Representative Men 7 Lects Author:Ralph Waldo Emerson General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1850 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: NEW READINGS. The publication in Mr. Bonn's serial " Library," of the excellent translations of Plato, which we esteem one of the chief benefits the cheap press has yielded, give' us an occasion to take hastily a few more notes of the elevation and bearings of this fixed star, or to add a bulletin, like the journals, of Plato at the latest dates, Modern science by the extent of its generalization has learned to indemnify the student of man for the defects of individuals by tracing growth and ascent in races; and by the simple expedient of lighting up the vast background, generates a feeling of complacency and hope. The human being has the saurian and the plant in his rear. His arts and sciences, the easy issue of his brain, look glorious when prospec- tively beheld from the distant brain of ox, crocodile, and fish. It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when in five or six millenniums she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was nowise discontented with the results. These samples attested the virtue of the tree. These were a clear amelioration of trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for further proceeding. With this artist time and space are cheap, and she is insensible to what you say of tedious preparation. She waited tranquilly the flowingperiods of paleontology for the hour to be struck when man should arrive. Then periods must pass before the motion of the earth can be suspected; then before the map of the instincts and the cultivable powers can be drawn. But as of races, so the succession of individual men is fatal and beautiful, a...« less