A certain partiality, a
headiness, and loss of balance, is the tax which all action must pay.
Act, if you like,--but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too
strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the
victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces
them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment,
becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in
some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form and
lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker
has established his monastery and his dance; and, although each prates
of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual.
But where are his new things of today? In actions of enthusiasm, this
drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher
aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of
cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the
speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and
sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.
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