Representative Men | Page 3

he is, as Linnaeus, of plants; Huber, of bees; Fries, of
lichens; Van Mons, of pears; Dalton, of atomic forms; Euclid, of lines; Newton, of
fluxions.
A man is a center for nature, running out threads of relation through everything, fluid and
solid, material and elemental. The earth rolls; every clod and stone comes to the meridian;
so every organ, function, acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its relation to the brain. It waits
long, but its turn comes. Each plant has its parasite, and each created thing its lover and
poet. Justice has already been done to steam, to iron, to wood, to coal, to loadstone, to
iodine, to corn, and cotton; but how few materials are yet used by our arts! The mass of
creatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant. It would seem as if each waited, like
the enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined human deliverer. Each must be
disenchanted, and walk forth to the day in human shape. In the history of discovery, the
ripe and latent truth seems to have fashioned a brain for itself. A magnet must be made
man, in some Gilbert, or Swedenborg, or Oersted, before the general mind can come to
entertain its powers.
If we limit ourselves to the first advantages;--a sober grace adheres to the mineral and
botanic kingdoms, which, in the highest moments, comes up as the charm of nature,--the
glitter of the spar, the sureness of affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness, heat
and cold, hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid, and gas, circle us round in a
wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable quarrel, beguile the day of life. The eye
repeats every day the finest eulogy on things--"He saw that they were good." We know
where to find them; and these performers are relished all the more, after a little
experience of the pretending races. We are entitled, also, to higher advantages.
Something is wanting to science, until it has been humanized. The table of logarithms is
one thing, and its vital play, in botany, music, optics, and architecture, another. There are
advancements to numbers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little suspected at first,
when, by union with intellect and will, they ascend into the life, and re-appear in
conversation, character and politics.
But this comes later. We speak now only of our acquaintance with them in their own
sphere, and the way in which they seem to fascinate and draw to them some genius who
occupies himself with one thing, all his life long. The possibility of interpretation lies in
the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side;
has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere, where it
plays a part as indestructible as any other. And to these, their ends, all things continually
ascend. The gases gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant, and
grows; arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives at the man, and thinks. But also the
constituency determines the vote of the representative. He is not only representative, but
participant. Like can only be known by like. The reason why he knows about them is,

that he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part of that thing.
Animated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate zinc, of zinc. Their quality makes
this career; and he can variously publish their virtues, because they compose him. Man,
made of the dust of the world, does not forget his origin; and all that is yet inanimate will
one day speak and reason. Unpublished nature will have its whole secret told. Shall we
say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innumerable Werners, Von Buchs, and
Beaumonts; and the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solution I know not what
Berzeliuses and Davys?
Thus, we sit by the fire, and take hold on the poles of the earth. This quasi omnipresence
supplies the imbecility of our condition. In one of those celestial days, when heaven and
earth meet and adorn each other, it seems a poverty that we can only spend it once; we
wish for a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its immense beauty
in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good faith, we are multiplied by our
proxies. How easily we adopt their labors! Every ship that comes to America got its chart
from Columbus. Every novel is debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a
foreplane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all around with a zodiac
of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our
sky. Engineer, broker, jurist, physician, moralist,