Fragment of the essay Protoithikologia

Like water, fellowless is the poet: Knowledge mayst gently sit, but canst not act. Vegetal process, that is, natural development; is a means not an end. Likewise true virtue never knows itself; and durst not indue to the form of works, and goodness durst not assume a moral precept - otherwise the persuasion is merely topical. Rather in each of these cases, virtue and goodness proceed respectively from the doing good deeds and exercise of the precept. And thereof long before this crucial enactment of the deed and precept, we hath a view of the Heart in her sincerity, isolated from the name of virtue and goodness, and denied the heat of deeds; charity, and the wisdom of society and of scripture, in the philosophies of Ethic, yet still orderly kept, out of a desire to do good for good's sake, which we call being faithful, or having faith in what is good and true. Itself, the Mind is a Heart; what we commonly call the Heart, is a Heart within a Heart, a Heart within a thinking Heart: the one - an escort - the sympathetic heart, or conscience, a messenger of sentiment. Even the comfort from which virtue is published, although it is a good, is not nevertheless a part of the absolute good, for as gold is made workable, so virtue, inviolate to itself, be fanciful and unpractical, and only by commixtion with some injustice, can be turn'd into social policy, by an intercedence of thoughts or legation. The slightest voice is also the most lissome, the most tensile. Thus in our selves there is an immense resource, character - the mind's voice, the most soft- spoken of all. Our moral should thereof be cuneatic, and inermous or destitute of thorn: judge not the prominence of your virtue by the acute angles it gives to the subject in the mind of your audience, lest the honest man giveth also the base idea of forwardly declaring affections, and always keep virtue and gift in it's infancy, that is, never give it a name, and fit it for protections against reproach of others. Thought is but the female to the Heart: it birtheth good deeds, the heart inciteth them. The Ark, and the burning bush, and the regular Theologian shouldest inspirit and braceth us, that is, fill us with a double- meaning, and urge us towards the contemplation of those senses, that is, the Theologian is a romantic. We art not braisers, nor stewpans, nor even torch - bearers and enunciations of Heaven, but rather an offspring of that fire, and only the like divinity transelementate. The Heart singeth into the bottom of the morning: the Seed is anarthous. 2 And shall this gentle truth, that the springs whence all this flood of Time, and the creatures born of time, flowest, if nature is the store of creatures time is their commission, servest us for nothing more then an Oeconomicke book, for that we art affatuated by the dietetical and capital uses of things, so we employ symbols, as if they were something other then thoughts, and society is exhausted into economy, virtues into values. Yet when we hath a sort of Faith, never canst we do wrong, and we art spared from the very notion of evil; for we art so orderly prompted by our hearts, before committing a notion or duty to actions, before appointment to the name of virtue, we hath a kind of honest purity, and canst no wrong do, canst no wrongs see. If we art truly honest we shall not be able to help ourselves from seeing others acting honestly; for all the world hath, as it where, been thrust from under the glass. Our basest portions canst alone fall into the service of another's will: whatever is Good, that may be called truth or virtue, is secure, safe; that, cannot be given or taken, liest beyond the reach of human sufferance. Likewise we earn nothing in being Good, and cannot praise ourselves for so being- that if the world be the great comedy, it maketh our performances here none the more pleasing to God, whom had expected to see us playing the very parts. I will excuse the sorrows of this world to those whom needs concern with it, and stalk the bees, and behold the Ideal of this World; yet I ought rather to live towards it, and seize upon the thread of a higher education, the hand to firmly grasp belonging unto the unseeable Guide - until a matured insight of disasters becometh tardily an everlasting deliverance from the terror and sorrow belonging to them. Societies, bodies of politic art immature, entomostracan or gilled states of men as the young cicadas art social only in the ground yet as adults art not social. The true and polished man ever is renounced of Society. To hath a family dost no content for him, nor as potter envieth potter 1; he thirsteth for God, he holdest no congress with his brother but in patronage. I will be fatherless as the ape. The man of wisdom lives every day ordinarily, that is, giving no attention to circumstance: the common beetle walkest as many Europes as he visteth our flowerbeds. The child's tears befriendeth more the Earth by hope of rain. We truly enjoy things only by seeing them in a fabric, when the many beams of color, of hue, adhere themselves to an image. And thus the wise find heaven in maize- dust. 3 Ever will bread prove a more universal staple then meat, ever will the daring icaco prove the greater value then the sugar plum and sapodillas and jaboticabas. Man is ever kept in the neuter and teneral, or impersonate, he is shy by his own colors: he is come into this World to give testimony, to enact and not to question, as it were, to illustrate nature. Thus to the engineer the machine itself is diagrammatic: in other