On the Seaboard. August Strindberg

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СКАЧАТЬ these moments of devotional exercise in thoughts of his origin and destiny, the commissioner let his mind run over his personal evolution, as far back as he could trace it, just as though to search for his own self, and in the past stages read his probable fate.

      He saw his father, a deceased fortification major of that undecided type of the beginning of the century, mixed as a conglomerate, and cemented of fragments from preceding periods, picked at random after the great eruption at the end of the past century, believing in nothing because he had seen everything perish, everything taken up anew, all forms of state tested, greeted with jubilee at reception, worsted within a few years, brought forth again as new and greeted over again as a universal discovery, he had at last stopped at the existing state as the only palpable, it may have come from a leading will, which was improbable, or from a combination of chances which was tolerably sure, but dangerous to say. Through study at the university his father had come into the pantheism of the young-Hegelians, which was a feint at turning the current which had then reached its height, and individuals had become the only reality and God became the comprehension of the personal in humanity. The living idea about the intimate relation of man to nature, that man himself stood highest in line in the chain of the world's process, characterized an elite corps of personalities, who silently despised the repeated attempts of political visionaries to place themselves above the governing laws of nature, trying in an artificial way to make new laws for the world through philosophical systems and congressional decrees. Unobserved they passed on of no use to either high or low, above they saw mediocrities through natural selection amassing around a mediocre monarch, below they found ignorance, credulity and blindness, while between these two classes the burghers were bent on business interests so positively that those who were not merchants themselves were unable to work together with them. As they were qualified, prudent and trustworthy they were occasionally promoted to positions of influence, but as they could not join with any party and had no desire to make a useless individual opposition and were not numerous enough to form a herd, besides as strong individualists would not follow a bell-cow, they remained pretty quiet carrying their discontent hidden under big crosses and decorations and smiled as augurs when they met at the councilor's table or in the house of noblemen, letting the world pass as it might.

      The father belonged to certainly not a very old noble family, but one which through civil merits in retrieving the mining business and not: through doubtful exploits of war gained by the help of nature's chances or an enemy's false step, had been rewarded by a coat of arms and moderate privileges, such as to wear a nobleman's uniform and unpaid to participate in one-fourth of the ponderous administration of the country. He counted himself therefore a meritorious noble and was conscious of having come from talented ancestors, which acted as a spur down to their now living representative. Property legally acquired through the qualities and labors of his ancestors gave him the opportunity to perfect himself in his calling. He became a prominent topographer, and had participated in the building of Gota canal and in the first railroad constructions. This employment at a whole kingdom, which he had become used to look at from above and to take in at one glance on the map spread over a writing table, gave his mind gradually the habit of seeing everything on a grand scale. There he sat with a rule opening communication lines which would change the whole physiognomy, of the landscape, leveling old cities and creating new, changing the prices of products, seeking for new resources. The maps should change, the old water ways be forgotten and the black straight lines which indicated the new roads would be the determinative. The heights should be just as fertile as the valleys, the combat of the rivers should cease, frontiers between realms and countries should no more be observed.

      There followed a strong feeling of power through this handling of the fates of lands and peoples, and he could not escape gradual seizures of the propensity accompanying power, to overestimate himself. Everything miraged in a bird's-eye-view, countries became maps and human beings tin soldiers, and when the topographer in a few weeks ordered the leveling of a height, which would have needed thousands of years to be denuded by natural agencies, he felt something of the creator in himself. When he ordered tunnels bored, transferred sand ridges to lakes, and filled up marshes, he did not fail to perceive that he had taken in hand a remodeling of the earth ball, throwing the natural geological formations topsy-turvy, and therewith his personal feelings swelled incredibly.

      Hereto was added his position as officer with numerous subordinates, whom he only communicated with as one in authority, and who consequently were considered as service muscles to his big determining brain.

      With a military's physical courage and resolution, the profoundness of a savant, the full deliberation of a thinker, the calm of one financially independent, and the dignity and self-esteem of a man of honor, he exhibited a type of the highest rank, where beauty and prudence combined to produce a well-measured, harmonious personality.

      In this father the son had both a prototype and a teacher, the mother having died early. To spare the son the bitterness of miscalculations, and disapproving the whole current method of education, which with books of tales and terrifying histories, educated the children to be children instead of men, he raised at once the whole curtain of the temple of life and initiated the youth in the difficult art of life; taught him the intimate connection between human beings and the remainder of the creation, where certainly the human being stood highest on his planet, but still continued to remain a part of the creation, able in a measure to modify the action of the forces in nature but nevertheless ruled by them, this was a rational nature worship if nature signifies everything existing, and worshiping is an acknowledgment of the dependency of the existing laws of nature. By this he removed Christianity's mania for greatness of individuals, fear of the unknown, death and God, and created a prudent man, watchful of his actions and personally accountable for his deeds. The regulator of the lower propensities of human beings he found in the organ, which through its perfected form separates the human being from the beasts, the cerebrum. Judgment, founded on liberal knowledge should govern, and when necessary suppress the lower propensities to keep up a higher type. Nourishment and propagation were the lowest impulses, and therefore in common with the plants. The sensibilities, as the animals? lower rudiments of thinking were called, because they were localized in the arteries, spinal cord and other lower organs, must be absolutely subordinate to the cerebrum in a human being of the highest type, and the individuals, who could not regulate their lower impulses but were thinking with their spinal cord, were of the lower form. Therefore the old man warned against believing in youthful enchantment and enthusiasm, which could just as easily lead to crime as to virtue. This, however did not exclude the great passions of universal benefit, which did not belong to the feelings but were powerful utterances of the will toward good. All that youth could produce was completely worthless, for as a rule it lacked originality, being only the pure thoughts of older predecessors which the after-coming youths had taken up as their own and with great gestures would spread abroad. Originality could only be said to develop when the brain had matured, just as true propagation with a following education of the offspring could only take place when man had reached virility and had the ability to provide means for existence and education of the children. A sure sign of the immature brain's inability to judge was the constant Grossenwahn, in which youth and women were living. Youth has its future before it, as is habitually said, but that assertion is shattered because manhood shows a less per cent, of mortality than youth, and the unwitty reply that if youth is a fault it passes away in time, does not overturn the precept, that youth is a present defect, an imperfection, thus a fault, which is admitted by the acknowledgment that it can pass away, for that which never existed cannot pass away. All youthful attacks on the existing are hysterical spells of the inability of the weak to bear pressure, an evidence of the same lack of prudence as in the hornet when attacking a human being to its own sure destruction. As a good illustration of the want of judgment and syllogism in the youths he brought forth the book Robinson Crusoe, which was written for the plain purpose of showing the inferiority of a life under natural conditions and isolation, and yet for a century it had regularly been misunderstood by youths as a psalm to savage life while the book represented it as a punishment for the foolish youth who abused culture's wealth like a savage. This little trait at the same time showed of how much lower ontological form youth was, betraying it in his sympathy for Indians and other rudimentary laggers-behind, just СКАЧАТЬ