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SELF-RELIANCE

Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother,
because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites
fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's
God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it prove a
mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a
Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its
classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In
proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the
number of the objects it touches and brings within reach
of the pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this
apparent in creeds and churches, which are also
classifications of some powerful mind acting on the
elemental thought of duty, and man's relation to the
Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism.
The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every
thing to the new terminology, as a girl who has just
learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons
thereby. It will happen for a time, that the pupil will find
his intellectual power has grown by the study of his
master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the
classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a
speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the
system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the
walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to
them hung on the arch their master built. They cannot
imagine how you aliens have any right to see, — how you
can see; 'It must be somehow that you stole the light from
us.' They do not yet perceive, that light, unsystematic,
indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs.
Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are
honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will
be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and
vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful,
million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe
as on the first morning.

2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of
Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains
its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made

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