Sunday, February 12, 2006
Emerson On Evolution:
"If Fate follows and limits Power,
Power attends and antagonizes Fate.
We must respect Fate as natural history,
but there is more than natural history.
For who and what is this criticism that pries
into the matter? Man is not order of nature,
sack and sack, belly and members, link in a chain,
nor any ignominious baggage; but a stupendous
antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the
Universe. He betrays his relation to what is below
him,-thick skulled, small brained, fishy, quadrumanous,
quadruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into biped,-
and has paid for the new powers by loss of some of the
old ones. But the lightning which explodes and fashions
planets, maker of planets and suns,is in him."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson,Fate-
The Conduct of Life 1860
"If Fate follows and limits Power,
Power attends and antagonizes Fate.
We must respect Fate as natural history,
but there is more than natural history.
For who and what is this criticism that pries
into the matter? Man is not order of nature,
sack and sack, belly and members, link in a chain,
nor any ignominious baggage; but a stupendous
antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the
Universe. He betrays his relation to what is below
him,-thick skulled, small brained, fishy, quadrumanous,
quadruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into biped,-
and has paid for the new powers by loss of some of the
old ones. But the lightning which explodes and fashions
planets, maker of planets and suns,is in him."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson,Fate-
The Conduct of Life 1860
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