words, the artist doeth everything under a "scheme of action" and his self- renunciation to His truth, to the scheme of action, causeth him to believe that he can turn words into things, that virtue is more then a name. Both the intellectual and natural sciences are mere prevenience of this higher aim - to awaken Man's soul to life - and thus the highest sciences, Ethics and the Aesthetic, are narrative: for the each are Practices of ideas, the introduction of ideas, respectively, into social and intellectual life. The Philosophical Act is the extinguishment of Self, that is, of opinion; for, properly speaking, the Philosophical Act is a celebration of Vision: the announcement of Philosophy is not a sort of judgment, for judgment supposeth there is a quality or worth of which to estimate, when rather the World listeneth to itself, and things speak for themselves. To celebrate vision is to "romanticize the world. " Philosophy hath sought Absolutes, to ground and find the "area" of knowledge; why should it not seek Exponents, to romanticize knowledge? Then man will sleep and wake at once [Novalis]: he will walk and cast no shadow, he will be silenced by the images of things, and depiction shall be his reckoning: he will grow inwardly as he groweth outwardly, til' no longer he seeth an evidence of himself in things: for Man belongs to truth, and contains in it, to expose truth is the only way that man can be exposed. The mariner maketh oil out of blubber; he maketh sinew from his mere porpoise- meat. His lesson, perhaps worth 1,000 philosophies, is that there is no knowledge but that will not meet request for, that as oil mayst be taken from blubber, so there be not any natural talent, or knowledge or services whatsoever, but that will not yield gold. Thereof I shall not civilize overmuch in the love of things secluded and out of places, as in a kind of landscape, or bed of flowers, nor affirm such to be only, so to say, birdseed in the eye, spread freshly for an idle thought, nor say that man is but a type warm- blooded, that beauty is but epinastic and a pectin, and as short lived as one or another ephemeropteran. Knowledge should be so total and general. The Earth beareth not a seal. Discern the workings of the Heart, it's cossic notations, it's intellect, howso and what for that it yearneth, and be far and wild like the Dacian: thou forgetest thine poverty, and riches shall become merely dream, marten fur a joking- straw; and fate incuteth no longer it's certificate upon the world. That same stamp you have relieved, blinds Plutus, but he is blind no longer, and all the treasure of the universe is ours. And though I adore the life of my heart, I offer it no prayer; nor will it condescend to feed upon the Indian potato - it cannot be made to mind a scandal. It pronounceth no exact science; but rather an algebra - will not gossip with me, but will only help me to relate, with people. And so I hath an prescience contemporaneous to my indocility, my brutishness, and mine limit; I turn my extremum and boundary into my compass; with wisdom I become a prophet of my own inhibitions to myself. I cometh a' begging to the Gods with hand of sabal- palm; I am a pygmy, I shall be a pygmy tomorrow, I endure a pygmy. All the time I am subdued, and made defeat: but I am born from that sericterium of the Heart, who's threads runneth all across this Universe, and only Triumph I can call my home, my family, my life. None of us poach for the treasure at the seabed, though we live upon the margents of a great ocean of thought. We art ailing lords - hinder'd from using our greatest power, I am denied my inheritance; the strength of justice and communicating I learn do not belong to me: these powers are instrumental, pianistic - they are like an art I have learned to work, but cannot so without my craft- bag, of lores and knowledge, a bark of the tongue, without which, I am unclothed. I fear that I am the Idol that knitteth his channel'd brows; a' top the "Tropic tree, itself a wood" though my Truth miscarryeth naught: tis' but her outbound self, her face that in length of time is colliquated like the frosted icicle, and drops like the tower and proud Orient, of Yesterday. Earth, mine suffering is like unto thee, I suffer your torment with you: what hadst the footpaces of Day and Night, deep like okeanobrutos, left upon your pinaxes? The lemur peaceably feeds, never minding who shaketh the mast above it, on the avocado or papaya which I hath caused to fall, from the tree; and for the eye is an index to the Soul, my Soul is wild like your deserts, for I hath seen your deserts. There is no quaint example of success - for those of us who take pains in maintaining the health of community, and simply for our deeds we expect to reform, we waste today by depending upon the morrow: so we become thieves of our own supererogations, are not diplomatic with the element of Time, which now and again with fresh experience, melts the solid plications of facts. It is difficult to find people, with an terrestrial appreciation of Nature. Those who claim to be intimate with the world commonly praise it like from a' top the helm of their Soul; but who can honor the lion as it feedeth upon him, who can praise the bee when they have been stung- who from the wilderness can admire the wilderness? I stand upon nothing more then a glyph or anlagen, the smoothness of the World is like the smoothness of the fountain, [what is called in one vocabulary ectolecithal egg,] the world ever is introducing itself to us: the World is an infant, Man is but the progress of clay.