVATION
EXPERIENCE.
more than books, experience
O rather than persons, are the prime educators.
Books aid as one has the wit to use them to advan-
tage, persons most when seeming not to serve us.
Experience converts us to ourselves when books fail
us, and this oftenest against our knowledge and con-
sent. And it remains questionable how far our attain-
ments further or hinder Nature's intentions, the art of
education being still so complicated and incalculable a
matter that, with the experience of past times to aid us,
not a few of the most striking characters have been
formed, untrammelled by the schools, under the more
direct and potent influences of life and things, oper-
ating under the pressure of necessity and seeming
accident.
TRAVELLING.
Ourselves are cosmic and capacious beyond conjec-
ture, and to experience some notion of the planetary
perspective is the richest income from travelling. It
takes all to inform and educate all. Sallies forth from
our cramped firesides into other homes, other hearts,
30
TABLE-TALK.
are wonderfully wholesome and enlarging. Travel
opens prospects on all sides, widens our horizon,
liberates the mind from geographical and conventional
limitations, from local prejudices and national, showing
the globe in its differing climates, zones, and latitudes
of intelligence. The travelled mind is the catholic mind
educated from exclusiveness and egotism. 66 Amongst
the many advantages," says Howell, "which conduce
to enrich the mind with variety of knowledge, to rectify
and ascertain the judgment, and to compose outward
manners and build one up in the highest story of
perfection, foreign travel is none of the least. The
traveller must have a diary about him when he is in
motion on his journeys, to set down what either his
ears hear or eyes meet with most remarkable in the
daytime, out of which he may raise matter of discourse
at night. And let him take it for a rule that he offends
less who writes toys than he who omits one serious
thing; for the pen makes the deepest furrows and
doth fertilize and enrich memory more than anything
else." A quick wit and observing eye are his best gifts,
with the skill for setting in apt phrase what interests
him on his way. Travelling is no fool's errand to him
who carries his eyes and itinerary along with him.
EPHEMERA.
Nor in stirring times like ours, when the world's
affairs come posted with each successive sun rising and
ENTERPRISE.
31
setting, can one ignore the magazines, libraries, and
ephemera of the press. Newspapers intrude into every
office, every house, almost superseding the primers and
text-books of the schools, proffering alike to hand and
eye intelligence formerly won only by laborious studies
and much expense of time and money.
Cheap liter-
ature is now in vogue; the age, if not profound, has
chances for attaining some superficial knowledge, at
least, of the globe's doings and designings, the ex-
periments of the few being hereby popularized for the
benefit of the many everywhere, the humblest even
partaking largely of the common benefit.
CHARIOTS.
"Tis best to keep sensitive throughout, touching
whatever transpires within every Mediterranean and
archipelago of endeavor, since thought, like light,
transmits the latest news from zenith to nadir of intel-
ligence, both hemispheres throbbing simultaneously
with common impulses and ideas. Nothing is insular.
Thought is salient, overbridging matter with spirit.
Mind is the charioteer of the lightnings.
The mind is fast emancipating itself from the do-
minion of man and of matter. It has let loose fearful
forces on the world. Nor can ignorance nor servitude
long withstand these mighty potentates, steam and
electricity. The press, the pen, are subordinated to
thought, and sects, parties, peoples set adrift in the
32
TABLE-TALK.
world-stream of ideas. Steam and electricity are be-
come the missionaries and civilizers, advancing all men,
the races, into near kindred and neighborhood. Show
man to man is the modern gospel.
Life and literature are become current commodities,
even Bibles are exchanged in good faith, the religions
of the cultivated nations embracing one another in kindly
greetings. Christendom, with its traditions, powerful
instrumentalities, prestige of centuries, is moved with the
rest by outside pressures; the international sympathies,
tendencies, and impulses, all driving forward the new
civilization with a speed and momentum unprecedented.
"'Tis the high tide that heaves the stranded ship,
And every individual spirit waxes
In the great stream of multitudes."
"I doubt not,” says Glanvill (writing in 1661), "pos-
terity will find many things that are now but rumors
verified into practical realities. It may be that, some
ages hence, a voyage to the Southern tracts, yea, possi-
bly to the moon, will not be more strange than one to
America. To them that come after us, it may be as
ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly with to remotest
regions, as now a pair of boots to ride a journey; and
to confer at the distance of the Indies by sympathetic
conveyances may be as usual to future times as by
literary correspondence. The restoration of gray hairs
to juvenility, and renewing the exhausted marrow, may
at length be effected without a miracle; and the turn-
ing of the now comparatively desert world into a
ENTERPRISE.
33
Paradise may not improbably be effected from late
agriculture."
The "sympathetic conveyances" are probably of
another sort from what the author imagined, and the
flying apparatus yet awaits construction. As to the
"rejuvenating," I know not if we are nearer its dis-
covery than his friend Kenelm Digby, desirable as it
were to the ancients of our time. But the "Paradise
Plantation seems in a fairer way for its accomplish-
ment, furthered as it is by our modern instrumentalities
of transportation from continent to continent, the open-
ing of the gates of India to the cosmopolitan mission-
aries, trade and intercourse; the traffic in things
advertising ideas; life and literature interchanging their
commodities at the Golden Gate, as the poet Dyer
wrote in 1758:
"A day will come, if not too deep we drink
The cup which luxury or careless wealth
(Pernicious gift!) bestows; a day will come
When, through her channels sailing, we shall clothe
The Californian coast, and all the realms
That stretch from Anam's Straits to proud Japan."
Already the lightning has become thought's courier
and competitor, flashing its tidings at the world's op-
posites in a twinkling, making of all mankind neighbors
and contemporaries in time and space, as if anticipating
the yet unannounced discovery-complementing Ga-
lileo's of the planet's spinning round its axle obedient
to the consenting wills of its inhabitants,
3
34
TABLE-TALK.
Hold fast, therefore, O circular philosopher, to thy
centre, and drive the globe along its orbit by the mo-
mentum of thy thought, all mind conspiring with thine,
all purposes one, and the will of thy will, of all con-
senting wills, the Will of wills, thus maintaining it in
space and timing its course.
Round the wide globe Thought fearless runs,
Her circuit suited to superior suns.
It is easy to see that any extravagance of idealism
may become matter of fact in the future; that whatever
the imagination of man may conceive, the reason dele-
gated to the hand of man may practically realize. All
that ideas have in store the mind hastens to individ-
ualize to the senses, and civilization keep abreast of
thought the world over.
HIPPOGRIFFS.
'Tis the age of Tubal Cain and the giants. Science
has grown frightfully audacious in these days, swift-
footed, ponderous, careering over her iron ways with
unslacking pace. This rampant dragon, on which I
am mounted, see how he bends his once stiff neck to
his rider, champing his checked bit and pawing the
dust, impatient to leap around the globe. Genius is
prescient, foresees its own might. Man is striving
through these iron-ribbed, steam-sped hippogriffs, to
recover his lost ubiquity and omnipotence, and threatens
ENTERPRISE.
35
soon to grasp in his ample palm, and fix with flaming
eye-ball, the elemental forces !
"Fire," said Plato, "by the fineness of its particles,
passes through all things, and air through the rest of
things, fire excepted, and water through earth; all
things are therefore full, and have no vacuum.
If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken
that we moderns are building houses for them,
structures which neither Plato nor Archimedes had
dreamed possible.
"More servants wait on man
Than he 'll take notice of."
"For him the winds do blow,
The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow.
Nothing we see but means our good,
As our delight, or as our treasure.
The whole is either our cupboard of food,
Or cabinet of pleasure."
IDEAS.
Ideas first and last: yet it is not till these are formu-
lated and utilized that the devotees of the common sense
discern their value and advantages. The idealist is the
capitalist on whose resources multitudes are maintained
life long.
Ideas in the head set hands about their
several tasks, thus carrying forward all human endeav-
ors to their issues. Thought feeds, clothes, educates
the population of the globe, -all economies, natural,
social, intellectual, spiritual, taking their rise in this
36
TABLE-TALK.
stream of power and performance. What were Statés
without these royal rulers, heads of cabinets? It will
be a stride in legislation when these subordinate and
make all else implemental to ideas, the sources and
seats of power and intelligence.*
GENIUS.
Genius is the world's capitalist, say worldlings
what they may, paying the golden gains with com-
pound interest into the world's exchequer, lest it fail
from insolvency. Could Rothschild purchase Fulton's
genius, or Vanderbilt pile his ingots were the visionary's
ideas not running his engines? The globe's riches
could not buy what his talents have created or
could command were these exhaustless. Yet Genius
has oftenest been the pariah of his time, the un-
housed god whom none cared for, unnamed till they
whom he first promoted, enriched and honored, found
it honorable to own their benefactor.
"By more than wealth we propagate our names
That trust not to succession, but our fames."
*"In Plato's style the term "idea" does not signify merely an inert, inactive
object of the understanding, but is used synonymously with cause and princi-
ple. According to that philosopher, goodness, beauty, virtue, and such like
are not figments of the mind, nor mere mixed modes, nor yet abstract ideas
in the modern sense, but the most real beings, intellectual and unchangeable,
and therefore more real than the fleeting, transient objects of sense, which,
wanting stability, cannot be subjects of science, much less of intellectual
knowledge."- Bishop Berkeley.
•
ENTERPRISE.
37
BUSINESS.
When the poets are too fine for public affairs, the
philosophers too ideal, the common people too indiffer-
ent, then the world's business falls to merchants and
bankers, they holding the keys of power for the time.
Yet reason and right must balance the accounts punc-
tually on time, or themselves bankrupt the community
at last, all going to wreck together.
"Never for his wealth
Would I appoint a ruler o'er the State,
Or chief in arms: wisdom should mark the man
Who in his country bears the sovereign sway;
Every man sage in counsel is a leader."
A polity founded upon the appetites cannot last long.
The passions refuse to be organized on a basis of their
own; hostile to personal freedom and one another, they
rush precipitately into anarchy and mob rule. A gov-
ernment for protecting the coarser interests of the body,
business and bread only, is but a carcass, and soon falls
by its own corruption to decay.
SOCRATES' PRAYER.
One would hardly venture an improvement of the
prayer of Socrates, where, in one of his fine sallies of
irony which he delighted to play off upon the super-
stitious Athenians, he recites in his conversation with
Phædrus,-
#
38
TABLE-TALK.
.
"O beloved Pan and all ye other gods of this place,
grant me to become beautiful in the inner man, and that
whatever outward things I possess, I may be at peace
with those within. May I deem the wise man rich, and
may I have such a portion of gold as none but a wise
man can either share or employ. Do we need anything
else, Phædrus? For myself I have prayed enough.
"Phædrus. Make the same prayer for me too, for
the possessions of friends are common.
"Socrates. Let us depart."
"Our Father who art in heaven" breathes a warmer
tone, but draws scarcely a deeper draught from the
wells of being than this of the great Athenian moralist.
Given the love and the wisdom, life's code of action
follows.
WORLD-CULTURE.
One day every man shall have a stake and share in
the world's rule and in person by reason of the vast
responsibilities a world-culture is fast laying on his
shoulders, and the feat of Atlas belong no more to
the ancient. As education becomes inclusive, intro-
spective, cosmic, promoting whole populations to power
and privilege, it enthrones a vast, invisible, personal
rule over the common mind. And this idea of personal
supremacy, born of every one's faith in community,
is the pledge of its consummation. Vast problems,
meanwhile, await man's solution, the planting and
peopling of the globe's surface, the subjugation—a
th
ENTERPRISE.
39
still more difficult labor-of the body to the mind, plant-
ing the intellect with fair colonies of ideas, peopling the
heart with sentiments of community, habituating the will
to the service of the laws of human destiny.
SCALE OF CULTURE.
Civilization meliorates the brute.
Culture refines the man.
Education molds the mind.
Religion divinizes the person.

+
III.
PURSUITS.
'To find one's self-business I am persuaded is the great art of
life. Some spirit, something of genius (more than common) is re-
quired to teach a man how to employ himself."
- Gray.

