and position vanish, when the individuals are seen in the duration
which is necessary to complete the career of each; even more swiftly
the seeming injustice disappears, when we ascend to the central identity
of all the individuals, and know that they are made of the same
substance which ordaineth and doeth.

The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The
qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and
pass away; the qualities remain on another brow. No experience is more
familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone; the world is not
therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems
turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred,
and you may still read them transferred to the walls of the world. For
a time, our teachers serve us personally, as metres or milestones of
progress. Once they were angels of knowledge, and their figures touched
the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture, and limits; and
they yielded their places to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names
remain so high, that we have not been able to read them nearer, and
age and comparison have not robbed them of a ray. But, at last, we
shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall content ourselves
with their social and delegated quality. All that respects the
individual is temporary and prospective, like the individual himself,
who is ascending out of his limits, into a catholic existence. We have
never come at the true and best benefit of any genius, so long as we
believe him an original force. In the moment when he ceases to help
us as a cause, he begins to help us move as an effect. Then he appears
as an exponent of a vaster mind and will. The opaque self becomes
transparent with the light of the First Cause.

Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say, great