82 EMERSON’S ESSAYS

him: but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one part, they attack him in another more vital part. If he has escaped them in form, and in the appearance, it is because he has resisted his life, and fled from him- self, and the retribution is so much death. So signal is the failure of all attempts to make this separa- tion of the good from the tax, that the experiment would not be tried,-—since to try it is to be mad,- but for the circumstance, that when the disease began in the will, of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to see the sen- sual allurement of an object, and not see the sen- sual hurt; he sees the mermaid’s head, but not the dragon’s tail; and thinks he can cut off that which he would have, from that which he would not have. “How secret art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied Providence certain penal blind- nesses upon such as have unbridled desires!“

The human soul is true to these facts in the paint- ing of fable, of history, of law, of proverbs, of con- versation. It finds a tongue in literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called ]upiter, Supreme Mind; but having traditionally ascribed to him many base ac- tions, they involuntarily made amends to reason, by tying up the hands of so bad a god. He is made as helpless as a king of England. Prometheus knows one secret which Iove must bargain for; Minerva another. He cannot get his own thunder; Minerva keeps the key of them.

’ St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I.