ONE'S STAR.
FOLLOW the star of promise first seen in your early
morning, nor desist though you find the labor
toilsome and your guides mislead. In the ardor of his
enthusiasm a youth set forth in quest of a man of whom
he might take counsel as to his future, but after long
search and many disappointments, he came near relin-
quishing the pursuit as hopeless, when suddenly it
occurred to him that one must first be a man to find a
man, and profiting by this suggestion he set himself
to the work of becoming himself the man he had been
seeking so long and fruitlessly. When last heard from
he was still on the stretch, near the end of his journey,
the goal in his eye, his star blazing more brightly than
when he first beheld it.
"The eldest god is still a child."
CHARACTER.
Act out your genius, nothing else avails. The Cre-
ator did the best possible under the circumstances to
make a right beginning of you. First ascertain his
44
TABLE-TALK,
intent, and proceed forthwith to enact this to the best
of your ability. If a crooked stick, consider yourself
gifted in that particular. Be what you were meant
to be. You may go through the world an oddity, to
your own merriment at least, if not that of your con-
temporaries. Character is a fact, and that is much in
a world of pretence and concession. Character, not
accomplishments, but character personally controlling
these, does the work. 'Tis not the hammer that drives
the nail, but the hand that smites it. Character is
might and momentum. It is easier to carry the world
in one's thought than on the shoulders. All is in the
will, and precipitated in conduct. Manners carry the
world for the moment, character for all times. All
faculties conspire in character, giving themselves un-
reservedly to the work.
MISFORTUNE.
The disparity between our powers and our perform-
ance is life's tragedy. A free scope for one's activities,
and a clean deliverance, freedom won from struggle;
not inaction but chosen activities, the satisfaction that
springs from tasks performed and duties faithfully
fulfilled, this is the reward and the content. An
ideal realized in the moment, yet spurring still onward
and upward, the sense of power to accomplish what we
design, the experience of so much of the perfect as lies
within our power to attain, yield the fruits of a satis-
PURSUITS.
45
faction which nothing distinct from one's purpose can
confer. He who is free in his spirit frees all his faculties
and fortifies himself from the fate of circumstance, the
assaults of calamity. Success is sweet, the sweeter
if long delayed and attained through manifold struggles
and defeats, better oftentimes than the early popularity
wont to fade into obscurity and forgetfulness. The
best things are all too cheaply purchased by a lifetime's
toil; treasures that none can beg or steal from their
possessor.
Our bravest lessons are not learned through success
but misadventure, the best soldiers being drilled by
Necessity, serving their time under the discipline of
Fate; only one must be equal to Destiny and measure
his strength with hers in open encounter. The faith-
ful are sure to win in the end. They come forth the
stronger through disaster not less than success. Fail-
ure of the man is the only discomfiture. Temporary
defeats may become means of successive conquests over
himself. The fool of ideas is ever on the high road to
wisdom, he lodges for the night only at the inns by the
roadside, quite willing to be cheated of his fare, too wise
to travel that route again.
"Truth and the feeling of integrity
Are of the heart's own essence, should they call
For suffering none repent the sacrifice."
46
TABLE-TALK.
AIMS.
"The entrance of men into the present life," said an
ancient wise man, "resembles the procession of a crowd
to see some great spectacle. For there men of every
description assemble with different views, one hasten-
ing to sell his wares for the sake of money and gain,
but another that he may acquire renown by exhibiting
the strength of his body; and there is a third class of
men, and those the most liberal, who assemble the beau-
tiful works of art, the specimens of valor, and the liter-
ary productions which are usually exhibited on such
occasions. Thus also in the present life, men of all
various pursuits are collected together in one and the
same place; for some are influenced by the desire of
riches and luxury, others by the love of power and
dominion, and others are possessed with an insane am-
bition for glory. But the most pure and unadulterated
character is that of the man who gives himself to the
contemplation of the most beautiful things, and whom
it is proper to call a philosopher."
"Be, rather than be thought, the best."
CALLINGS.
66 'Tis very manifest," says Plutarch, "there is a
wide difference in things, and that we ought to obey the
inscription of the Pythian oracle, that every man should
know himself, that he should not constrain his genius
PURSUITS.
47
but leave it to its own propensions, and so, by applying
himself to that to which he is most adapted, he may
follow and gratify his own inclinations. Thou hast a
province of thy own: adorn this, and mind nothing else.
'Tis by a false estimate of happiness that men disturb
and perplex themselves. Every man has a storehouse
of trouble and of contentment in his own bosom. The
vessels which contain good and evil are not placed at
Jupiter's threshold, but in the recesses of the mind,
as the variety of our passions gives abundant demon-
stration."
Every one has his special gift and calling predeter-
mined by descent and temperament, subject of course
to slight modification by choice or training; and inti-
mating for what he is specially fitted. Only mediocrity
can follow his attempt to attain success in other lines
of effort; if estimating wisely his cast of gifts he may
perceive that mediocrity is his destiny, and so spare
himself the mortification of failure in attempting what
he is not fitted by birth and temperament to achieve.
Necessity may balk the following his destined employ-
ment, and life be wasted in the effort to live.
tion may work wonders as well in warping the genius
of individuals as in seconding it, and civilization
degrade the many to exalt the few. But the sense of
degradation is strong in noble natures, and asserts
itself with an emphasis unmistakable. It behooves com-
munities to furnish suitable employment for all its mem-
bers, or else recreation and amusement. Man must
Educa-
C
48
TABLE-TALK.
7
have some recognized stake in society and affairs to
knit him lovingly to his kind, or he is wont to revenge
himself for wrongs real or imagined. "T is a sure omen
of the revolutionary spirit when the people have been
driven by hereditary injustice, or neglect, to study the
fundamental principles of society, and to bring the arti-
ficial institutions of antiquity to the rigorous ordeal of
common sense, and unsophisticated and injured hearts.”
GIFTS.
Play boldly your game with few or many counters,
according to your company and skill. Some have one,
some two, others three or more; to one here and there
are given the whole seven, with the ability to play with
them as becomes the gifted and great. But you may
not expect to match beyond the number challenged.
The mind is a casket containing the seven counters,
corresponding to your talents, and you play a round
game only with him who has as many at command as
yourself. The multitude play with three, for the most
part no more than four, knowing not nor suspecting the
full complement hidden in the casket slides, and theirs
for the finding.
"God's greatest gift is common sense.'
One law of toils for all, poet and placeman alike, yet
the condition bears hardest oftentimes upon the poet,
"Whose pursuits and labors lie
Apart from all that lead to wealth, or even
A necessary maintenance ensure,
Without some hazard to the finer sense.”
PURSUITS.
49
NOBILITY.
Engage in nothing that cripples or degrades you.
Your person is sacred; you may not willingly profane
yourself. Either subordinate your calling to your culture
or quit it at once. Your real influence is measured by
your treatment of yourself. First find the man in
yourself if you will inspire manliness in others. Like
begets like the world over. ·
"Rank exists in the moral world also; common natures
Pay with what they do, noble with what they are."
MISDIRECTION.
A chosen pursuit is the saviour of its devotee; and
happy are they who, by grace of temperament as by
choice, find and follow their true callings life-long.
The miseries of one's lot come for the most part from
misdirection or pressing necessities, which preclude one's
determining outright for himself. Why individual gifts
if these are not destined to special uses and ends?
Occupations adapted to such are the birthright of every
new-comer into our planet.
BEGGING.
To beg conditions is like begging bread. Shall one
sell his principles for the sustenance of his body? If he
cannot get his bread by labor or by love, shall he break
4
-
50
TABLE-TALK.
the ten commandments for a morsel? Yet the unfortu-
nate_victim of social institutions shall sometimes be put
to this trial, and is it strange if he be found wanting in
the straits of hunger and dependence? A more equita-
ble adjustment of faculties to offices, a just division of
profits from the labors of head and hands, must effect
a happy revolution in the community. It appears the
pure instincts justify none in eating bread not honestly
earned, the Scripture text being good socialism for all
times.
Let eagerly all men repeat
Tent-maker Paul's labor receipt :-
'Who will not work shall not eat.""
Labor's the mighty mint,
Coins without stop or stint,
For high and low degree,
Love, Light, and Liberty.
LABOR.
Labor is wholesome, nor is it the sternest of decrees
that sends man to do his work in the sweat of his face.
Labor humanizes, exalts. We then breathe life from the
fountain-head and sweeten its streams. Sloth is the
tempter that beguiles, and expels from paradise.
"Friends, books, a garden, and perhaps the pen,
Delightful industry enjoyed at home,
And Nature in her cultivated trim,
Dressed to his taste, inviting him abroad,
Can he want occupation who has these?"
PURSUITS.
51
AGRICULTURE.
The fables tell us of Saturn parcelling out the globe
for culture, setting trees and grafting them, planting
vines, Celeus nursing Ceres, the goddess of gardens
and orchards, and sending her travelling over the world
instructing mankind in the art of husbandry, thus
making agriculture the oldest of the arts.
Some familiarity with the soil seems friendly to self-
respect and good citizenship. And to the credit of
humanity, most persons desire to become owner or
occupant of some small spot at least, if unable to com-
mand acres. A house without a well-kept garden and
surroundings almost accuses its occupant of disloyalty
to himself and the community. The occupant seems
unfurnished if unskilled in some handicraft by which to
vary his pursuits. One's mind acquires suppleness and
vigor, freshness and speed, by engaging at intervals in
some out-door recreation. The walk, the ride, games
of any kind, hardly supply the skill and dispatch
which strenuous labor at intervals is sure to promote.
One comes from his toil with faculties whetted for work
indoors. His labors yield a satisfaction which a hire-
ling's cannot; his work is done under his eye and
hand, and needs no after touches. There is a skill
caught from an early use of rake and spade which nothing
else can supply. An elegant service, moreover, one's
garden enables him to render his neighbor, the gift
of fruits plucked from the vines by his own hands of a
.:
52
TABLE-TALK.
He is the
keeping the
Happily for him,
dewy morning and taken to his door.
sweeter and wholesomer through the day,
commandments with a keener relish.
too, if he be in the enjoyment of the products of an-
cestral orchards and vineyards, from which generations
of his kindred have plucked the spangled fruits, the
ruddy clusters, -baskets for family use, for winter
time, for gifts to friends, for festivals, for times of
merry-making and of sorrow, fruits being always sea-
sonable, always welcome.
"Wisely," says Plutarch, "did the ancients impose
those names upon the Graces to show that the joy of
him who does a kindness exceeds that of the beneficiary,
many," he adds, "blushing when they receive favors,
but few when they bestow them."
By combining landscape gardening with productive
husbandry the landscape is rendered picturesque and
attractive, intimating the taste, opulence, and refine-
ment of the occupants, as one notes with pleasure in
suburban neighborhoods. Nature hastens to adopt
and harmonize any piece of art by superadding orna-
ments to hide the least incongruity in the design, as if
she would have partnership with mind and supply
deficiencies, suppress redundancies.
LEISURE.
“Leisure to those who know how rightly to employ
it is the most beautiful of possessions." Yet without
PURSUITS.
53
..
this knowledge it becomes burdensome and a fate.
One must espouse some pursuit, taking it kindly at
heart and with enthusiasm. Fruit he must bear, or
perish of lassitude and ennui.
"When man has cast off his ambitious greatness,
And sunk into the sweetness of himself,
Built his foundation upon honest thoughts,
Not great, but good desires, his daily servants,
How quietly he sleeps, how joyfully
He wakes again, and looks on his possessions,
And from his willing labors rests with pleasure.”
INDIVIDUALISM.
Wherever comes man come tragedy and comedy also,
fools of ideas and fools of facts, of the latter the
greater number. Individualism is the youth of the
mind, the fanaticism of liberty. One must survive his
extremes of opinion to find the golden mean and attain
the world wisdom. Once emancipated from himself,
and no longer the young man he once was, wrangling
in all companies about the sovereign rights of individ
uals, he finds himself the individual with whom he had
been at variance all the while.
THE STATE.
Personality pertains to the state. Composed of per-
sons, as distinguished from individuals, the latter remain
outside as separate and distinct therefrom in their pri-
vate interests. Being one, states represent community
54
TABLE-TALK.
of persons solely. And republics preserve their power
and perpetuity in maintaining undisturbed this personal
polity, the state planted in the common will, and thus
ensuring the security of all in the freedom of each and
every member of the commonwealth.
Communities have duties to perform collectively, as
well as private individuals; and a truly Christian
community will endeavor to ensure an education to
every citizen as the safeguard and stronghold of its
liberties. Its richest crop is a virtuous and free popu-
lation, that town or neighborhood being the best which
contains the best.

IV.
NURTURE.
"Love is a divine provision for the nurture of the young."
- Plato.

THOU
CHILDHOOD.
HOU whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul's immensity;
Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage; thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted forever by the eternal mind,
Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
(In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;)
Thou over whom thy immortality
Broods like the day, a master o'er a slave,
A presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom, on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!"
Children are illuminated text-books, breviaries of
doctrine, living bodies of divinity, open always and
inviting their elders to peruse the characters inscribed
58
TABLE-TALK.
on the lovely leaves. He who cannot divine their signi-
ficance intuitively and truly, forfeits his claim to name
them his or conduct their training during their tender
and telling years.
THE TEACHER.
Wise eyes and tender sympathies are requisite for
discerning what a child is, and dealing with it according
to its deservings. A delicate and discriminating touch.
alone finds a quick response and calls forth its sen-
sibilities and intellect to deeper issues than the
understanding commands. Instinctively the human
heart leaps to whatsoever is noble and pure, even when
failing to apprehend what it is that charms and wins
its admiration and love.
None can teach admirably if not loving his task.
There are grades of ability running up from plain
sense through the intermediate gifts to enthusiasm and
genius. The last are the chosen masters of the art,
"The pure gift
Of heaven to poet and to child, which he
Who retains most to manhood, being a man
In all things fitted else, is most a man
Because he wants no human faculty,
Nor loses one sweet taste of the sweet world."
One must be as young as the children he addresses
to say anything which they care to hear; as fresh and
jubilant if he will win their attention and impart hist
NURTURE.
59
moral effectually. Enthusiasm imparts itself magnet-
ically and fuses all into one happy and harmonious.
unity of feeling and sentiment.
YOUTH AND AGE.
We pay too dearly for our knowledge if we find our-
selves outstripped in age by our youthful wisdom, exiled
from the Eden of innocency in which we then dwelt
delightedly. "The great man is he who does not
lose his child's heart."
If age is the house of forgetfulness, it may be the
tower of faith and foresight nevertheless, opening
prospects of bettering the memory of the eternal reali-
ties which the lapse of time, the obliviousness of the
senses, may have obscured for the while, but to be
revived with superadded brilliancy and beauty. The
soul forgets nothing, save through its vices, worthy
of lasting remembrance.
PRIMITIVE EDEN.
A happy childhood is the pledge of a ripe manhood,
and when our civilization spreads around an atmosphere
of home delights, Christianity will have wrought out its
happiest issues. A state, a community, caring first for
all its children, providing amply for their spiritual as
for their temporal well-being, has organized the prim-
itive Eden.
"Seek not thy fellow-citizens to guide
Till thou can'st order well thine own fireside."
60
TABLE-TALK.
MOTHERS.
One must have constant charge of children and youth
if he hopes to mould their minds and manners into the
image of beauty and loveliness. And mothers have
this happiness beyond all others. To preserve their
innocency of heart and fancy inviolate, to quicken the
sense of right, steadfastness to conscience, this is
the happy office of mothers. Where there is a mother
in the house, matters speed well. Pity the child who
has never known one! Pity the mother who assumes
the name without being all this implies! "Note well
a house that is prosperous among men, and you will
find virtue among its women folk.”
"Every new educator," says Richter, "works less
than his predecessor, till at last if you take the whole
of life as an institution for education, a circumnavigator
does not get from all the nations together so much cul-
tivation as from his nurse.” *
REVERENCE.
Reverence for superiors is the source of filial piety
and obedience. We are told that the times of remote
antiquity bore so great a reverence for parents as to
The laws of the commonwealth of Massachusetts establishing free
schools enjoin upon teachers :—
"That they shall exert their best endeavors to impress on the minds of
children and youth committed to their care and instruction, the principles
of piety, justice, and a sacred regard to truth; love of their country, hu
NURTURE.
61
venture to call them gods; finding, however, some check
from the incommunicable devotion due to the divine
nature they called their parents "brothers," hereby in-
timating what profound respect belonged to the parents
themselves when even their collateral relatives were
complimented with the name of having something di-
vine in them.
FAITH.
Confidence in persons is a promising trait, a disposition
graceful to witness; in the young specially becoming,
and the best of things may be hoped of their future
career. Living by faith, for the most part, and taking
life and things as these appear to the senses, fortunate
for us, if, among the authorities of our neighborhood, the
friends of our choice, we find some one or more whose
words affect us with a power irresistible and by whose
counsels we stay our own. Babes, the Spirit feeds us
as babes. Nothing short suffices. We thirst for divin-
ity, crave personal objects of worship. Foundlings
here, Nature takes us kindly to her homely breast,
weaning us soon, the children of a nobler stock,
stronger than her strength, and of an ancestry our
step-dame knows not of.
manity and universal benevolence, sobriety, industry, frugality, chastity,
moderation, and temperance; and those other virtues which are the orna
ment of human society, and the basis upon which a republican constitution
is founded. And to endeavor to lead their pupils, as their ages and capacities
will admit, into a clear understanding of the tendency of the above virtues,
and also to point out to them the evil tendencies of the opposite vices."
62
TABLE-TALK.
Our faiths are instinctive, inborn, become rooted
with our affections from the cradle upwards, flower
forth in a homely mythology; then wonder, surprise,
credulity, superstition even, may qualify our persua-
sions, and become parts of our personal experience.
Without a mythology faith is impersonal and heartless.
"Never change sacred names,
For there are names in every nation, given from God,
Which have an unspeakable power in the mysteries."
SPIRITUAL CULTURE.
It behooves us to cherish the virtues we praise besides
their names. We cannot have too many helps and
provocations to genuine piety, nor spare children or
youth any advantages of culture which our civilization
affords. They bespeak all the nurture, the supervision,
the schools can bestow, the family cherish, the church
can render. The virtue of a community is unsafe
till men are freed from the dominion of the worst
without, by assistance from the best within and above
them, all past history showing that man lapses into
the brute unless he worship something wiser and holier
than himself. It requires all gifts to educate a
human being, because a human being is the summary
of all gifts and the most precious trust committed to
life for trial and training.
Aiming at immediate and special results, we are wont
to forget that general culture embraces mind and body
NURTURE.
63
alike, includes incentives and discipline for both. It
calls forth every faculty in proper order for taking the
man's part in the world's affairs, while seeking indirectly
and above all the appliances that fit one for the coming
sphere of activities to which the present discipline and
duties are preparatory. The end is one, the processes
complemental and going abreast, religious incitements
inspiring the work from the beginning.

V.
1
HABITS.
Philosophy is the art of living, and therefore must be admitted
into every part of our conversation, into all our gay humors and
pleasures, to regulate and adjust them, to proportion the time and
keep them from excess.
- Plutarch.
¿

