Essays (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I HY..U, ]f: V ESSAY L HISTORY. There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes ? forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact, all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give ' power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand -; (.i.I, V I. M. ...;" foro-sta is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gad, s v ' Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. ' Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world. This human mind wrote history, and this must read it The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation be- tween the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of mi...