The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Natural history of intellect, and other papers [Vol. 12]

Page 312, note 1. Here follows a paragraph, telling with what eagerness the new generation studies the history of freedom in civil, religious and philosophic matters, and also the rude poetry of antiquity; then how it "celebrates its wants, achievements and hopes." "The time is marked by the multitude of writers. Soldiers, sailors, servants, nobles, princes, women, write books. The progress of trade and the facilities for locomotion have made the world nomadic again. … All

facts are exposed. Let there be no ghost-stories more. … Let us have charts true and gazetteers correct. We will know where Babylon stood, and settle the topography of the Roman Forum. We will know whatever is to be known of Australasia, of Japan, of Persia, of Egypt, of Timbuctoo, of Palestine. …

"Christendom has become a great reading-room. … The age is well-bred, knows the world, has no nonsense, and herein is well distinguished from the learned ages that preceded ours. [He alludes to the superstitions that filled the heads of the English and European scholars for the half-millennium that preceded the eighteenth century.] The best heads of this time build or occupy such card-house theories of religion, politics and natural science as a clever boy now would blow away. What stuff in Kepler, in Cardan, in Lord Bacon. Montaigne with all his French wit and downright sense is little better; a sophomore would wind him round his finger. Some of the Medical Remains of Lord Bacon in the book for his own use, 'Of the Prolongation of Life,' will move a smile in the unpoetical practitioners of the Medical College. [He then gives amusing citations from Bacon and Cardan and odd anecdotes from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.]

"All this sky-full of cobwebs is now forever swept clean away. Another race is born. Humboldt and Herschel, Davy and Arago, Malthus and Benham have arrived. If Robert Burton should be quoted to represent the army of scholars who have furnished a contribution to his moody pages, Horace Walpole, whose letters circulate in the libraries, might be taken with some fitness to represent the spirit of much recent literature. He has taste, common sense, love of facts, impatience of humbug, love of history, love of splendor, love of justice, and the sentiment of honor among gentlemen: but no life

whatever of the higher faculties, no faith, no hope, no aspiration, no question concerning the secret of Nature.

"The favorable side of this research and love of facts is the bold and systematic criticism which has appeared in every department of literature. From Wolff's attack upon the authenticity of the Homeric Poems dates a new impulse on learning. … Niebuhr has sifted Roman history by the like methods. Heeren has made good essays towards ascertaining the necessary facts in the Grecian, Persian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Ethiopic, Carthaginian nations. English history has been analyzed by Turner, Hallam, Brodie, Lingard, Palgrave. Goethe has made the circuit of human knowledge, as Lord Bacon did before him, writing True or False on every article. Bentham has attempted the same scrutiny in reference to Civil Law. Pestalozzi, out of a deep love, undertook the reform of education. The ambition of Coleridge in England embraced the whole problem of Philosophy; to find, that is, a foundation in thought for everything that existed in fact. The German philosophers Schelling, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, have applied their analysis to Nature and thought with an antique boldness. There can be no honest inquiry which is not better than acquiescence. …

"This skeptical activity, at first directed on circumstances and historical views deemed of great importance, soon penetrated deeper than Rome or Egypt, than history or institutions or the vocabulary of metaphysics, namely, into the thinker himself and into every function he exercises."

From this point on, the paper in the Dial is like that here printed, except that Mr. Emerson's corrections, pencilled on the margin, have been adopted here in the text, as well as in the omitted passages given above.