I
EPHEMERIS.
REMEMBER how my young fancy was charmed
with the astrological picture fronting our annual
almanac, representing the influence of the planets over
the several members of the human body, their signs
and aspects, and in what good faith the monthly prog-
nostics of the weather were consulted for the guidance
of rural affairs. And whatsoever of superstition or of
credulity may have been intermingled with the current
faith, there was a kind of wholesome piety implying a
living affinity between man and the elements, an occult
sympathy at least existing between mind and matter,
which one must respect if not accept as genuine. It
was an ancient doctrine handed down from remote fore-
fathers, repeated in the annual calendars, celebrated
besides by the poets from Hesiod to the last mottoes of
verse for the successive months throughout the year,
and which, moreover, neither faith nor science has yet
set aside.
MOODS.
The sensitive scholar must have experienced these
ephemeridean periods. And the readers of Milton will
68
TABLE-TALK.
...
Not
readily recall the eloquent passage wherein he describes
the seasons of the year most friendly to his muse.
all moods for all times, some being the more propitious
for thought, some for criticism, some for recreation,
some for rest.
"What can I do in poetry
Now the good spirit's gone from me?
Why, nothing now, but lonely sit
And oversee what I have writ."
For thought the study, for tropes the walk; sitting for
composition, standing for criticism; hills for ideas,
valleys for sentiment; for force the ocean, the sky for
worship, the seasons being in turn recuperative, sur-
charging body and mind rendering them primitive and
elemental. Even the frosts of winter impart virtues
that pass into summer, preserving the mind's vigor and
fertility during the reign of the dog-star.
Leigh Hunt wrote,
"Winter's the time to which the poet looks,
For hiving his sweet thoughts and making honeyed books."
Frost
Thought, like a Hyperborean, comes oftentimes
bearded with rigors, as from a region of snow.
for thought, heat for sentiment, the mercury tempering
the genius accordingly.
The wit is he and genial seer,
Who deepest drinks thought's atmosphere.
"Let your soul," says Marcus Aurelius, “receive
the deity as your blood receives the air; for the in-
I
HABITS.
69
fluences of the one are no less vital than the other.
For there is an ambient, omnipresent Spirit which lies
as open and pervious to your mind as the air you
breathe into your lungs. But then you must remember
to be disposed to draw it."
EXERCISE.
Plato called him a cripple who, cultivating his mind,
suffered his body to languish through inactivity and sloth.
So Dryden,-
'The wise, for care, on exercise depend,
God never made his work for man to mend.”
Change of scene most of all for quickening the wits:
a frequent sharpening of these upon the atmosphere –
the full inspiration of mountain and river, sun and
shade, sky pictures all around. What is thus imbibed,
pulse by pulse, sense by sense, from day to day, season
by season, not spoken nor suspected at the moment,
shall sometime pour its affluence from the pen or lip,
sparkling with the lustrous flood of imagery to delight
every one. Then a plunge into the stream to stir one's
blood of a morning and send it bounding and brilliant
to the brain for precipitating ideas.* Wonderful the
* "Those who desire to pass through life with health and spirits," says
Agatheus, "should bathe frequently in cold water. I can scarcely find
words to express the benefit which one receives from this practice; and even
in extreme old age, cold bathing, to such as have been habituated to it, will
render the body firm, will strengthen the appetite, preserve the senses entire,
and, in a word, will give vigor to the whole animal economy.'
70
TABLE-TALK.
stimulus, and as wonderful the sloth that withholds the
exertion: the demon of indecision being as indomitable
a rider of its victim as precipitancy, and riddance
from either were alike desirable. "Expel sluggishness
from your actions; opportunity is the chief good in
every thing." Each moment offers the full cup.
Drink, drink deep, drink it off while you may! All
is in the flowing moment.
The brimming bowl if once you spill,
Time's longest term shall not refill.
Live a day once and render all days following im-
mortal thereafter.
"Live employed, and so live free
From all fetters, like to me."
Whose tasks delight him cancels melancholy, ennui;
day by day he enacts the commandments anew. What-
soever stirs the stagnant currents, setting these flowing
in wholesome directions, promotes brisk spirits and pro-
ductive thinking. The less of routine, the more of life.
"The mind's
A sparkle of heavenly fire, that feeds
On action and employment, needs
No time for rest; for when it thinks to please
Itself with idleness, 't is least at ease.”
SLEEP.
Sleep, nevertheless, and enough of it for the wasted
members. Heaven trims our lamps while we sléep.
HABITS.
71
Who cannot sleep soundly pays forfeit for transgression
of the sanitary laws by his ancestry or himself. A full
draught of oblivion is nature's elixir for restoring the
body's tone and tension after being drugged with the opium
of the day's delusions. Sleep holds the keys to the mys-
teries of divination, the laws of sanity. Sleep and dream,
so fabled the wise ancients, sway the destinies of mortals.
Our dreams drench us in sense, and sense steeps us again
in dreams. Sleep is the sure antidote of insanity, the
cure of idiocy, the giant of strengths, without whose
potent anodynes every creature would run rabid, percep-
tion lapse into inanity. Only as we sleep do we sur-
vive the fever of thought or quench its flame.
TEMPERANCE.
The beautiful youth Charmides asks Socrates, in the
Platonic dialogue of that name, for a remedy to cure
his headache, and Socrates naively prescribes a certain
leaf, to be taken with a certain incantation, the leaf
being of no use, he adds, without the charm, since the
body is only comforted and made whole through the
health of the soul. The charms, he tells the youngster,
are beautiful reasons" or restraints, which, infused
into the soul, impart health and cherish virginity of
mind and body alike.
66
Health, longevity, beauty, are other names for personal
purity, and temperance is the regimen for all. "All other
sciences,” says Plato, are sciences of another thing.
72
TABLE-TALK.
:
But temperance is both the science of other sciences,
and of itself likewise. The temperate man alone knows
himself. For to know thyself and be temperate is the
same thing, as both the writings and myself assert."
"And blest are they whom grace
Doth so illumine that appetite in them
Exalteth no inordinate desire,
Still hungering as the rule of temperance wills."
RATIONS.
A cheerful and a good heart will have a care for his
meat and drink."
"Superfluous to relate the various powers
Of different foods. Full fifty years would roll
And fifty more, - life's lengthened span entire
Before the tale were told, the rations named
For inspiration sure and senses, sane:
Take then this recipe in sum, as thus
""
Solar diet (of fruits largely), fountain waters, daily bap-
tism and recreation, fair fellowships, thought, a chosen
task, continency, early hours, and sovereign sleep.
Banquet of ancient seers and saints to be-
The spice of life and immortality. *
*"The food which is pleasant to each disposition," says the Bhagavad Gítá,
"is of three kinds,-
"Those which increase life, vigor, strength, happiness, gayety, and beauty,
are savory, rich, and substantial. Those are the pleasant foods, dear to the
good.
"The bitter, cold, salt, pungent, sour, and burning are the foods beloved
of the bad, causing pain, grief, and disease.
"Whatsoever food is stale, tasteless, or impure is the food preferred by
those of an indifferent quality."
HABITS.
73
The best of the banquet is taken above the plate, and
"what is left does one the most good." Fruits have
other virtues than for nourishment, refreshing the spirits
by their beauty and fragrance. Lord Bacon reckons
"pearmains among the cool cordials." Apples once
had the reputation of being good for longevity. "Eat
apples and live forever."
Roger Bacon thought the human species to be
naturally immortal, or "able not to die," and that the
possibility of prolonging human life is confirmed by the
fact that, after the loss of aboriginal longevity, indi-
vidual life is only abbreviated by degrees, and may
therefore be partially if not wholly restored by a persis-
tent regimen of temperance and continency observed by
generation after generation.
With temperance, health, cheerfulness, friends, a
chosen task, one pays the cheapest fees for living, and
may well dispense with other physicians.
DEBAUCHERY.
Every one deals with his delights according to pre-
disposition, disciplined more or less by his culture and
refinement. As his tastes so is he, these classifying
him unmistakably. None can hide under fine names;
the creature will out when least suspected. What
avails though he come garlanded to the hall, Ceres
and Bacchus bring their costliest gifts to the banquet,
compunction is sure to follow the debauch, the Satyrs
74
TABLE-TALK.
and Furies coming on the morrow for vengeance.
It
was said of the Rhodians that they built houses as
if they were immortal, but feasted as if they meant to
die to-morrow.
CHASTITY.
Cleanse the fountain if you would purify the streams.
A chaste generation would restore Paradise. But not
an age whose youth, like the old sinners are eager to
pluck the forbidden fruits from the stem, the brazen
following fast childhood's golden period, and leaping
wildly into the iron, the beautiful bashfulness, nature's
ornament and foil, the girdle of chastity, all torn and
trodden under foot.
Till the sexes are held alike to purity of morals, and
justice meted alike to both for any infraction of the
laws of social order, no community is safe.
"If none can lead without celestial aid
Th' immaculate and pure life of a maid,
Oh! let not then the powers all good divine,
Permit hot lust to soil this breast of mine."
Why couldst thou not wash the water instead of the
water wash thee?
"Who seeks for pleasure in this mortal life,
By diving deep into the body base,
Shall lose true pleasure; but who gainly strive
Their sinking soul above this bulk to place,
Enlarged delight they certainly shall find,
Unbounded joys to fill their boundless mind."
HABITS.
75
THE MYSTERIES.
The pure alone are privileged to taste unharmed of
the apples of life, knowing the good, the evil not to
know in the partaking. "Even genius," says Dante,
"is incapable of attaining certain kinds of knowledge
unless it be assisted by love." Love, indeed, includes
all knowledge, divining the mysteries, which remain
sealed till love turn the key. Modesty, that perennial
flower planted instinctively in the human breast, blooms
therein only as continence guards and virtue keeps.
Ah, lady fair, because thou hast not passed blushing,
therefore, O womankind, modesty remains for the race!
The fable runs that the gods mix our pains and
pleasure in one cup, and thus mingle for us the adul-
terate immortality which we alone are permitted here
to enjoy. Voluptuous raptures, could we prolong these
at pleasure, would dissipate and dissolve us. A sip is
the most that mortals are permitted from any goblet
of delight. Pleasure, that immortal essence, the beau-
teous bead sparkling in the cup, effervesces soon and
subsides; only by the beautiful continency is ours for
the moment. Enchantress, she seizes fast and sets free
the fancy; in imparting her essence she insinuates the
power of creating forms, to which herself falls down
presently and worships. Into the brazen leaves she
weaves the roses from her garland and crowns the
prisoner, whom passion had else bound in chains of
iron, with her victorious wreath.
76
TABLE-TALK.
...
But who ventures the speaking of the unspeakable,
to say in words what words at best profane? Ah! were
we the true lovers, seldomer should we descend from
the clear silences in which the heart voices itself, from
that commerce of eyes in whose glance love's features
are robed, to the awkwardness, the confusion of speech.
And yet words, the word once uttered, are love's
token, the maiden's wreath. And welcome! since only
the pure can truly express the qualities that constitute
them such.
"Sink thy plummet in the sea,
Thou wilt never fathom Love;
Soar where eagles fly, and he
Is beyond thee and above.
By love's influence divine
Sky and earth in wedlock join."
Love you none? Then are you lost to love. Love
is the key to felicity, nor is there a heaven to any who
love not. We enter Paradise through its gates only.
"Love is a circle that doth move
In the same sweet eternity of love."
FRIENDSHIP.
Ideals are possibilities, and persons handsomest viewed
by the mind's eye, as beautiful estates seen in the dis-
tance. Such is the charm of the perspective. But the
moment we covet them as ours and ours only, their
glory departs, the beauty fades, and they are worthless
in our eyes, robbed of all that made them so desirable
HABITS.
77
to us.
Paradise is too delightful to be enjoyed out of
the mind. How else were friendship possible? Our
ideals are our better selves.
Limner, I come for my likeness.
I have one of your dearest friend.
Beautiful! but I sit for my own.
Your friend is yourself idealized and completed.
Ah, yes; but how far from that am I!
Therefore is he your ideal, and nothing short can
satisfy your demands upon my art. You will never be
content with your own.
Our friends interpret the world and ourselves to us,
if we take them tenderly and truly; nor need we but
love them devotedly to become members of an immortal
fraternity, superior to accident or change.
Life's noblest aim, its happiest end,
By love to charm and chain a friend.

:
VI.
DISCOURSE.
[
"Conversation is a virtue, and he can be of no good nature that
does not prefer it before all other enjoyments whatsoever. Com-
pany whets and adorns our good parts, the most exalted endowments
growing dull without it. Men acquire color and perfume from the
qualities of their associates, and the conversation of good persons is
contagious."
- Evelyn.
.
:

ΟΝ
HOSPITALITY.
NE honors himself and his household by the noble
company who pass his threshold and the free hos-
pitalities bestowed upon them.
'Some friendly guest,
Who leaving us awhile, the rest
Of our companions look morose and dull,
He was so good and beautiful."
desolate
without
The house is unfurnished and
woman; society and conversation were incomplete with-
out her presence and participation. Plain as its apart-
ments may be, these are enhanced by the presence of a
hostess upon whom one looks graciously as upon a fair
picture ornamenting house and household, the presence
of the host adding nobility to the mansion.
CONVERSATION.
The house stands for comfort and for conversation,
and parlors were misnamed if not peopled with ideas.
Whatever may be spoken is here best spoken, and what
may not be delicately implied is forbidden anywhere.
82
TABLE-TALK.
:
:
..
anywhere.
Here is woman's world; here are the
graces, the proprieties, the wit, the wisdom of dis-
course,—woman's discretion presiding over all. And
where women are, the better things are implied if not
spoken. In the company of accomplished women one
finds his best gifts at command, his happiest utterances.
In the flow of discourse he dips into the sweetness and
depth of his mother tongue to bring forth its riches of
sentiment and of phrase. Remarkable, too, with what
salient sense and sparkle the sex are trained in this
genial school, how readily they in conversation bring
forth the full opulence of speech to the surprise and
confusion of scholars and men of social accomplish-
ments, their wise tongues silencing the egotists who
may venture on a tilt with them.
Oft woman's wit prompts and prevails
When man's best counsel halts and fails.
Nor is she a stranger to the decorum of silence. For
'
Though discreetly speak, she can
Still be silent, rather than
Talk while others may be heard,
As if she did hate, or feared
Their condition who will force
All to wait on their discourse."
True intercourse involves the interplay of the feminine
and masculine forces. Heart and head appear and dis-
appear in alternate rhyme of sentiment and thought,
giving soul and body to the argument. Only as ideal-
ists persons meet gracefully. The tender touch is most
DISCOURSE.
83
..
effective, the best in each answering to the best in
all. It is this modesty and docility of bearing that
constitute the charm of discourse-a hospitality given
to opinions of diverse shades of difference, along with
a depth of insight that seizes the truths underlying the
extremes, however wide these may appear. The diffident
accost each other with a certain coy respectfulness,
having its rise in self-reverence, a regard for persons
and principles. The obtrusive egotists,
"Bred ere manners were the fashion,
And their beginnings set them free
Alike from honor and civility,"
may best be left to solve the Socratic paradox at their
leisure.
To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of
the ignorant. Modesty and docility render one teach-
able ;
then reverence and civility are possible. He who
has not surveyed himself thus personally excludes him-
self from society, remains still in his den of individual-
ism, that burrow of the baser nature. "The right
society among men consists in the communication of
reason and discourse, and not, as with beasts, to graze
in the same pasture."
CANON OF CONVERSATION.
Conversation is an abandonment to ideas, a sur-
render to persons. Rising naturally from the occasion,
the theme, the company, it sets no prescribed rules,
..
84
TABLE-TALK.
obeys laws of its own. Its beauty consists in its sug-
gestiveness, unexpectedness, saliency; it vaults - the
passes, flashes the whole of things upon the imag-
ination at a glance, sets life and things anew for the
moment. It does not overbear or silence the timid and
bashful. It draws forth from all their deepest and
happiest thoughts, whether speaking or listening. The
good ears prompt the fluent tongues, the good things
finding utterance in the genial atmosphere; if the best
are not spoken the best are implied, seconded by all
and delighting all.
'Tis a rare satisfaction,—this fellowship with those
who have a genuine appetite for intellectual communi-
cation. I remark this more particularly in conversing
with women, who cling to personal illustration, bring
subjects home to the heart, their faith in the affections
holding their heads strong and steady without the
prop of argument.
Pressing differences lightly, and seeking agreements
rather, the converser avoids definitions, the best things
being of too subtle a nature to cling to any definition
that fails in answering to the instincts of the heart.
DISPUTING.
Not every one, knowing as he may be, knows when his
question is answered, deems the yea or the nay as final.
Your yea or your nay are alike partial, nor could have
come into the discussion had your statement been in-
DISCOURSE.
85
...
clusive and entire.
Both are wont to take the part
of wranglers, and close the dispute as far from settle-
ment as when it was opened.*
You insist upon my giving to your question a cate-
gorical answer, yea or nay. I might answer both yea
and nay. You must put your question deeper and in-
clusively, if you will have the true and final answer;
one that admits of no questioning — is self-affirming-
unless you persist in denying against all denial. Your
nay assumes the pre-supposition of yea to give it even
seeming validity and substance.
"In all affirmation and negation," says Aristotle,
"the predicate is a universal."
Truth is one undivided, all-sided, inclusive, without
opposites or parts. It is falsehood's measure, the mind
perceiving what is not by what is. "The right reason
of a man is one of the divine volumes in which are
written the indelible ideas of eternal truth, so that
what it dictates is as much the voice of God as if in
so many words it were clearly expressed in the written
revelation."
The want of fixed principles, of positive ideas grounded
*"This is a main piece of idolatry and injustice in the world, that every
man would make his private genius a universal God, and would devour all
men's apprehensions by his own fire that glows so hot in him and (as he
thinks) shines so clear. Men are wont to be so full of their own fancies and
idiopathies that they scarce have the civility to interchange any words with
a stranger. If they chance to hear his exotic tone they mention it with
laughter, a passion very incident upon that occasion to children and clowns.
But it were much better neither to embosom nor reject anything, though
strange, till we are well acquainted with it."
Henry More.
86
TABLE-TALK.
..
upon a knowledge of the mind, leaves one without a
standard of reference or appeal. Opinion is parried by
opinion, and the argument fails of bringing conviction
to any.
“When I had reason to suppose my convictions
fundamentally different, it has been my habit," says
Coleridge," and I may add, the impulse of my nature,
to assign the grounds of my belief, rather than belief
itself; and not to express dissent till I could establish
some points of complete sympathy, some grounds com-
mon to both sides, from which to commence its expla-
nation."
AGITATION.
One
Agitation and agitators are needful. But the calm
follows the storm, and there needs the skill to still the
waves which have been whipped into fury in the conflict.
"It is not wise to throw stones into a fountain."
owes to truth the happiest manner of presenting its
claims upon the hearer's attention, knowing how easily
the prejudices and passions are provoked by an unhand-
some address, and the absurd strictness with which a
mob holds one to his words. More potent the sweet
temper for all occasions than the sour, the genial ray
than the boisterous hurricane. Only his word thun-
ders whose life lightens." Every word of yours smites.
and provokes when harshly spoken. Indignation even
becomes oftentimes a two-edged weapon, to slay him
who brandishes it in defence of the right. The colors
DISCOURSE.
87
܀
of anger and indignation pass so imperceptibly and
blend together that they become undistinguishable to
the iconoclast. "It is not proper either to carry a
blunt sword nor to use freedom of speech intemper-
ately." One does not readily sympathize with the
indiscriminate zeal that, while breaking the idols,
shatters the tables of the law also. Measure in all
things. A candid spirit is mightier than the most
persistent dogmatism. Truth is inclusive of all the
virtues, is older than sects and schools, and, like
charity, more ancient than mankind. "Nothing is
finally potential but gentleness and persuasion."
Anger is the resentment of the animal, and gentle
blood alone makes the gentleman.
"Know you a man whose intuition sees
When speech is due, or silence sure to please,
Who knows the time for winking and for sight,
And holds in check each animal appetite?
Follow his steps as closely as you can,
For sure in him is nature's gentleman.”
DISCRETION.
It was well said by Lysis, the Pythagorean, that "to
inculcate liberal speculations and discourses to those
whose minds were turbid and confused, were just as
absurd as to pour pure and transparent water into a
deep well full of mire and clay, for he who does this
will only disturb the mud and cause the water to be
defiled."
:
.
88
TABLE-TALK.
And Lord Shaftesbury speaks with a tender regard
for the ignorant and for the weak.
"We can never," he suggests, "do more injury to
truth than by disclosing too much of it at once. "T is
the same with understandings as with eyes, to speak a
certain size, and make just so much light and no more.
Whatever is beyond brings darkness and confusion.
'Tis rare humanity and kindness to hide strange truths
from tender eyes."
The wise Goethe thus delivered his canon of dis-
Course:-
"One is not obliged to utter his highest maxims,
unless they can benefit the world at the time. He
keeps them discreetly to himself, rather; they cannot
fail to diffuse over his actions the mild radiance of a
hidden sun."
IMPLICATION.
There are truths that shield themselves behind veils,
and are best spoken by implication.
Even the sun
veils himself in his own rays to blind the gaze of the
too curious starer. To tell all to the senses is falsify-
ing the truth oftentimes. Yet always the truth should
be spoken, the time, manner, person speaking, being
matters left to the discretion and good sense of the
moment. It is on these occasions that the wise man
shows his wisdom above the indiscreet, who must needs
tell all he knows, at all times.
Truth is sensitive and jealous of the least encroach-
DISCOURSE.
89
"And in proportion as it
ment upon its sacredness.
is inward the less do its terms admit of controversy; but
perception or no perception, yea or nay is the condi-
tion in which it comes. The least wanton scepticism
is sufficient to annul that fine sense which the object
requires. Again, the deeper the truth the more it
approaches the impregnable fortress of human liberty,
and the more softly does it appeal, the more susceptible
of denial it is, and the more susceptible of affirmation;
in a word, the more subjective, the more universal, and
yet in one sense the more private also."
.
SOCRATES' METHOD.
It was an exquisite piece of irony in Socrates' ad-
mission of being himself the biggest "know-nothing
in all Athens, and then proving himself to be the wisest
by confession of every one whom he might draw into
disputing his premise. The more one endeavors to
sound the depths of his ignorance the deeper the chasm
appears, and he comes at last to the solution of the
Socratic paradox, that the confession of ignorance is
the beginning of all wisdom.
CHRIST'S METHOD.
How subtle was Christ's method, undermining the
premise of his antagonist's assertion at a stroke, con-
victing, if not convincing, him out of his own mouth of
his error.
It was the method of intuition, the dialectic
!
90
TABLE-TALK.
of the Spirit dealing directly with the matter in hand.
He spoke thus convincingly by obedience to the laws
of the mind, "knowing what was in man" by insight,
the logic of the Spirit transcending all understanding.
Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in
man, and finds the readiest response.
A deeper depth, sense more profound,
Than heart or head shall fully sound.
THE SEER.
I have heard a certain discourse delivered more than
once, and with new surprise at every delivery, both as
regards the speaker's insight and power of statement.
Yet it seemed the impression it made on others was owing
less to those excellences, the suggestive thoughts,
the brilliant rhetoric, than to some indefinable charm
of manner that left ordinary speaking by contrast poor
and powerless. The auditors heard with eager delight,
and what they failed to comprehend they could not but
admire as something lovely and admirable. It seemed
like the breath of life, an ethereal sweetness, a tonic, of
which they would have more, and when the preacher
closed still held them in the attitude of inhaling the
atmosphere his effusion had cast around them. A
pentecost of sensibilities had fallen from his tongue, and
they were listening in silence for the prolonged accents
to vibrate upon their charmed hearts.
"'T is less the counsel than the speaker's worth,
That gives persuasion to his eloquence."
DISCOURSE.
91
CONVERSATIONS.
The magnetic mind draws his circle around him and
pours himself into this cup to fill it to overflowing.
This was the ancient mode of instruction.
"The most approved teachers of wisdom in a human
way," says Leighton, "have required of their scholars
that, to the end their minds might be capable of it, they
should be purified from vice and wickedness. And it
was Socrates' custom, when any one asked him a ques-
tion, seeking to be informed of him, before he would
answer, he asked him concerning his own qualities and
course of life."
Institute in the towns and cities, circles of this sort,
and we shall have initiated the fresher style of teach-
ing.
If the Sunday lectures lack the essentials of religious
worship, they still have a rightful place in our civiliza-
tion. Many are drawn thither who shun the church
services. And the attraction of different speakers from
Sunday to Sunday stimulates thought, each treating his
theme from his own standpoint. Moreover, the rising
young divines find herein models of eloquent and effec-
tive preaching for practical uses.
NEW DIVINITY.
Are peoples left without a priesthood? Be sure the
High Powers are gathering congregations for its coming.
92
TABLE-TALK.
So the infant faith waits, seeing the brilliant prospects
ahead, the sure descent of the spirit of unity and fellow-
ship.
"Temples are not demolished, though profane,
Here Peter, Jove's, there Paul hath Dia's fane.”
Meanwhile the old faith is not without its oracles,
speaking here and there, and out of the chaos of sects
and creeds, the unseen Personal Mind is giving birth
to the new order, the new divinity.
Many are the seekers who sympathize deeply with
Leigh Hunt's confession:
“A church appears to me an instinctive want in the
human family. I never to this day pass one, even of a
kind the most unreformed, without a wish to go into it
and join my fellow-creatures within in their affecting
evidence of the necessity of an additional tie with Deity
and Infinity, with this world and the next. But the
wish is accompanied with an affecting regret that I can-
not recognize it free from barbarisms derogatory to
both; and I sigh for some good old country church,
finally delivered from the corruptions of the Councils,
and breathing nothing but the peace and love befitting
the Sermon on the Mount. I believe that a time is
coming when such a doctrine, and such only, will be
preached; and my future grave by some old, ivied tower,
seems quieter for the consummation."
DISCOURSE.
93
PREACHING.
If the speaker cannot illuminate the parlor, shall he
adorn the pulpit? Who takes most of private life into
the desk, comes nearest heaven and the children who
have not lapsed out of it. Is it not time in the
world's history to have less familiarity with sin and
the woes of the pit? Commend me to him who
holds me fast by every sense, persuades me, against
every bias of temperament, habit, training, culture,
to espouse the just and lovely, and he shall be in
my eyes thereafter the priest of the Spirit and the
sent of heaven.
It is undeniable that, with all our teaching and
preaching, admirable as these often are, the current
divinity falls behind our attainments in most things
else, the commanding practical sense and adventurous
thought of our time, being unawakened to the concerns.
wherein faith and duty have their seats, and from
whose fountains life and thought are spiritualized
and made lovely to men.
Though allegory is superseded in good part by the
*"It were a happy suggestion for reviving the spirit of picty and keeping it
alive, for the several sects to trace out the bright instances of persons within
their pale who have been instrumental in keeping up the life of religion in
times when most busied themselves with strife and disputes, and this none
the less though such persons may have made no great figure in the world.
For it must be a spiritual eye that distinguishes a truly divine life from one
merely secular and humane. Such examples of illuminated persons, would
be attractive aids to edification in knowledge and virtuo; since we know
how the weighty points of religion adorned with a historical dress will sooner
go down with mankind than formal discourse.
94
TABLE-TALK.
novel, the field for this form of writing is as rich
and inviting as when Bunyan wrote. A sacred
allegory, treating of the current characteristics of
the religious world, would be a powerful instrumen-
tality for awaking and stimulating the piety of our
times.

