ORIGINALITY.


A great contemporary writer, so I am told, regards originality as much
rarer than is commonly supposed. But, on the contrary, is it not far
more frequent than is commonly supposed? For one should not identify
originality with mere primacy of conception or utterance, as if a
thought could be original but once. In truth, it may be so thousands or
millions of times; nay, from the beginning to the end of man's times
upon the earth, the same thoughts may continue rising from the same
fountains in his spirit. Of the central or stem thoughts of
consciousness, of the imperial presiding imaginations, this is actually
true. Ceaseless re-origination is the method of Nature. This alone
keeps history alive. For if every Mohammedan were but a passive
appendage to the dead Mohammed, if every disciple were but a copy in
plaster of his teacher, and if history were accordingly living and
original only in such degree as it is an unprecedented invention, the
laws of decay should at once be made welcome to the world.

The fact is otherwise. As new growths upon the oldest cedar or baobab
do not merely spin themselves out of the wood already formed,--as they
thrive and constitute themselves only by original conversation with
sun, earth, and air,--that is, in the same way with any seed or
sapling,--so generations of Moslems, Parsees, or Calvinists, while
obeying the structural law of their system, yet quaff from the mystical
fountains of pure Life the sustenance by which they live. Merely out
of itself the tree can give nothing,--literally, nothing. True, if cut
down, it may, under favorable circumstances, continue for a time to
feed the growing shoots out of its own decay. Yet not even at the cost
of decay and speedy exhaustion could the old trunk accomplish this