Essays, First Series | Page 5

of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect
themselves. I have no expectation that any man will read history aright
who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names
have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.
The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state
of society or mode of action in history to which there is not somewhat
corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner to
abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he
can live all history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and
not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is
greater than all the geography and all the government of the world; he
must transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read,
from Rome and Athens and London, to himself, and not deny his
conviction that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have any thing
to say to him he will try the case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He
must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret
sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the
purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal
narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid
angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a
fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing
already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in
Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact
was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an
immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same way.
"What is history," said Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?" This life
of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War,
Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flowers
and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of
them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the

Islands, --the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in
my own mind.
We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our
private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes
subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,--must go over the
whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not
know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for
manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for itself,
by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it will
demand and find compensation for that loss, by doing the work itself.
Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had long been
known. The better for him.
History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts
indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see
the necessary reason of every fact,--see how it could and must be. So
stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke,
before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More,
of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson; before a French Reign of Terror,
and a Salem hanging of witches; before a fanatic Revival and the
Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that we
under like influence should be alike affected, and should achieve the
like; and we aim to master intellectually the steps and reach the same
height or the same degradation that our fellow, our proxy has done.
All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the
excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,--is
the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then,
and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and
measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see
the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself.
When he has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made
by such a person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which
he himself should also have worked, the problem is solved; his thought
lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs,

passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the
mind, or are now.