VII.
CREEDS.
"'T is the great beauty of true religion that it shall be universal,
and a departure in any instance from universality is a corruption of
religion itself.'
1
Glanvill.

!

CATHOLICITY.
MANIFEST reforms are stirring the common air
we breathe, and are advocated with a zeal more
or less discreet and discriminating. One may not
sympathize fully with any, yet find something in all
to which he gladly gives countenance and aid. If
approving the end, he may prefer other and what
he deems wiser means for its attainment. Methods
are mostly matters of convention, and earnest enthu-
siasm is reputable in a worthy cause.
Neither standing
aloof from parties and sects, nor remaining inside,
measures one's piety or patriotism. The true man is
above sect or party, whether he cooperate with such
or not. Without good men and true to uphold sects
and parties, these would reel down to ruin and dissolve.
'Tis the inclusive spirit that holds bodies together and
advances the commonwealth of mankind. All for all,
and abreast, its motto.*
* "I am persuaded," says an old author, "if we judged of spiritual things
by the weight and solidity of an inward principle, the power of a divine life,
and not by the outward form and appearance, or an agreeableness to our
own notions and opinions, we should discover a most harmonious agreement
in the essential and radical principles of divine truth and goodness among
98
TABLE-TALK.
It especially becomes Christians to free themselves
from the exclusiveness of sects and creeds of every
name and time. Professing to be followers of One
who sought to liberate his disciples from every bias of
breeding or of race, they should at least prove them-
selves strong enough to stand fast in the strength of
their convictions, and respect not less the convictions
meanwhile of others equally honest and sincere. It
were modest to commend all professors to the following
of that one Christian in history, Jesus himself. Yet
one may even hesitate taking the name of Christian
if he implicate his private views by associating with
others; preferring rather to illustrate that sacred name
by modesty of profession and purity of life. A Chris-
tian is a high type of character, including every excel-
lence to which humanity aspires, a sympathy with all
of like aspirations of whatever name or race. And
now, while thought is exploring all subjects affecting
human welfare, the spiritual solvent cannot be wanting
for fusing the current creeds and recombining them in a
fresher faith, answering to the religious needs of the
present if not future generations. In the general dif-
fusion of light no special thought can hold the community
very long under its shadow, since the revelations made
to the various races are culminating in an inclusive faith
suited to the needs of all.
those who seem most of all to oppose one another in their notions and senti-
ments. If we did but know how to interpret each other's souls, we should
quickly find that we differ more in words than in thoughts, and in the notions
of things than in the things themselves."
3
CREEDS.
99
CHRISTIANITY.
“Like all other religions," says Max Müller, "Christi-
anity has its history. But the Christianity of the nine-
teenth century is not the Christianity of the Middle Ages.
The Christianity of the Middle Ages is not that of the
carly councils. The Christianity of the early councils.
was not that of the apostles. What has been said by
Christ, that alone was well said."
"What is now called the Christian religion," says St.
Augustine, "existed among the ancients, and was not
wanting from the beginning of human kind till Christ
came in the flesh, since when the true religion begins to
be called the Christian religion."
Christians have no good reason for regarding with
jealousy the Oriental religions. Christianity does not
conflict with any, but complements them. Enlightened
Christians in all times past have gladly recognized the
likeness of Plato's spirit especially to the Christian.
Christianity absorbs and assimilates into itself the best
of Platonism, the Greek idealism being intermingled
with the Jewish faith in our body of Saxon divinity.
One must hear St. John speak to catch the accent of
this composite faith. St. Paul, though bred in the dia-
lectic of the Greek schools, came late by his conversion
to the new faith, and remained a Jew to the last.
Peter was a zealot, and St. James was plainly the Non-
conformist of his time. All were limited by their race
and temperament.
St.
Uor M
100
TABLE-TALK.
..
"I think it no contemptible argument," says Dr. Henry
More," that the Platonists, the best and divinest of phil-
osophers, and the Christians, the best of all that profess
religion, do agree in the fundamentals of their faith,
acknowledging that God hath not left any without witness
of himself. And it might strike our adulterate Christian
professors with shame and astonishment, their lives.
falling so exceedingly short of the better heathen, —to
find Plato so akin to their professions; for Christ is not
wherein his name is, nor doth God fill the world with
his glory by words and sounds, but by his spirit, life,
and reality."
IMMANUEL.
Life is one, religion one, creeds are many and diverse.
And as all peoples have lapsed more or less from per-
sonal integrity, there needs an Immanuel to restore
them to their forfeited Heaven of Blessedness.
An impersonal faith will not satisfy. A personal
mediator, uniting the human and divine, alone suffices.
Only as the Word becomes incarnate is the religious
sentiment fairly addressed, the revelation cordial and
complete. *
Christianity has become so woven into the very human
tissues, that to question or even qualify belief in its
* "Socrates," says Coleridge, "introduced ethics and taught duties, and
then finally Plato asserted, or reasserted, the idea of God, the Maker of the
world. The measure of human philosophy was then full, when Christianity
came to add what was wanting, -assurance."
CREEDS.
101
this
divinity would be like what Plutarch asserts of the
sacred Egyptian fables.
"But I fear," he says,
would be to stir things that are not to be stirred, and to
declare war not only (as Simonides speaks) against
length of time, but also against many nations and fami-
lies of mankind, whom a religious reverence towards
these gods holds fast bound, like men astonished and
amazed; and would be no other than going about to
remove so great and venerable names from heaven and
earth, and thereby shaking and despoiling that worship
and persuasion that hath entered into almost all men's
constitutions from their very birth, and opening vast
doors to the atheists' faction, who convert all divine
matters into human, giving also a large license to im-
postures."
PURITANISM.
Creeds, like other goods, pass by inheritance to de-
scendants. Not every one of the present generation were .
so fortunate as to inherit a liberal and humane one. I,
for my part, while acknowledging gratefully my indebt-
edness for whatsoever was humane and holy in the
Puritan creed, have wished it had bequeathed to us
some gleams of Jove's smiling Olympus to soften the
terrors of its blazing Sinai. I know these have been
softened and humanized by the more enlightened spirit
of our time, and, with new interpretations, still suit
the temper and tendencies of many of the present gene-
ration. Nor can it be denied that, dreary and doleful
102
TABLE-TALK.
as it was, it has borne fruits that any faith might honor,
has planted institutions still in advance of all others
in our modern civilization, has nurtured heroic qualities
of character, if not the gentler ones. It has made New
England the leader of human civilization, and still leads.
the world in the civic and social virtues, if not in
general intelligence and culture.
Now, while extremes in religious faiths are finding a
common basis, 't is wise in the sects to press differ-
ences tenderly. Religion is too essential to cling to
any dogma. The head best leaves to the heart what
the heart alone divines. Piety is too subtile and
elusive to be drawn into and confined in definitions,
and he is most devout who clings to the spirit, while
giving the letter full play to express itself in his
conduct.
66
Synods and decrees and even councils," wrote
Erasmus, "are by no means, in my judgment, the
fittest modes of repressing error, unless truth depend
simply on authority. But, on the contrary, the more
dogmas there are, the more fruitful is the ground in
producing heresies. Never was a Christian faith purer
* "The Church of England," says a modern writer, "has been a blessing
to mankind, inasmuch as it has discountenanced the most superstitious, and
given sense and improvement leave to grow; but if it cannot learn still fur-
ther to sacrifice letter to spirit, and see the danger of closing its lips on the
greatest occasions and then proceeding to open them on the smallest, and
dispute with its very self on points the most frivolous and vexatious, it will
do itself an injury it little dreams of with the new and constantly growing
intelligence of the masses, who are looking forward to the noblest version of
Christianity."
CREEDS.
103
or more undefiled than when the world was content
with a single creed, and that the shortest creed we
have."
PIETY.
The
While
Professions with performance. One's piety is best
displayed in his pursuits, his prayers perfected. Dis-
possessed of one's egotism, the Godhead enters.
devout Jew never pronounced Jehovah's name.
God is the mute letter in the saint's service, and himself
the silent syllable, faith lisps itself in lovely liturgies
and with veiled face. 'You should not. dare to speak
of God to an impure soul," said Pythagoras. Being an
instinct of man's nature, religion seeks to become a life
and light. Being personal, it is inspired by personal
persuasion, living examples. It has doctrines, to be
sure, creeds, rituals, sacraments, symbols; but these
must be warmed into significance by living. It is a
life lived above the senses, and a light to these. If
eyes are wanted, it creates these for seeing; ears for
hearing, hearts to understand, since the Spirit alone
divines the Spirit's teachings.
Not Scripture but life, practice not profession, reno-
vates and sanctifies. The letter sometimes vitiates its
spirit. Piety refuses to be written. Scripture is sacred
or profane as is the life it records. Every noble
life becomes a revelation of the spirit which the love
and joy of mankind cannot let perish from remem-
brance.
104
TABLE-TALK.
SPIRITUALITY.
Born daily out of a world of wonders into a world of
wonders, that faith is most ennobling which, answering
to one's highest aspirations, touches all things mean-
while with the hues of an invisible world. And how
vastly is life's aspect, the sphere of one's present ac-
tivity, widened and ennobled the moment there step
spiritual agents upon the stage, and he holds conscious
communication with unseen powers!
"He to whom the law which he is to follow," says
Jacobi, "does not stand forth as a God, has only a
dead letter which cannot possibly quicken him."
The religious life transcends the scientific understand-
ing, its lights shining through the clouds to those.
alone whose eyes are anointed to look behind the veils
by lives of purity and devotion.*
SCRIPTURE.
The message is of more importance than the messen-
ger who brings it; still more important is the divining
"God imparts to the human soul his essential and original knowledge.
The soul is the mirror of the universe and stands in relationships to all living
things. She is illuminated by an inward light; but the tempest of passions, the
multitude of sensual impressions, the dissipations darken the light, whose
glory only diffuses itself when it burns alone, and all is peace and harmony
within. When we know ourselves to be separated from all outward influ-
ences, and desire only to be guided by this universal light, then only do
we find in ourselves pure and certain knowledge. In this state of concen-
tration the soul analyzes all objects on which her attention rests. She can
unite simply with them; penetrate through their substances, penetrating even
to God himself, and feeling him in the most important truths."
- Van Helmont.
CREEDS.
105
instinct to read its significance when delivered. The
Spirit is superior to the text. Who but the Spirit shall
interpret the Spirit?
'Tis one and the same Spirit dictating and divining the
Scripture. You read into the text whatsoever you find
therein. Your Bible was life before it became letter;
and you must live into the life that dictated the letter
if you will find its true import. You cannot seek what
you have not some notion of in yourself. The spirit
dwelling in you must interpret yourself to yourself.
Inspiration must find answering inspiration. Unless
the senses are opened, and the light fall from the Spirit
upon the page, is there answering illumination, though
it were the sacred text upon which the eye rests, the
mind ponders. It needs a man to perceive a man, an
inspired soul to translate the text of the inspired book,
and interpret the revelation after it is written. Without
such interpretation the page were blank. "If thou
beest it, thou seest it.”
BIBLICAL STUDIES.
The history of religions, of which Christianity is a
transcendent element, awaits the deepest study. It
requires Bibles to free from Bibles. Comparative the-
ology is the best of studies for liberating one's mind
from geographical and traditional limitations. Like
travelling, it shows the globe in its varying climates
and zones, its latitude and longitude of intelligence.
106
TABLE-TALK.
When the races shall have learned each the other's
language, the significance of things to thoughts, one
faith becomes universal, one brotherhood.
MYTHOLOGIES.
Respect, Christian, the mythologies of nature and of
nations, and treat with becoming reverence the sacred
Pantheon of the Mind, the Person in man clothing itself
in the faded garments of the gods. Enter, therefore,
the sacred fanes, and treat with a soft regard the gods
and heroes before whom thy brother kneels, for so shall
The One whom all revere be found of thyself and him
alike. Break not rudely his idols, lest thou shatter the
image of the One whom, through the many, he also loves
and adores.
REVELATIONS.
Revelations are suited to the minds of their recipients,
the oracle of a period being corrected by some successor
in turn. Impossible, otherwise, in the nature of commu-
nication itself, since the whole of truth is commensurate
with the whole of being, and this is not apprehended
at a glance. Hence the mending of the spectacles, age
after age, to suit the eyes of advancing intelligence.
"Less hard 't is not to err ourselves, than know
If our forefathers err'd or no.
When we trust men concerning God, we then
Trust not God concerning men."
CREEDS.
107
;
AUTHORITY.
The sacred books owe their credibility to the fact of
having been dictated by the Spirit to faith, as their
sponsor and interpreter. A book written from Reason,
reaches the reason alone; fails of meeting the demands
moral sentiment, the heart;
of the imagination, the
fails of making good its claim upon the personality
entire. If the voice of the Personal Mind, it speaks
to every man, and to each according to the measure of
his receptivity. Moreover, every faith has its historic
grounds, its roots running deep and piercing the oldest
traditions, intertwisting its belief with whatsoever is
marvellous in memory, feeding both the senses and
the soul, and cropping out into an overshadowing
mythology answering to the genius of the race, the
period of its origin and history.
DOGMAS.
Every dogma embodies some shade of truth to give
it seeming currency. Take the theological Trinity as
an instance, which has vexed the literal church from
its foundation, and still perplexes its learned doctors.
An intelligible psychology would interpret the mystery
even to the unlearned and unprofessional. Analyze
the attributes of your Personality, that which you
name yourself, and you find herein the threefold
attributes of Instinct, Intelligence, Will, incarnate in
108
TABLE-TALK.
your own person, the root plainly of the Trinitarian
dogma.
Not till we have fathomed the full significance of
what we mean when we pronounce
"I, myself,"
is the idea of Person clearly discriminated, philosophy
and religion established upon immutable foundations.
SCIENCE AND RELIGION.
The attempt at reconciling science and religion is a
significant feature of our time. And if the advocates
of both will cherish the reverence due to such supreme
investigations, the best results will ensue to science and
religion alike. And whatever the attitude of the oppo-
nents, the reconciliation must ultimately follow, else.
matter and mind were void of unity and coherence, the
universe without an Intelligent Head.

