Divine Library is a free online public library that includes free eBook downloads and free audio books.
We work with New Thought Seekers and Sharers around the world
insuring that all New Thought Texts in the Public Domain
are available for you to read on the web for free, forever!
Navigate through this book by clicking Next Page or Previous
Page below the text of the page & jump directly to chapters using the chapter numbers above the text.
The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do. This is the moral of the Plutarchs, the Cudworths, the Tennemanns, who give us the story of men or of opinions. Any history of philosophy fortifies my faith, by showing me that what high dogmas I had supposed were the rare and late fruit of a cumulative culture, and only now possible to some recent Kant or Fichte, --- were the prompt improvisations of the earliest inquirers; of Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Xenophanes. In view of these students, the soul seems to whisper, There is a better way than this indolent learning of another. Leave me alone; do not teach me out of Leibnitz or Schelling, and I shall find it all out myself.'
Still more do we owe to biography the fortification of our hope. If you would know the power of character, see how much you would impoverish the world if you could take clean out of history the lives of Milton, Shakspeare, and Plato, --- these three, and cause them not to be. See you not how much less the power of man would be? I console myself in the poverty of my thoughts, in the paucity of great men, in the malignity and dulness of the nations, by falling back on these sublime recollections, and seeing what the prolific soul could beget on actual nature; --- seeing that Plato was,
