I acknowledge no limit, set up by man's opinion, as to the capacities
of man. "Care is taken," I see it, "that the trees grow not up into
heaven," but, to me it seems, the more vigorously they aspire the
better. Only let it be a vigorous, not a partial or sickly aspiration.
Let not the tree forget its root.
So long as the child insists on knowing where its dead parent is, so
long as bright eyes weep at mysterious pressures, too heavy for the
life, so long as that impulse is constantly arising which made the Roman
emperor address his soul in a strain of such touching softness,
vanishing from the thought, as the column of smoke from the eye, I know
of no inquiry which the impulse of man suggests that is forbidden to the
resolution of man to pursue. In every inquiry, unless sustained by a
pure and reverent spirit, he gropes in the dark, or falls headlong.
_Self-Poise_. All this may be very true, but what is the use of all this
straining? Far-sought is dear-bought. When we know that all is in each,
and that the ordinary contains the extraordinary, why should we play the
baby, and insist upon having the moon for a toy when a tin dish will do
as well. Our deep ignorance is a chasm that we can only fill up by
degrees, but the commonest rubbish will help us as well as shred silk.
The God Brahma, while on earth, was set to fill up a valley, but he had
only a basket given him in which to fetch earth for this purpose; so is
it with us all. No leaps, no starts will avail us, by patient
crystallization alone the equal temper of wisdom is attainable.
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