1
VIII.
INTERLEAVES.
"The postulate of Philosophy, and at the same time the test of
philosophic capacity, is no other than the heaven-descended
66 Кпого
thyself," and this at once practically and speculatively. For, as
philosophy is neither a science of the reason, or understanding only,
nor merely a science of morals, but the science of Being altogether,
its primary ground can be neither merely speculative nor merely
practical, but both in one."
•
Coleridge.

THE PRACTICAL AS INTRODUCTORY TO THE
SPECULATIVE.
THERE are two sides or phases to the "Practical.”
The practical includes what is instrumental, subsidiary,
a means to an end. This, so far as man is con-
cerned, has relation first to his bodily wants, food,
clothing, and shelter—to their satisfaction and supply;
secondly, the ministration toward his spiritual wants
which crave culture, or the ascent above individual
limitations and the realization of the generic ideal of
humanity or Mind. In other words, the practical en-
deavor of Man must neutralize his immediate and slav-
ish dependence on Nature (relieve him from the sensuous
importunity of hunger, heat, and cold, external intru-
sion), and it must enable him to realize in himself as
Particular individual the Universal, or the consciousness
of his entire species, the human race.
The first phase of the Practical looks to providing the
means for the sustenance of the body; the body is,
however, an instrument for the soul, or for the purposes
of conscious being. Hence this phase looks to the
creation of an instrument for an instrument,
thus a
double mediation.
112
TABLE-TALK.
The second phase of the Practical is ministrative di-
rectly to the final end, the Consciousness of Man.
Subtract consciousness, and the possibility of the prac-
tical altogether vanishes. There must be a conscious
adaptation in any one or all of its phases. A complete
and entire consciousness of it a comprehension of its
entire scope may be found, however, in few people.
This necessary knowledge commonly takes on a partially
unconscious form, the form of conviction, or religious
faith. The individual looking out upon the world of
instrumentalities, the infinite complex of mediations, is
unable to trace it through to the end, and therefore bor-
rows from the SEER his insight in the form of a Divine
Revelation, and by its light believes that he possesses
a Personality which is absolute end, and beyond all sub-
servience to mere outward uses.
The Practical, as regards provision for bodily wants,
has an incidental higher use. It is not simply for the
neutralization of the physical pangs and inconvenience
—the rendering of the same a nullity that the bulk
of human endeavor goes to the supply of the body. If
all this were merely to still the Cerberean dog, the econ-
omy of Providence might be doubted. In stilling the
clamor of the body, man is obliged to resort to social
and political combination. The division of labor in
Civil Society, the institution of the Family and the
State, all these are initiated to relieve man from the
degrading slavery to bodily sensation. But only "ini-
tiated" for these institutions, all serve directly a spirit-
3
INTERLEAVES.
113
ual end; when Spirit can provide for the body incident-
ally while providing in the most direct way for the Soul,
then it has achieved freedom, for the External no longer
sways or swerves.
In these great institutions-Family, Society, and the
State-mankind arrives at the necessary conditions of
spiritual combination. These it would organize there-
fore as mere forms, were there no material need to goad
it on, provided, once for all, that mankind had achieved
rational insight into the means and demands of culture.
But as the consciousness of the Race develops in Time,
and is a historical existence and not an absolute one, it
follows that the bodily necessities with their pricking
pangs are useful as initiatives, nay, even necessary.
Here the divine Providence is manifest: Nature urges
herself to complete introversion, and the "breath of
Life is compelled to sustain itself by contest with the
clay dwelling in which it finds itself. In satisfying the
physical, the spiritual is excited to activity, and grad-
ually gains ascendance and independence. The "mask
of life" and the subjection of the Spiritual to material
ends is seen to be only Maya, a mere delusion of the
senses. All this servitude and slavery has been only
for self-knowledge, and for the freedom of the self from
the self, the realization of the Universal in the Par-
ticular.
The blind Samson grinds in the mill, not for others
but for himself; the imprisonment in sensuous being
must be broken by pain and stern renunciation. When
.
114
TABLE-TALK.
it is done, down falls that lying torment, the Mask of
Life (die qualvolle Lüge der Larve des Lebens), and
the soul looks through the interval upon the unveiled
Eternal Verities. The Universal, the Absolute, God, is
the root of this Ego which I call myself, and when I
free myself from the glare of the senses (which cause
selfishness in place of self-consciousness) I shall live
and have my being in the presence of this great fact.
But there is a possibility of undervaluing that portion.
of our life which is called secular to distinguish it from
the direct, conscious seeking of the Divine. As already
stated, the whole realm of the Secular the Family,
Society, and the State-is also directly tributary to the
divine life of Man.
It is not a mere instrumentality for the purpose of si-
lencing the beast of the body, but rather is it the pro-
pædeutics of human combination and communication,
wherein spiritual life becomes a reality, a fixed fact.
The division of labor and exchange of productions are
the apparent ends of industry, but the cunning of Spirit
uses them merely as means for the circulation of ideas.
The real Practical result is the addition to consciousness
of new foreign material, the appropriation of points
of view that were alien to it. By solving (spiritually
digesting) the contradiction between its own ideas and
those of the new people with whom it comes in contact,
it rises to more universal and truer ideas. The contrast
between this commerce and the material commerce is to
be marked. In material commerce the goods are to be
INTERLEAVES.
115
consumed and rendered null; in the commerce of ideas,
both parties gain, and neither lose anything.
By this discussion we have only sought the stand-
point of the Idealist. Whether he be the mystic, the
religious man, or the speculative philosopher, he regards
the world as a "fleeting show," considered by itself,
and the great fact of the Universe to be the Immanence
of Spirit, of the Divine Person. In this he is not
necessarily "impractical," but is quite likely to be in-
tensely the contrary.
THE SPECULATIVE.
I.
MR. ALCOTT's first principle is Person - or the absolute
self-reflection that which knows itself purely.
Hence it is a speculative stand-point. All stand-points are
material which posit at the basis a fixed or rigid substance, a
realized multiplicity, whether the same be called simply mat-
ter, force, law, form, cause, essence, ideas, or archetypes,
etc., etc.; while, on the other hand, all stand-points are
speculative which posit a self-moving, self-making pure act
at the basis, whether they call it God, Person, or Idea, its
proper names, or any of the other terms mentioned.
A demonstration that Person or Idea is the Absolute Prin-
ciple, and that nothing else can be, would run somewhat as
follows:
a. Being is either dependent or independent: if the latter,
it is by itself; and if the former, it exists in another which is
independent.
b. Actual Being is either determined through itself or
another if the latter, it is finite, not self-contained, not a
totality; if the former, it is self-contained and infinite.
C. Hence all being is self-determined and independent, or
else exists in and through a self-determined and independent.
116
TABLE-TALK.
d. That which is self-determined or self-made is not sub-
ordinate to Time and Space, but generates them in its own
process; for if it were subordinate to Time and Space, it
would be externally determined, and thus a dependent some-
what.
e. This self-determined Being is what we name God,
Spirit, or Idea (in the sense of Person).
Remarks. In this proof we have taken the reflective
method, -a very deficient form, because we are forced to jump
from one beginning to another. We have an insight into the
true stand-points at first, and then construct a bridge to get
to them. The genetic or dialectic method, on the other hand,
unfolds the progress of discovery as well as its grounds.
The method used above is similar to the mathemathical
method. It jumps across the river to get a plank to make a
bridge with. Of course, itself does not need a bridge; it
kindly makes one for others.
But the genetic method gives the wings with which the dis-
coverer flew across the chasm. All these strictures on the
method employed here will become evident on looking at the
beginning, which is gratuitously assumed without explaining
why it is done.
In the geometric demonstration I draw this construction
and that, but give no explanation of the why. Thus it is an
external procedure when contrasted with the dialectic method.
Thus one may have a speculative stand-point and not a
speculative procedure. It may be without any procedure, a
mere positing of the various degrees of the finite; or these
degrees may have the reflective nexus exemplified; or, finally,
the dialectic may be given, and in this case the whole system
is speculative. This prepares us for a view of the second
stage in Mr. Alcott's Philosophy:
THE DESCENT OR LAPSE OF THE SOUL.
II.
α. The first Principle, or God, is a Person -a self-deter-
mining or creative, self-dirempting or self-dissecting.
b. He creates that which is most like Himself, hence
+
INTERLEAVES.
117
self-determined or creative beings. They differ from the
Absolute Person only in degree; they are pure souls.
C. These pure souls may lapse or may not. They have
the possibility of lapse, since they are free.
d. Those that lapse create thereby bodies for themselves;
and, lapsing still further, generate the lower animals; and,
these continuing the lapse, beget the plant-world; and thence
results the inorganic world.
e. The limit to the lapse is the atom [i. e., complete self-
externality, or space, or chaos].
This Scheme has the following advantages as a view of the world:
A. (a) It recognizes Person as the only substantial, and
all else as dependent thereon. This is the opposite of the
materialistic scheme.
(b) It places next to the Person, as the substance, that
which is most like it, as being the most substantial; that
which is least personal is least substantial and most depend-
ent, hence is placed last as depending on the dependent.
B. It represents all creation as through thought.
(a) The total thought of God thinks the total, and thus
Himself as His own object, or Pure Spirit.
It is only finite thinking, i. e., an act of thought, which
seizes only one moment of the totality, that creates an im-
perfect being. The finite thought thinks a part or phase as
though it were a totality, and thus takes it out of its truth;
hence arises untruth. In this sense, the theory of the finite
resting on lapse is deepest truth.
() It implies that thinking creates its thought (the deep
fundamental thought of Aristotle); hence seeing creates
what it sees. The divine, harmonious, pure, unlapsed soul
comprehends or seizes all in the One or Person; while the
lapsed soul, in the form of sense and understanding, creates
spectres, i. e., gives validity to abstractions, and thus cannot
cancel them and arrive at their negative unity in pure thought.
This leads us to the consideration of the positive value of
this scheme.
118
TABLE-TALK.
III.
This order of stating the genesis is an order of rank or
caste.
α. Each lower form has its explanation in the next higher
or more concrete. The soul sees its moments scattered and
isolated in the lower forms in such a manner that each is de-
ficient and demands to be complemented by another.
b. When we consider the inorganic, we find strange prop-
erties, such, for example, as gravity, inertia, or light and
heat; we ascend to the organic world and see what all these
meant. The lower forms of the organic, such as vegetation,
likewise have their explanation in the higher or animal forms,
and the animal has its explanation in man. Thus this system
formally justifies itself.
According to Plotinus, "The soul appetizing is the animal.
The world of vegetation is the merely reproductive soul.
The world-soul is the immediate effective agency of the intel-
lect which is its own object. The longing of the individual,
special soul gives it a body; with the body it retains fancy
and memory. Below it is the sense-world, and then feeling,
desire, and the vegetative life.”
In the Fifth Ennead, he has this order: -I. The One; II.
The Intellect (dualism). The Primal Essence in its return to
itself sees itself, and thus arises knowing or intellect; thus
the Primal Essence is disrempted in its unity; as disremption
(or intellect) it produces the lower orders.
Proclus considers the One as uncognizable in itself, and to
be cognizable only as it is in its process and return.
The re-
lation of the unity to the distinctions which it produces is
that of the procession from itself. He shows by a dialectic
more or less external how all determinations cancel them-
selves and return to the One.
Plato's highest principle is the Comprehension or genus
(idea). This is the universal particular and individual as one
process, hence dialectic throughout. Plato is therefore dia-
lectical, always inoving from the Many to the One, like Pro-
INTERLEAVES.
119
clus. His dialectic is more or less mixed with reflections,
seldom pure; and his great inferiority to Aristotle is in this,
that he does not enunciate so clearly the self-thinking thought
to be the first Principle.
When the logical idea finds all its presuppositions, so that
its moments or phases become equal to the total, we have
the IDEA, in which the dialectic vanishes. There is no longer
an external negative unity cancelling the moments, for each
moment is its own negative unity, and thus a complete total-
ity. Each one is in the image of the whole, and the whole
thus attains extant being, so that in the sphere of the idea we
have the identity of Being or immediateness and Comprehen-
sion or subjectivity. This is seized by Aristotle in its imme-
diate or elementary phase, and hence he has the appearance
of proceeding empirically; for he seizes each stage as a
totality, and leaves out the dialectic-unlike Plato. The
complete Philosopher should show the genesis of the Idea
dialectically, but this is Plato's side. Aristotle assumes it.
Plato is always demonstrating the dialectical evolution of the
Idea, but leaves the work unfinished. *
From this we shall be able to point out the missing links
in Mr. Alcott's Philosophy. He leaves out the dialectic en-
tirely, and hence we have no historical Comprehension, but
each step is treated as a totality or an idea. When this be-
comes entirely insufficient, he has recourse to concrete dialec-
tical terms, such as appear in Psychology, or even Physiology,
appetite," "desire," etc. The starting-point, too, or the
genesis whose soul is the dialectic, is rigid, and we advance
by reflections or else begin anew with each link, making a
as “
* The method of reasoning employed by the dialectic of Plato, was in-
vented by Eleatic Zeno, the disciple of Parmenides, and is as follows:
Two hypotheses being laid down, viz: If a thing is, and if it is not, each
of these may be tripled by considering in each what happens, what does not
happen, what happens and at the same time does not happen, so that six
cases will be the result.
But since, if a thing is, we may consider itself with respect to itself, or
itself with respect to others; or we may consider others themselves with re-
120
TABLE-TALK.
discreet degree. Now, to the mind of the oracle all this is
present. The totality hovers before it, but in such an imme-
diate form that the permanent variable cannot be seized.
Hence it is that the steps are seized isolatedly, while the
mediation of the same remains unconsciously in the subject
and is not explicitly stated.
Of course, when the dialectic is left out, the series may be
inverted without any obvious impropriety. Thus, in the
present instance we are taught that the most perfect created
beings were created first instead of last, which is the Mo-
saic order and that of the ordinary conception.
The appa-
rent difficulty would entirely vanish if the creation of the first
pure soul were considered dialectically; for then the links
would fall between the Absolute Idea and its realization as
Pure Spirit as cancelled moments, and hence not as real evil.
As all these intermediate links would have their explanation
and raison d'être in the Final Cause or perfect spirit, the pred-
spect to themselves, or others with respect to the thing itself, and so likewise
if a thing is not; hence the whole of this process will consist of eight triads,
which are the following:
1. If a thing is, what happens to itself with respect to itself; what does
not happen; what happens and at the same time does not happen.
2. If a thing is, what happens to itself with respect to others; what does
not happen; what happens and at the same time does not happen.
3. If a thing is, what happens to others with respect to themselves; what
does not happen; what happens and at the same time does not hap-
pen.
4. If a thing is, what happens to others with respect to that thing; what
does not happen; what happens and at the same time does not hap-
pen.
And the other forms which are founded on the hypothesis that a thing is
not, are to be distributed in exactly the same manner as those above enu-
merated.
Such is the whole form of the Dialectic method, which is both intellectual
and scientific, and under which these four, the definitive and divisive, the
demonstrative and analytic, receive their consummate perfection. Its end
is the perfection of truth. The whole of our life is an exercise to the vision
of this, and the wandering through dialectic hastens to that as its past and
looks through all.
- Thomas Taylor.
INTERLEAVES.
121
icate evil or good could not be applied to them, and hence
the obstacle which Plotinus sought to remove (the real exis-
tence of evil as a creation of the Absolute) is shown to have
no absolute existence, but only a relative one to finite con-
sciousness (the reflective understanding). This, perhaps we
have reason to believe, is the true view of those who explain
creation through the lapse. They cling to that form of
stating it in order to emphasize the hierarchy of Spirit and
the dependence of destiny upon Choice or the freedom of the
Will.*— WILLIAM T. HARRIS, Editor of the Journal of Specu-
lative Philosophy, etc.
* Every system of metaphysics, which has had its hold for the time upon
the human mind, owed its acceptance to its embracing an element of the
mind's absoluteness, else it had not had a history. Thus to the Eleatics we
owe the idea of being in itself; of becoming, to Heraclitus; that of The One,
to Leucippus and Democritus; of quantity, to Pythagoras; that of measure,
of identity, of difference, and of ground, to Leibnitz; that of the negative,
to the Sceptics; of being in itself and the phenomenon, to Kant; that of
content and form, of matter and form, to Aristotle; that of substance, to
Spinoza; that of the general idea, to Plato; that of the absolute idea, to
Plato, Aristotle, and Kant.
Succeeding thinkers appear to have added nothing of importance to the
ideas of these great masters.
*** The most noteworthy presentation of the "Latest Philosophy" is now
being given in a series of lectures, in Boston, by Rev. Joseph Cook, which
we understand are announced for publication in the coming autumn.

