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- 7414
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
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- start_line
- 7350
- text
- I.
In those Hyperborean regions, to which enthusiastic Truth, and
Earnestness, and Independence, will invariably lead a mind fitted by
nature for profound and fearless thought, all objects are seen in a
dubious, uncertain, and refracting light. Viewed through that rarefied
atmosphere the most immemorially admitted maxims of men begin to slide
and fluctuate, and finally become wholly inverted; the very heavens
themselves being not innocent of producing this confounding effect,
since it is mostly in the heavens themselves that these wonderful
mirages are exhibited.
But the example of many minds forever lost, like undiscoverable Arctic
explorers, amid those treacherous regions, warns us entirely away from
them; and we learn that it is not for man to follow the trail of truth
too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of
his mind; for arrived at the Pole, to whose barrenness only it points,
there, the needle indifferently respects all points of the horizon
alike.
But even the less distant regions of thought are not without their
singular introversions. Hardly any sincere man of ordinary reflective
powers, and accustomed to exercise them at all, but must have been
independently struck by the thought, that, after all, what is so
enthusiastically applauded as the march of mind,--meaning the inroads of
Truth into Error--which has ever been regarded by hopeful persons as the
one fundamental thing most earnestly to be prayed for as the greatest
possible Catholic blessing to the world;--almost every thinking man must
have been some time or other struck with the idea, that, in certain
respects, a tremendous mistake may be lurking here, since all the world
does never gregariously advance to Truth, but only here and there some
of its individuals do; and by advancing, leave the rest behind; cutting
themselves forever adrift from their sympathy, and making themselves
always liable to be regarded with distrust, dislike, and often,
downright--though, ofttimes, concealed--fear and hate. What wonder,
then, that those advanced minds, which in spite of advance, happen still
to remain, for the time, ill-regulated, should now and then be goaded
into turning round in acts of wanton aggression upon sentiments and
opinions now forever left in their rear. Certain it is, that in their
earlier stages of advance, especially in youthful minds, as yet
untranquilized by long habituation to the world as it inevitably and
eternally is; this aggressiveness is almost invariably manifested, and
as invariably afterward deplored by themselves.
That amazing shock of practical truth, which in the compass of a very
few days and hours had not so much advanced, as magically transplanted
the youthful mind of Pierre far beyond all common discernments; it had
not been entirely unattended by the lamentable rearward aggressiveness
we have endeavored to portray above. Yielding to that unwarrantable
mood, he had invaded the profound midnight slumbers of the Reverend Mr.
Falsgrave, and most discourteously made war upon that really amiable and
estimable person. But as through the strange force of circumstances his
advance in insight had been so surprisingly rapid, so also was now his
advance in some sort of wisdom, in charitableness; and his concluding
words to Mr. Falsgrave, sufficiently evinced that already, ere quitting
that gentleman's study, he had begun to repent his ever entering it on
such a mission.
And as he now walked on in the profound meditations induced by the hour;
and as all that was in him stirred to and fro, intensely agitated by the
ever-creative fire of enthusiastic earnestness, he became fully alive to
many palliating considerations, which had they previously occurred to
him would have peremptorily forbidden his impulsive intrusion upon the
respectable clergyman.
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