On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History | Page 6

still to inquire, Whence came that
scientific certainty, the parent of such a bewildered heap of allegories,
errors and confusions? How was it, what was it?
Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend "explaining," in this place,
or in any place, such a phenomenon as that far-distant distracted cloudy
imbroglio of Paganism,--more like a cloud-field than a distant continent
of firm land and facts! It is no longer a reality, yet it was one. We ought
to understand that this seeming cloud-field was once a reality; that not
poetic allegory, least of all that dupery and deception was the origin of
it. Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life
on allegories: men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have
had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks. Let us try if,
leaving out both the quack theory and the allegory one, and listening
with affectionate attention to that far-off confused rumor of the Pagan
ages, we cannot ascertain so much as this at least, That there was a kind
of fact at the heart of them; that they too were not mendacious and
distracted, but in their own poor way true and sane!
You remember that fancy of Plato's, of a man who had grown to
maturity in some dark distance, and was brought on a sudden into the
upper air to see the sun rise. What would his wonder be, his rapt
astonishment at the sight we daily witness with indifference! With the
free open sense of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole
heart would be kindled by that sight, he would discern it well to be
Godlike, his soul would fall down in worship before it. Now, just such
a childlike greatness was in the primitive nations. The first Pagan
Thinker among rude men, the first man that began to think, was
precisely this child-man of Plato's. Simple, open as a child, yet with the
depth and strength of a man. Nature had as yet no name to him; he had

not yet united under a name the infinite variety of sights, sounds,
shapes and motions, which we now collectively name Universe, Nature,
or the like,--and so with a name dismiss it from us. To the wild
deep-hearted man all was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas;
it stood naked, flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable.
Nature was to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is,
preternatural. This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the
mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;--that great deep sea of azure
that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud
fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain; what
is it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at
all. It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty; it is by
our superior levity, our inattention, our want of insight. It is by not
thinking that we cease to wonder at it. Hardened round us, encasing
wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays,
mere words. We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity,"
and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and
silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?
Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide
from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can
never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.
This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle;
wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.
That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent,
never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like
an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim
like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is
forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,--for we have
no word to speak about it. This Universe, ah me--what could the wild
man know of it; what can we yet know? That it is a Force, and
thousand-fold Complexity of Forces; a Force which is not we. That is
all; it is not we, it is altogether different from us. Force, Force,
everywhere Force; we ourselves a mysterious Force in the centre of that.
"There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it; how else
could it rot?" Nay surely, to the Atheistic Thinker, if such a one were
possible, it must be a miracle too, this huge illimitable whirlwind of

Force, which envelops us