P
TABLE-TALK.
Book II.
SPECULATIVE.
"Should any one interrogate Nature how she works, if graciously
she vouchsafe to listen and speak, she will reply, 'It behooves thee
not to disquiet me with interrogations, but to understand in silence,
even as I am silent, and work without words.'"'
-Plotinus.
I.
METHOD.
"I shall commend to them that would successfully philosophise
the belief and endeavor after a certain principle more noble and in-
ward than Reason itself, and without which Reason will falter, or at
least reach but to mean and frivolous ends. I have a sense of some-
thing in me while I thus speak, which I must confess is of so retruse
a nature that I have no name for it, unless I should adventure to
term it Divine Sagacity, which is the first rise of a successful reason."
Dr. Henry More.

M
INDEX.
ETAPHYSICS is but an index to the study and
interpretation of the universe; yet some finger-
post is convenient and even necessary for the student
who will plunge into this wood of wonders. If some-
times perplexed and losing his way while threading the
thickets, let him but take his bearings carefully, never
questioning that he may reach the familiar goal at last,
for which he set forth at the beginning.
66 we are never
"While we sit still," says Berkeley,
the wiser, but going into the river and moving up and
down is the way to discover its depth and shallows. If
we exercise and bestir ourselves, we may even have dis-
covered something. The eye by long use comes to see
even in the darkest caverns, and there is no subject so
obscure that we may not discover some glimpse of truth
by long poring over it. Truth is the cry of all, but the
game of the few. Certainly, where it is the chief pas-
sion, it doth not give way to vulgar ends and views, nor
is it contented with a little ardor in the early time of
life, active perhaps to pursue, but not so fit to weigh and
revise. He that would make a real progress in knowl-
edge, must dedicate his age as well as youth, — the la-
ter growth as well as first fruits, at the altar of truth."
128
TABLE-TALK.
:
METHODISTS.
The great thinkers of all times have been strict
methodists. They made their astonishing discoveries
and set these forth systematically, by following the laws
of thought, the logic of things, and thus showing the
track of spirit in their genesis. Esteeming mind as a
living, creative power, they seized its movements and
traced these legally from their sources to their issues.
Other processes they knew were but mere conjectures
and systems of logomachy.
Proclus observes, "There are two sorts of philos-
ophers: the one places body first in the order of being,
and makes the faculty of thinking depend thereupon,
supposing that the principle of all things is corporeal ;
that body must really or principally exist, and all other
things in a secondary sense and by virtue of that.
Others, making all corporeal things to be dependent
upon soul or mind, think this to exist in the first place
and primary sense, and the being of bodies to be alto-
gether derived from and to presuppose that of the
mind."
Either method avails, the method of analysis or of
synthesis. They start from opposite bases, and thence
proceed by processes the reverse of each other, — life,
the while, their common factor. Like the fable of the
shield seen from obverse sides, each justifies results from
its point of view. The former observes matter as such;
the latter, as exalted and mingled with mind, neither
METHOD.
129
The
being able to separate life from matter or mind.
idealist avails himself of both methods, and thus includes
the facts entire in his speculation.
Starting from life in atom, the naturalist evolves
therefrom the series of forms in ascending order up to
man, where his science halts. Life and matter remain
to him as inexplicable as at the start. The idealist
accepts the facts, without his inferences. He carries
forwards and upwards the series inversely through in-
stinct, intelligence, will, personality, to their acme and
genesis in Spirit. And from thence descending in crea-
tive order, he threads the kingdoms of mind and of
matter upon Spirit, which floods all substances with
its life, is the solvent force quickening the imponderable
essences, and bodies forth all things in matter as its
vehicle.
"Symbolical is all that meets the sense,
One mighty alphabet for infant minds;
And we in this low world, placed with our back
To bright Reality, that we may learn
With young, unwounded ken the substance from
The shadow."
MATTER.
Everything is thus suffused with spirit. And matter,
seen essentially, becomes spirit in fusion trembling to
organize itself. The visible world is spirit outspread
before the senses, for the analysis of understanding,
130
TABLE-TALK.
the synthesis of reason, and matter is Spirit's confine,
limning bodies to the senses.
Out of the chaos dawns in sight
The globe's full form in orbed light;
Beam kindles beam, kind mirrors kind,
Nature's the eye-ball of the Mind;
The fleeting pageant tells for nought
Till shaped in Mind's creative thought.
OBSERVATORY.
Everything in matter is respirable in thought.
Every atom drifts mindwards to partake of the brain's
endowments, an omniscient brain being Spirit's culmina-
tion in matter, and its observatory of things terrestrial.
Mind thus becomes the common menstruum, and thought
the solvent of all substances, material and immaterial.
The mind is so great because void of quantity, and the
universe so spacious because spirit pervades every part
and particle of its matter.
METACHEMISTRY.
Solidity is an illusion of the senses. Everything is
fluent and aflame, the spiritual metachemistry resolv-
ing atoms into heat, heat into light, light into motion,
motion into force, whereby Spirit recoils on itself, and
mind becomes the solvent of the imponderables into
their several forms in matter. "All we know of bodies
METHOD.
131
is that there is something active in the space which they
occupy."
THE BECOMING.
The infinite is alone imperishable.
Of the fleeting
finite, nothing abides or remains. The fugitive Be-
coming resolves itself into the stable Being from whence
it proceeds. Atoms revolve, images shine, facts pass;
ideas survive the fleeing forms and are eternal. The
globes are ever making, never made.
"Matter, while it fleeteth fast,
Returneth to the soul at last."
ORBIS PICTUS.
An orbis pietus of Spirit, the globes present them-
selves in a series of resolving views, an ideal geometry
and optics of the flowing life, which to the senses seems
fixed and still, yet is figuring in view the while as on a
screen,
"The things without figure."
*"The physicist cannot admit into his science the conception common to
ordinary life, namely, that material existence, so far as it strikes our senses,
is actual reality, and the bearer of all other reality. He must not alone
grant that the properties of bodies depend on their chemical nature (a fact
which has been long perceived), but it must stand clearly before his mind
that bodies are only phenomena which are produced by active forces, of
which no single one is in itself a body; even more than this, he cannot view
bodies as constantly existing which is so entirely the silent supposition of
the experience of ordinary life; he must perceive that that which is, does
not exist a single moment by itself, but only through a constant reciprocal
action with all that surrounds it, and more or less directly with the entire
universe."
- Oerstead.
132
TABLE-TALK.

To the senses, things appear linear,
orbed to thought. The lines of gen-
esis, like flames, show spirally and
aspirant. The spiral includes all
known figures.
"Principles, like fountains, flow round ceaselessly,
Whirling in eddying evolutions of wavelets."
REASON ABSOLUTE.
There must be mind to presuppose matter possible.
To affirm that there is no passage from mind to matter
were to deny even the possibility of matter itself, since
the assertion sets out from mind. And only mind can
affirm or deny anything,—cannot deny itself even, being
itself self-affirmation and intuition of Being. Every
sense needs the whole mind's endorsement to render its
verdicts trustworthy. "But if one is so fugitive and un-
settled that he will not stand by the verdict of his own
faculties, you can no more fasten anything upon him
than you can write in the water or tie knots of the
wind.”
IDEAS.
"We learn all things indeed by occasion of experi-
ence; but the very facts to be learned force us inward
on the antecedents that must be presupposed in order to
render experience itself possible. An idea is an experi-
ment proposed; an experiment is an idea realized."
METHOD.
133
Ideas mediate between facts and truths, as the rainbow
spans an arc of the heavens. Without ideas the facts
would remain confused and uninterpretable, since things
are explained only by the reason translating them from
things into ideas. 'The sphere of the senses and the
sphere of reason are not merely distinct, but antago-
nistic; and it is only by an inversion of phenomena
that we pass into the region of causes.
""
INTUITION.
Intuitive truths are self-affirmative and their own evi-
dence. Because He cannot swear by one greater than
himself, therefore doth he utter himself in a
" Thus
saith the Lord," the true and Absolute, "without vari-
ableness or shadow of turning."
INSTINCT.
Instinct divines what the understanding cannot per-
ceive, nor reason at once apprehend. Its presentiments
are oracular and personal, — the voice of Spirit to the
mind entire. Reason, imagination, fancy, memory,
understanding, all certify and translate according to
their special function, the behests of the spirit. All
are its pupils and mediators. Instinct, intuition, vo-
lition embosom and express whatsoever the Spirit
vaticinates and verifies in experience.
Like birds of passage, the instincts drift the soul
134
TABLE-TALK.
adventurously beyond the horizon of sensible things, as
if intent on convoying it to the mother country from
whence it had flown. "Instinct harmonizes the interior
of animals; Religion, the interior of man." Alike in our
wakeful and somnolent moments, it evokes from the
memory, secrets hidden from us at other times, as if
memory and fancy then opened wide their folding-doors
and delivered the soul out of its dormitory of space and
time into its pre-existent heavens.
"Sense is but the employment of the dormant soul.
So much of the soul as is merged in body, so far it
sleeps. And its vigilance is an ascent from the body,
since a resurrection with a body were but a transforma-
tion from sleep to sleep and from dream to dream, like
men passing in the dark from bed to bed. That alone
is the real ascension which frees the soul from the
shadowy essence of body."
Nothing fairly represents mind but mind. Nature is
but the picture-book with which we toy in wonderment
and task ourselves life-long. As the glass reflects the
features, so nature mirrors mind. No one beholds
himself personally, but only his apparition and effigy.
Man is a soul using the body as an instrument.*
Body is not me, is nothing; so when thought fails to
find the me, it substitutes not me or nothing — the void
"If we say spiritual souls are not in their bodies, but their bodies in
them, we have Plato's authority to vouch for us. And by favor of an easy
simile, we may affirm these to be to the body as the light of a candle to the
feculent snuff, which, as it is not pent up in it, so neither does it partake of
its impurity."
Glanvil.
METHOD.
135
of me—instead, nothing as nothing being inconceivable.
It owes its seeming for the moment to the being with
which thought endows it, and is because of this: is not
in itself. Being is, and in this are all things, out of
which is only chaos.
"The light of Nature lends
But feeble light, and leads to her own ends;
And shadows thrive the more in stature
The nearer we approach the light of Nature."
SELF-FINDING.
Conversant with things only, the senses are neces-
sarily idolaters. Thought unsensualizes and restores
the mind to the vision of ideas, the truths of the pure
reason, the revelations of the Spirit. Transcending the
senses and the understanding, thinking exalts the mind
into self-consciousness. To think essentially, absolutely,
is the finding of the Person or Self, distinct from matter
and mortality. One must climb the summits to com-
mand the prospects and salute the sources of light and
of Pure Being. Not without significance spreads the
sky overhead for the highest and holiest known to the
mind.
"The vulgar saw thy tower, thou saw'st the sun."
66
LIFE'S LADDER.
Theology and philosophy unbind the ligaments that
chain the soul down to earth, and assist her flight to-
136
TABLE-TALK.
wards the foreign good. There is an instinct or tendency
of the mind upwards, which shows a natural endeavor
to recover and raise ourselves from our present sensual
and low condition into a state of higher order and
purity. The perceptions of sense are gross, but even
in the senses there is a difference. Though harmony
and proportion are not objects of sense, yet the eye and
the ear are organs by means wherewith the soul may
apprehend the one and the other. By experiments of
sense we become acquainted with the lower faculties of
the soul, and from them, whether by gradual evolution
or ascent, sense supplies images for memory. These
become subjects for fancy to work upon. Reason con-
siders and judges of imagination; and all these acts of
reason become new objects of understanding. In this
scale, each lower faculty is a step that leads to one
above it; and the uppermost naturally leads to the
Deity, who is rather the object of intellectual knowl-
edge than even of the discursive faculty, not to mention
the sensitive."*
The stairway of nature conducts through the visible
world to the second flight, the mind, and this in con-
*"O Adam! one Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not depraved from good; created all
Such to perfection; our first nature all
Indued with various forms, various degrees
Of substances, and in things that live, of life;
But more refined, more spirituous and pure,
As nearer to him placed or nearer tending,
Each in their several active spheres assigned,
Till body up to spirit work in bounds.
METHOD.
137
tinuation of the first
from the level landing-place
of things rising upwards, on the several faculties, to
the open dome of Spirit, displaying, as we rise, the
successive stories and apartments of the vast temple
of Being.
UNITES
AS SOUL
Lives
THE PRESENCE.
I.
THE PERSON
IDENTIFIES
AS WILL
Deliberates
DIVIDES
AS MIND
Thinks
Experiences
Chooses
Whence?
INSTINCT
Who?
VOLITION
Thoughts
What?
MEMORY
Divines
Feelings
Thence?
IMAGINATION
Purposes
Acts
Now?
CONSCIENCE
Recalls
Events
Once?
REASON
Conceives
Rectifies
Judges
Ideas
Duties
Truths
How?
Ought?
Why?
FANCY
SENSE
UNDERSTANDING
Represents
Forms
Thus?
Notes
Perceives
Things
Where?
Facts
Which?
SUBSTANCE.
Proportioned to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk; from thence the leaves
More airy; last the bright, consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes. Flowers and their fruits,
Man's nourishment by gradual scale sublimed
To vital spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual; give birth to life and sense,
Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
Reason receives, and Reason is her being
Discursive or intuitive.”
- Milton.
138
TABLE-1ALK.
In this house of many mansions, the home of THE
PERSON, the faculties take precedence according to their
special endowments, each ranging freely throughout its
allotted courts, divining those above and descending
at choice to all below.

II.
GENESIS.
"They that affect men's minds with impiety and atheism make
that which is the first cause of generation and corruption to be the
last thing in the universe, and that which is the last to be the first.
From hence proceeds their error concerning the being of God; that
is, they make mind and soul to be the last thing, and body and
matter to be the first.
Dr. Cudworth.

