TEXT
There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their
authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is
habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains
us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For
this reason, the argument which is always forthcoming to silence those
who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely, the appeal to
experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the
objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope. We grant that
human life is mean; but how did we find out that it was mean? What is
the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is
the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine inuendo by which
the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the natural
history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving behind
what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics
worthless? The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the
chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always
remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is
a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we
know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that
somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am
constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than
the will I call mine.
Essays: First Series -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
from OED NARP Home Page
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