Page:Essays (1841).djvu/42

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ESSAYS 1

and inorganic being. In the age of the Cæsars, out from the Forurn at Rome proceeded the great highways north, south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia, Spain and Britain, pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were, highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. All his faculties refer to natures out of him. All his faculties predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose a medium like air. Insulate and you destroy him. He cannot live without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he would beat the air and appear stupid. Transport him to large countries, dense pop ulation, complex interests, and antagonist power, and you shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded, that is, by such a profile and outline, is not the vir tual Napoleon. This is but Talbot's shadow ;


His substance is not here:
For what you see is but the smallest part,
And least proportion of humanity;
But were the whole frame here,
It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch,
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it.

Henry VI.


Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. Newton and Laplace need myriads of ages and thick-