THE
CREATION.
HE ancient wise men obscurely signified the Gen-
esis of matter in their mysteries, wherein they
represented the virile Hermes as the ideal Reason or
creative Spirit, generating the world of visible things.
Their Genesis was thus spiritually conceived and con-
ducted; Creation was a descent, Spirit stooping to
organize things. Effects were suspended from causes,
successively in series and degrees; Spirit, the Cause
of all causes, first fashioning man ideally, and through
him derivatively generating the visible hierarchy of
natural creatures and things in matter. The soul,
being a descendant of divinity, was taken to be the
eldest of all things in the corporeal world. It was the
source of all motion and generation in it. Pre-existing
before bodies it presided over and ruled these. From
whence it followed that ideas were older than things, and
therefore sensation, thought, and volition were in order
before length, breadth, and profundity.
IDEAS.
"As everything which operates essentially produces
an image of itself, He therefore who fashions the uni-
*
142
TABLE-TALK.
verse fashions an image of himself.
But if this be
causes of the.
To which we
the case, he contains in himself the
universe, and these causes are ideas.
may add that the perfect must necessarily antedate the
imperfect; unity, multitude; the indivisible, the divis-
ible; and that which abides perpetually the same, that
which subsists in necessary mutation. From all which
it follows that things do not originate from baser
natures, but that they end in these; and that they
commence from natures the most perfect, the most
beautiful, and the best. For it is not possible that
the intellect should be unable to apprehend things
equal, similar, and the like, and that the Artificer of
the universe should not contain in himself the essen-
tially equal, just, beautiful, and good, and in short,
everything which has a universal and perfect subsist-
ence, and which, from its residence in Deity, forms a
link of that luminous chain of essences to which we
may give the name of ideas."
TYPES.
"In every type of beings there is a first, a middle,
and a last, in order that the progression of things may
form an unbroken series, originating in Deity and ter-
minating in matter. In consequence of this connec-
tion, one part of the human species naturally coalesces,
through transcendency, with beings of an order superior
to man; another part, through degradation, unites with
the brute species; and a third part, as the connecting
GENESIS.
143
medium between the other two, surpasses those prop-
erties which characterize the human in a manner not
exceeding, but exactly commensurate with, the con-
dition of humanity." The series descends, ascends,
graduates accurately the intelligence of the several
types, their genera and species. Above the head there
is nothing material, as beneath the feet there is nothing.
intellectual. Everywhere, throughout the animal king-
dom, heads typify supremacy, spines subordination.
Crowned with forehead and face, man epitomizes,
idealizes all subordinate creatures; these betraying,
under every guise of features, every limb, some trait or
trace of his fallen physiognomy. The protoplast of all
lower forms, through him descend, by degradation of
his essence, every type into corresponding organs.
The lower man descends the more he resembles the
brute, a degrading passion transforms the human
into the brute. An unusual likeness between features
of persons and the lower animals indicates a corre-
sponding likeness of character.
Not by volume, but by quality,
which the calipers fail to measure
or scales weigh, does wit declare the
values of the imponderable essences,
sensibility and thought. The coun-
tenance tells the tale. The crowned
head belongs to art, exalts all below
into nobility. The ideal type is
built over the eyes, the animal

PERSONALITY
CONSCIENCE
IMAGINATION
REASON
UNDERS
DERSTANDING
MEMORY
FANCY
BENSE
INSTINCT
144
TABLE-TALK.
:
downwards. The fair types are hyperboreal, the dark
Oriental: intermingled, these form the present genera-
tions of mankind. Every departure from ideal beauty
is a degradation of it. The one form embosoms all
forms, these having a common likeness at their base
of difference. All heads are portraits, more or less
exact, of the typical Godhead. But the features elude
stiffening in the brittle clay.*
SEX.
Without sex bodies could not be. For thus the One
distributes himself in counterparts, returning hereby
into himself. An exposition of the sexual laws would
solve the mysteries of incarnation, the genesis of ma-
terial things.†
((
As well try write
How roses first came red and lilies white."
*"The first Beauty," says Ficinus, "is the splendor of the Father of Lights
and the figure of his Person, from which there shines forth a threefold radi-
ance: the first through angelic minds, the second through intellectual souls,
the third through beautiful bodies; these reflecting the same light, as it were,
through three different glasses of different colors, and accordingly they suc-
cessively reflect a different splendor from the First."
"It is easy to understand that a city ought not to be mixed like a cup,
in which the maddened wine when poured forth effervesces, but one that,
being corrected by another and a sober deity, does, after receiving a beautiful
commingling, produce a good and moderate drink. Yet not one, so to say,
is able to clearly see this taking place in the mingling of the sexes. On this
account it is best to leave alone things of this kind by legislation, and to
endeavor by charms to persuade parents to set a greater value upon the
quality of their offspring."
- Plato.
GENESIS.
145
INCARNATION.
Living is incarnation. Quick with spirit in alternate
systole and diastole, the tides course along, incarnating
organ and vesicle in their ceaseless flow. Let the
pulsations pause for an instant, creation ebbs into in-
visibility. The visible world is the extremest wave of
the spiritual flood, its flux being living, confluence
body, efflux decease. Organization is spirit's confine
and bodies its substance. Life is procreant.*
• All
matter," says Aristotle, "desires form as the female
desires the male." All delights are seminal, being
spirit in transition and bodies in embryo.
"Each
globule of blood is a microcosm, containing in act all
the series that precede it, and in potency, therefore, a
whole human race; for the seed arises from the blood."
"The paternal mind soweth symbols in souls.” †
ANCESTRY.
Blood is a genesis and destiny: once meliorated and
*"The germinal or living matter may be said to be the domicile of the
ego,
but so rough are our methods of investigation that when we begin to
search for the ego, we destroy its habitation, and the ego escapes whither
we cannot follow it."
Dr. Beal.
†"An animal exists, body and soul, before conception in the sperm, and
by means of conception is made merely to undergo a great transformation.
As generation, moreover, is but development and increase, so death is no
more than envelopment and diminution. There may be metamorphoses, but
no metempsychoses among animals. The soul changes its organs gradually
and is at no time completely deprived of them. So that not only the soul,
but the animal even, is indestructible. Only God is without a body.”
-Leibnitz.
146
TABLE-TALK.
ennobled by virtue and genius, by culture, it resists
baser mixtures and preserves its purity for many gen-
erations. Intermarriage modifies but does not efface
the family type. Blood determines native traits and
dispositions; persistent, pitiless it may be, sometimes
victimizing its owner, yet never so fatally as to leave
no margin of choice, unless idiocy or insanity predes-
tine his earthly race. Lust fathers the animal, love
mothers the man.
"Man has three forms of three worlds in him, and
is the complete image of his Creator. And there are
three masters contesting for his form in his incarnation.
The predominant one only tunes his instrument and the
others lie hid; and as soon as he appears, his innate,
genuine form appears by his words and conversation.
And so great is the difference in their procreation, that
one brother or sister doth not as the other."
No one can be indifferent to the matter of descent
without missing the key for unlocking the mysteries.
of character. The blood intermingled with his flows
in strict accordance with laws that neither discipline nor
climate shall wholly stem or countervail. Ancestral dis-
positions and traits are not safely ignored. Genealogies
tell tales. And it is a significant fact of our times that
the genesis of species, races, families, and individuals.
is receiving the attention of accomplished thinkers and
careful observers. Thanks to the Darwins and their
school, — whatever their pretensions to scientific cer-
tainty.
GENESIS.
147
TEMPERAMENTS.
The temperaments denote the climate and zone of our
individuality, the planetary body we inhabit. - They
fit us closely or loosely. To the wise a flowing gar-
ment, to the foolish a close jacket, a web of fate. The
Nemesis of descent, it is not optional with the Fates
to leave uncut threads themselves did not willingly spin.
Obeying the conservative laws of things, they ply the
shears of the destiny that clips individual threads woven
by time into the tissues of the coming generation.
Destiny spares only those whom divinity willingly ad-
mits to mortality.
"See the weird women! Clotho stands behind
Wielding her disdaff; then the one who spins
And rules the threads, and she who cuts them off.
O Atropos! Unchangeable! The Greeks
Gave thee that name; but when thy severing steel
Comes near the silver cord of human life,
We must remember, if we keep our faith,
That though ye fashion destiny to-day,
Thou and thy sisters are but mortal too,
And have no office in the life to come."
The sunnier the temperament, the more genial and
radiant; the more lunar, the more nocturnal and melan-
choly. The fair reflect the prismatic colors, the dark
absorb the rays. The pure genius is clothed with the
rainbow.* We see in light being formed of light.
*The colors," says Goethe, "are acts of light. The eye may be said to
owe its existence to light, which calls forth, as it were, a sense akin to itself.
The eye, in short, is formed with reference to light, to be fit for the action
148
TABLE-TALK.
66
"Were the eye not sunny, how could we see the light?
Were God's spirit not with us, how could we discern
spiritual things?" God," said the magi, "has light
for his body and truth for his soul." Light and incense
are parts and particles of our essence; we cannot
escape from the flames we feed upon, cannot perish
clean from our ashes. Our embers are still embryons.
We toy with sunbeams from our cradles, dazzled life-
long by the celestial splendors. How we grasped at the
rays with our tiny hands !
Light us, Sovereign Lamp! Flood our souls with
thy fervors! Illuminate our heavens with thy radiance!
Born of fires, swathed in earths, in waters bathed, on
ethers fed, and greedy of elemental life, our souls
aflame of THEE, incline us, O Fluid and Seminal
LIGHT! to quaff immortal memories from Thy resplen-
dent urns, ever filling, never full, our souls of Thee.
66
'Light without darkness is the incommunicable claim
of him who dwelleth in light unapproachable. 'Tis no
disparagement to philosophy that it cannot deify us or
make good the impossible promise of the primitive de-
ceiver. It is that which she owns above her that must
perfectly remake us after the image of our maker."
,,
of light: the light it contains corresponding with the sight within." Aris-
totle's Genesis of the organs of sense runs thus: "The pupil of the eye is
from water, of the hearing from the air, of the smell from one of these.
But fire is either the organ of no sense or is common to all the senses, since
there is no sensation without heat. And earth is either the organ of no
sense, or is most peculiarly ministered by the touch."
III.
PERSON.
"As myself is present to me in an incomprehensible manner, so
God is present to me likewise in an incomprehensible manner.
""
Jacobi.

'TIS reported in Sicilian fable that Hero, King
of Sicily, asked Simonides, the poet, for a deſi-
nition of Deity. Simonides first requested a day to
consider, then two more days, then doubled and re-
doubled the number, till the king, growing impatient
for an answer, and demanding the reason for the delay,
was told by the poet that the longer he considered the
question, the more impossible he found the answer.
And were the question put to any to define his mind,
a like answer would be returned. Yet the mind is
felt to be that by which we divine whatsoever we abso-
lutely know, the term Person answering to our deepest
apprehension of its essence and being. "God is not a
name for God, but an indication of what we conceive
of Him."
PERSONAL IDENTITY.
Personal identity is the sole identity.
"That which
knows and that which is known," says Aristotle,
66 are
really the same thing." The knowing that "I am”
affirms also the Personality immanent in all Persons,
and hence of the Supreme Person, since distinct from
152
TABLE-TALK.
Personality neither mind nor God were thinkable. And
it were impossible to have like conceptions in our minds,
if we did not partake of one and the same intellect.
Were God not God, I were not I,
Myself in Him myself descry.
An impersonal God were an absurdity. Personality
is essential to the idea of spirit, and man, as man, were
unthinkable without the presupposition of Personality.
It is the I that gives subsistence to nature and reality to
mind. Where the I is not, nothing is. Religion and
science alike presuppose its presence as their postulate
and ground. It is the essence of which substance is
manifestation. Qualities are adherent in substance, and
substance is one and spiritual. Personal identity is
spiritual, not numerical, souls being one, bodies not
one. Any number of bodies never attain to unity,
since it is the One in each that defines and denotes it.
The Personality is inclusive of the One in each and
all.
THE ONE AND THE MANY.
"The mind so far forth as Person is one, therein
resembling the divine One by participation, and impart-
ing to other things what itself participates from Above.
This is agreeable to the doctrine of the ancients, how-
ever the contrary opinion of supposing number to be an
original primary quality in things independent of the
mind may obtain among the moderns. This much,
PERSON.
153
upon the whole, may be concluded, — that, distinct from
the mind and its sensations, there is in created things
neither unit nor number." "One is the world through
the bond of Deity alone, and made according to pro-
portion."
All theories of the Godhead involve ideas of the one
and the many of the Personal and individual or imper-
sonal, Trinity and Unity — as prime factors. And the
different schools and sects in theology take rank accord-
ingly. Individualism, the independence of the many
of the One, leads of necessity to polytheism, pan-
theism, atheism, materialism, and blank nihilism, im-
plied or professed. Personalism, the dependence of
the many on the One, on the other hand, conducts by
logical sequence to theism, idealism, and the positive
faiths of the orthodox sects. Christianity Personalized
the pagan notion of fate with the added idea of free
agency, the One God instead of the many gods
enthroned in the pagan Pantheon, thus reconciling
the contradiction of free will and destiny by a spirit-
ual unity and mediation.
Jesus affirmed himself to be "One with the Father,"
that man's Personality was derivative and filial, par-
taking of his divinity in his individual humanity. And
St. John writes: "Hereby know we that we dwell in
Him, and He in us, because He hath given us of His
spirit." Embosomed in man's person is the Personal
One, proceeding forth and returning into Himself me-
diatorially, cancelling His duality through His tripli-
1
154
TABLE-TALK.
city, and hereby reconciling soul and mind in the spirit-
ual reciprocity of the Will.
"One is The One in Holy Three,
Unlapsed in self's duplicity."
ATHEISM.
The fool's conceit is "There is no God," hereby
nullifying his own existence in his ignorance of himself.
Till he find himself Personally he is Godless and adrift.
No one can fully dissociate the notion of God from his
thought; in some shape or another it adheres to his
Person and affirms itself obscurely if not openly. It is
thus that Spirit stoops to incarnate itself to the
senses, and reveal the Person to himself. An imper-
sonal faith, be its pretensions what they may, becomes
frosted with superstitions and chilled with atheisms
from which the heart turns with aversion and dread.
"The heart has arguments with which the reason is
not acquainted." Head and heart must live together
* "I wish," said St. Augustine, "that men would but consider these three
things within themselves: I confess they are different from the Trinity; but
yet let them exercise their thoughts and try, and so find how far off they are.
"I say, then, that these things are to be, to know, and to will; for I am,
and I know, and I will. I am, knowing; and I am, willing; and I know
myself to be and to will; and, I will, both to be and to know.
"Therefore, in these three let him that can reach to it comprehend how
inseparable that life, and one life, and one understanding, or mind, and one
essence, is; and how inseparable a distinction there is, whilst yet there is a
distinction, let him that can reach to it comprehend. The cause depends in
his own court; nay, let him mark and judge, for it is within himself, and
then let him tell out his mind."
PERSON.
155
in sympathetic fellowship, else faith and hope die out of
one's days, and darkness, if not despair, succeed.
Even God becomes a phantom, if separated and seen
apart from one's Person; for where God is not, spectres
fill the void to revel and terrify. "God is present to
him that can touch Him; but to him that cannot he is
not present. And there lieth our happiness; and to be
moved from hence is but to partake less of being."
Without the thread of Personality, no clew is found
to conduct man beyond into a certain future of contin-
uance. Personality is the key to the mystery of human
existence. It unlocks every ward of Spirit. Our
instincts divine our continuance, defy intellect to think
extinction possible. Infinite in essence, we cannot con-
sent to remain prisoners of time and space; we seek by
faith and soar in vision into our native regions of light
and of longevity.
Immortal is the mind,
And of its kingdom there's no end.
"The human mind requires the permanent and abid-
ing under all changes. And this it finds in the fact
revealed by its consciousness of its Personality, — the
continuous act of Will by which every one affirms and
maintains himself as an 'I am.' And this very pro-
cess, by which one becomes cognizant of his spiritual
being and abiding Personality, reveals to him the higher
truth of an Eternal I am, without whom he cannot
affirm his own being."
156
TABLE-TALK.
MAN AND BRUTE.
Personality and Individuality differ as do man and
brute. As animal and no more, man is individual; as
Personal he is spiritual. His individuality distinguishes
him from other individuals of his kind, his Personality
unites and identifies him with all Persons. Animals are
impersonal. Personality is the link that lifts man above
the animal, and distinguishes him as a Person. An
animal is deficient in a Personal Will. It knows not
that it is an I. "That which specially distinguishes
the spirit of man from the souls of the lower animals
is its knowledge of necessary truths. These make
science possible and elevate man to the knowledge of
himself and of God."*
WILL.
Three parties are
our Personal and
The soul obeys higher laws than it transgresses, else
it would depose itself from holiness.
present in every deliberative act,
individual self, the Spirit underlying and overbrooding
both. While in the swing, we incline to either extreme,
The fact that man can entertain the conception of his ego lifts him
infinitely over all other beings on earth. It is this that constitutes him a
Person, and, by virtue of the unity of consciousness, amongst all the changes.
that may happen to him, one and the same person, that is, a being quite
distinct by rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals are,
with whom we can do as we please; and this even when he cannot yet speak
of his I, since he at least thinks it, and as all languages must think it when
speaking in the first person, even though they have not a special word for it.
For this faculty of thinking is the understanding Reason itself."
- Kant.
PERSON.
157
till our final determination is made. Our choices are
our Satans or Saviours for time and eternity. Who
shall escape from the retribution of his deeds without
aid from Above?
Man as an animal is all animals in One individually.
He has the weapons of all stacked in his frame, await-
ing his seizure as he wills. There sleep within a
thousand instincts, a system of lives, all ready to
spring forth at his bidding. Yet this thousand, and
the One more potent than all of them, slumber unfeared
and harmless in his loins till his Will lets them loose.
What ordnance for good or for evil is here? What
but God's grace, and a heavenly descent, can save thee
from thyself? *
CHOICE.
Our choices are our destiny.
our choices have not made ours.
Nothing is ours that
Our wills are creators.
As we will we come into possession of ourselves; we
were not selves, but things, without these. The will is
Personal. The having a will differences man from
* “The will makes the beginning, the middle, and the end of everything:
it is the only workman in Nature, and everything is its work. It has all
power, its work cannot be hindered, it carries all before it. It enters wher-
ever it wills and finds everything it seeks; for its seeking is its finding. The
will overrules all nature, because nature is its offspring and born of it; for
all properties of nature, whether they be good or evil, in darkness or in
light, in love or in hatred, in wrath or in meckness, in pride or in humility,
in trouble or joy, are all the offspring and birth of the will: as that wills, so
they live; and as that changes, so they change. So that whatever you are
or whatever you feel, is all owing to the working and creating power of
your own will,"
- William Law.
158
TABLE-TALK.
animals. "In order to be a Will, in any proper sense
of the word, the will must will, what it cannot otherwise
than will, its own being as an undivided Will. It must
be Itself, continuously, invariably, self-consistently, and
this is what we mean by a single will or Person.”
1
FREEDOM.
The soul's world is not created for its occupant, but
by him. One must be, not by another's, but by his own
determination. Choice is the creator. God (so to
speak) were not God, if not free and fulfilling the con-
ditions of freedom absolute and self-determined. Free-
dom is the crowning attribute of Godhead, and of
manhood also. God is God because free in freedom,
and man is man while maintaining himself in freedom
superior to fate.
Pure Personal Power is above restraint or constraint,
being a law in itself, a trust in keeping of the unlapsed,
-the Holy. Holiness is above deliberating, is right-
eousness. It is single in purpose and performance, con-
sentaneous and one. Virtue is virtue in choosing the
right against temptation to choose and do the wrong.
It deliberates and resolves righteously. Vice chooses
the wrong, loves and pursues it unscrupulously. These
typify the threefold states of the will, and rank respec-
tively the holy, the virtuous, the vicious.
PERSON.
159
CONSCIENCE.
Ever present and operant in the breast is That which
never becomes a party in one's guilt, conceives never
an evil thought, consents never to an unrighteous deed,
never sins, but holds itself impeccable, immutable, Per-
sonally holy, the conscience, counsellor, comforter,
judge, and executor of the Spirit's decrees. None can
flee from the Spirit's presence, nor hide from himself.*
The reserved powers are the Mighty Ones.
Side by
side sleep the Whispering Sisters and the Eumenides.
Nor is conscience appeased till the sentence is pro-
nounced. There is an oracle in the breast, an unsleep-
ing police; and ever the court sits, dealing doom or
deliverance. Our sole inheritance is our deeds. While
remorse stirs in the sinner, there remains hope of his
redemption. "Only he to whom all things are one,
·who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in
one, may enjoy true peace and rest of spirit."
None can escape THE PRESENCE. THE OUGHT is
everywhere and imperative. Alike guilt in the soul
and anguish in the flesh affirm His ubiquity. Matter
in particle and planet, mind and macrocosm, is quick
with Spirit.
* Montaigne, in his Essay on Conscience, relates this story, which, he adds,
is in every child's mouth. Bessus, the Paonean, being reproached with
wantonness for pulling down a nest of young sparrows and killing them,
replied he had reason so to do, seeing that the little birds never ceased
falsely to accuse him of the murder of his father. This parricide had till
then been concealed and unknown, but the revenging fury of conscience
caused it to be discovered by himself, who was justly to suffer for it.
"Despotic conscience rules our hopes and fears."
IV.
THE LAPSE.
"I inquired what iniquity was, and found it to be no substance,
but the perversion of the will from Thee, the Supreme, towards
lower things."
-St. Augustine.

