of history is in one man, it is all
to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between
the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is
drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is
yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise
of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal
forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages
explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one
more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in
his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men
have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every
revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same
thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform
was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again
it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond
to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as we read, must
become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner;
must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we
shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as
much an illustration of the mind's powers and depravations as what has
befallen us. Each new law and political movement has meaning for you.
Stand before each of its tablets and say, 'Under this mask did my
Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the defect of our too great
nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective; and
as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the waterpot lose their
meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices
without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and
Catiline.

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and
things. Human life, as containing this, is mysterious and inviolable,
and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence
their ultimate reason; all express more or less distinctly some command
of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also holds of the soul,
covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to
it with swords and laws and wide and complex combinations. The obscure
consciousness of this fact is the light of all our day, the claim of
claims; the plea for education, for j