66
OUR
DEGENERACY.
We
UR misery is not of yesterday, but is as ancient
as the first criminal, and the ignorance we are
involved in is almost coeval with our human nature :
not that we were made so by God, but by ourselves.
We were his creatures; sin and misery were ours.
are not like the creatures we were made, and have not
only lost our Maker's image, but our own, and do
not much more transcend the creatures God and nature
have placed at our feet than we come short of our
ancient selves."
The Orientals defined Fate to be the penalty of deeds
committed in a former state of existence. And the
like penalty is reaffirmed by Jews and Christians, an-
cestral sins being visited upon the children even to the
third and fourth generation, by imputation upon the
race itself. Science, elucidating the old theology, traces
the transmitted propensities still more directly to their
sources in the Adams and Eves populating every house-
hold. And private statistics testify that however saintly
the ancient heads of houses may have been, many a
prodigal illustrates the vicarious code.
"If a house be builded in wrong it shall blossom in
vice."
?
164
TABLE-TALK.
1
SIN ORIGINAL.
All sins are original, having their root in the will.
Tendencies to evil may be inherited, but are sinless till
chosen and loved as sinful. Errors are not sins, but
mistakes of judgment. Yet sins pervert judgment,
abridge freedom of the will, and predestine the soul's
fate.
"Sin, to speak properly," says an old mystic, "is
nothing else but a degeneration from a holy state, an
apostasy from a holy God. Religion is a participation
of God, and sin is a straggling off from him. There-
fore it is wont to be defined by negatives,-a depart-
ure from God, a forsaking of him, a living in the world
without him. The soul's 'falling off from God' de-
scribes the general nature of sin; but then as it sinks
into itself, or settles upon the world, and fastens upon
the creature, or anything therein, so it becomes speci-
fied, and is called pride, covetousness, ambition, and
by many other names."
"In better understandings sin began;
Angels first sin, next devils, and then man.
Only, perchance, beasts sin not: the sinners, we,
Less man than beast in white integrity."
!
THE TEMPTER.
Lapsed from original holiness, man's soul falls below
choice and deliberation even. His appetites depraved,
his passions perverted, his will divided, he forfeits
THE LAPSE.
165
his personal freedom and becomes the victim of his
lusts. Thus dethroned, he is the subtlest of all crea-
tures, the adversary and tempter. "Because thou hast
done this thou art thus debased beneath the cattle and
creeping things, dust-eating, downtrodden, and ab-
horred."*
There is in every one a Serpent, an Eve, and an
Adam. Our senses and natural affections are the Eve,
the Adam is our reason dethroned, the Serpent is our
concupiscence-
"Man's pride,
Which aims at things denied,
That learned and eloquent lust
Instead of mounting high creeps low upon the dust."
DESCENT.
Souls do not lapse in equal degrees, but each accord-
ing to similitude of disposition, no one so low as to lose
its type beyond recovery. And it is conceivable that
some preserve their integrity intact, never descending
into matter and mortality.
"Perchance God shapes souls bodiless, pure minds,
Lapsed souls shape those that fleshly be,
Man's soul the horizon 'twixt both kinds,
In whom we do the world's abridgment see."
"Sinning souls," said Plato, "fall down into perish-
*"The soul is the man, not the outward shape. If she live, therefore, but
the life of the brute; if her vital operation, her vigorous will and compla-
cency, be that which a beast likes, I cannot see that she is any more than a
living brute, or a beast in man's clothes."
Cicero.
166
TABLE-TALK.
able bodies, and are restored to immortality by repent-
ance and amendment of life.”
Loaded with necessity, grave with fate, bodies droop
and decline in consequence, matter filling the void souls
should occupy,
the man dismembered, deposed, and
treading the while upon the prostrate torso of his fallen
form.
DURANCE.
Every sin provokes its punishment. Fortunate if
it enable one to fathom the depth of his lapse, and save
him from himself. The soul that sinneth forfeits its
freedom.
"Know withal
In inan's original lapse true liberty
Is lost, which always with right reason dwells
Twinned, and from her hath dividual being.
Reason in man obscured, is not obeyed;
Immediately inordinate desires
And upstart passions catch the government
From reason, and to servitude reduce
Man till then free."
Evil is retributive: every trespass slips fetters on the
will, holds the soul in durance till contrition and repent-
ance restore it to liberty. Not even in Pandemonium
may sinners run at large, nor in Paradise without their
tether. The eternal laws prevail and must be obeyed
throughout the universe.
THE LAPSE.
167
GOOD AND EVIL.
"Evil no nature hath: the loss of good
Is that which gives Sin its livelihood."
A check on itself, evil subserves the economies of
good, as it were a condiment to give relish to good;
men, like animals, or the animal in them rather, the
man demonized and debased, fated to be stimulated
by something of a contrary nature, as if his vices were
for the moment invigorated by participating in the vir-
tues that fed his appetites, were whetted by attrition on
his vices. And since sinning had its original from the
desire of pleasure, it must of necessity be cured by
pain; for here also evils are the cures of evils.
Gracious God! what scales and ladders we are, some-
times descending from thy mountain of holiness even to
the pits of perdition; yet never losing Thee, or being
wholly lost; Thine, whether we acknowledge Thee or
forget Thee; Thy Spirit our helper, as we help, as we
hinder, lapse or rise!
"He out of good can bring
Evil to man, dread battle, tearful woes.
He and no other. Open to man's sight
Were all the chain of things, could he behold
The Godhead ere he steps on earth.”
COMPASSION.
The sight of sin softens and subdues.
so inhuman as to insult the sinful?
And who
Best of men
is he who, tolerant of human infirmity, comprehends
168
TABLE-TALK.
its frailties and forbears the stern rebuke. Never
are the human prerogatives so nobly displayed as when
compassioning the wicked and weak, defending them
against themselves even by kindly clemency and for-
bearance. It takes more than man to treat man justly
and graciously. The greater the sin, by so much
greater the measures of mercy, the tenderness, the long-
suffering, defending the sinner against his sins and
awakening the convictions that bring him to confession
and repentance.
It costs a Christianity of graces, a Redeemer's sacri-
fice, to be truly charitable, humane, and helpful to a
fallen fellow, though he were but a single remove from
one's self in debasement. Every soul appeals to the su-
preme court in the breast for judgment; believing there
is in every heart a better friend than foe, a judge just
as justice itself; an instinct of compassion which com-
mends the offender to mercy; all men feeling the need
of clemency, and plead secretly if not openly for for-
giveness.
6
"Bias, obliged to judge one of his friends who was
to be punished with death, wept before all the Senate
before pronouncing the sentence. Why do you weep,'
said some one, since it depends upon yourself to clear
or condemn the criminal?' 'I weep because Nature
forces me to compassionate the miserable, and the laws
order me to have no regard to the impulses of Nature.””
1
THE LAPSE.
169
SYMPATHY.
Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength,
not my weakness. I fall readily enough without help
from any one. Can you assist me to rise? It may
need all your strength, all mine, and more, the Super-
natural assistance, which is never withheld from any
seeking humbly its succors. And this is what I crave,
most need, the helpful service, the sympathy that re-
vives and consoles. It is seeing, behind all enmities,
the friend there is there, that gives to forgiveness its
divine effect, the loving one better than he loves him-
self even.
Suffering for others is Love's fate,
The insufficient soul's estate,
Vicarious cross, sins unforgiven,
Save by atonement in Love's heaven.
Man being a reality, his wants are therefore real.
His poverty pledges him what he craves, the human
nature seeking succor and sufficiency in the divine ful-
ness. With the uprise of religion in the heart, there
comes every satisfaction to fill the void, charm the soul
from the abyss, and deliver it from its woes. 'Tis the
Godhead at which the soul quarries. Too poor to par-
take of the divine succors at once, man receives by
instalments of benefits. His poverty is capacity for
fulness. Like a babe at the breast, he imbibes accord-
ing to his measure of blessings through the long season
of his immortal infancy.
170
TABLE-TALK.
DECEASE.
Some time that least welcome of friends invades our
dwelling, to assure us how embosomed in divinity are
our human affections and how imperishable. Who
shall speak words more impressive than silence at such
times, or if speaking beside the dear dust, open the
glorious hope of immortality? "I am the resurrection
and the life." Surely the centuries intervening since
these quickening words were pronounced should have
certified to every soul ere this its latent immortality.
Ah! when shall breathing men cease inquiring whether
they breathe or not? "Whoso believes revelation im-
plicitly, without consulting the intellect, is the happiest
of mortals, the nearest to heaven, and at once a native
of both worlds."

V.
IMMORTALITY.
Whatsoever that be within us that feels, thinks, desires, and
animates, is something celestial, divine, and consequently imper-
ishable."
— Aristotle.

BE
I
HOME.
T matters little where our geography falls, since
our planet is our post but for a century at most,
our inn for the night; yet the heart loves to asso-
ciate itself with some spot ancestral and dear, and call
it home.
For home is where heart is,
The heart's where'er we roam;
Home's where our friends are-
The friendless have no home;
Our Edens all unfurnished,
Till into those we come.
The shaft of life is wreathed with the human affec-
tions, as the vine embraces the column and climbs into
the sun's rays while its roots are nourished from the
mould at its base.
Friendship is the soul's heaven. Our desire for fel-
lowship, and the persuasion that departed friends await
us, is assurance against all disappointments meanwhile
of our rejoining them in the new existence. Personally
immortal, man accepts nothing short of an eternity of
fellowships in his illimitable future. He is greater than
his expectations, a spirit incarnate, and is at once the
occupant of two worlds. The Person is immortal.
174
TABLE-TALK.
·
REMINISCENCE.
We are wont to date our existence from our family
registers, and from these our ages. Yet we cannot
remember when we did not remember we were, know
we were before we found ourselves bodily. Our souls
first found us, and we found ourself in them; were born
out of them into consciousness of surrounding things.
Baby new to earth and sky,
Finds itself a shapen I;
Feels itself in all it sees
Loveliest of mysteries.*
"We may be justified in asserting," says Words-
worth, "that the sense of Immortality, if not a coexist-
ent or of twin-birth with Reason, is among the earliest
of her offspring; and we may further assert that, from
these conjoined, and under their continuance, the hu-
man affections are gradually formed and opened out."
PRE-EXISTENCE.
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
* "Every creaturely spirit must have its own body, and cannot be without
it, since the body is that which makes it manifest to itself. It cannot be
said to exist as a creature till in a body, because it can have no sensibility of
itself, nor feel, nor find either that it is but in and by its own body. Its body
is its first knowledge of its something and somewhere.”
Wm. Law.
IMMORTALITY.
175
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home;
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
"Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,
But he beholds the light and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day."
Without perspective the soul tells its history imper-
fectly. As conception precedes birth, life quickens life,
in like manner souls precede their assumption of the
human form. I am before I find myself bodily, and
antedate my sensations life long. I find my past in my
present, and from these forecast my future. I recollect
and remember myself.
OBLIVION.
"If all souls retained, in their descent into bodies,
the memory of those concerns of which they were con-
scious in the heavens, there would not be doubts among
men about immortality. But as all, in descending,
drink of oblivion, some more, others less, on this ac-
176
TABLE-TALK.
count, though truth is not apparent to all men on the
earth, yet all have their opinions about it, because a
defect of memory is the origin of opinion. But those
discern most who have drunk least of oblivion, because
they easily remember what they had before in the
heavens. Memory is a preservation of sensation.
It differs from recollection in that what the soul has
suffered with the body, it now does, without the body
as much as possible, recover or remember. Moreover,
when the soul, after losing the memory of things per-
ceived, brings them back again to itself, then it recol-
lects and remembers."
SLEEP.
Our sleep is a significant symbol of the soul's ante-
cedence. Shall I question that I now am, because I
am unconscious of being myself while I slept, or be-
cause I am conscious of being then unconscious? I
am sure of being one and the same Person I then was,
and thread my identity through my successive yester-
days into the memory out of which my consciousness
was born, nor can I lose myself in the search of my-
self.*
T
At best, our mortality is but a suspended animation,
*"O Lord, my God, am I not I even in my sleep? And yet such a differ
ence there is between myself and myself, and between the instants wherein
go from waking to sleeping and return from sleeping to waking! Is my
reason, then, shut up with my eye? Is it cast into a slumber with the
senses of my body!"
St. Augustine.
IMMORTALITY.
177
the soul meanwhile awaiting its summons to awaken
from its slumbers. Every act of sleep is a metamor-
phosis of bodies and metempsychosis of souls. We
lapse out of the senses into the pre-existent life of
memory through the gate of dreams, memory and fancy
opening their folding-doors into our past and future
periods of existence, the soul freed for the moment
from its dormitory in space and time.
The more of sleep the more of retrospect, the more
of wakefulness the more of prospect. Memory marks
the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.
Before the heavens thou art, and shall survive their
decay. Were man personally finite, he could not con-
ceive of infinity; were he mortal, he could not think
immortality. Whatever had a beginning comes of
necessity to its end, since it has not the principle of
perpetuity inherent in itself. And there is that in man
which cannot think annihilation, but thinks continuance.
All life is eternal; there is no other. Despair snuffs
the sun from the firmament.
"For souls that of His own good life partake
He loves as His own self; dear as His eye
They are to Him. He'll never them forsake.
When they shall die, then God Himself shall die.
They live, they live in blest eternity."
LIFE EVERLASTING.
As, in sailing upon the orb of this planet a voyage
towards the regions where the sun sets conducts grad-
UorM
178
TABLE-TALK.
ually to the quarter where we have been accustomed to
behold it come forth at its rising, and, in like manner, a
voyage towards the east, the birthplace, in our imagina-
tion, of the morning, leads finally to the quarter where
the sun is last seen when he departs from our eyes, so
the contemplative soul, travelling in the direction of
mortality, advances to the country of everlasting life;
and in like manner, may continue to explore these
cheerful tracts till she is brought back, for her advan-
tage and benefit, to the land of transitory things, of
sorrow and of tears."
Heart, my heart, whose pulses' play
Repeats each moment's destiny,
Dost all thy life's terrestrial day
Dial on time my past eternity.

Maoul
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