The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 30, April, 1860. Various
character, his nationality, his practicality, upon every series of circumstances by which he was surrounded: he sailed up the Nile as if it were the Mississippi; although a well-enough-informed man, he practically ignored the importance of any city anterior to the Plymouth Settlement, or at least to London, which had the honor of sending colonists to New England; and he would have discussed American politics in the heart of Africa, had not my ignorance upon the topic generally excluded it from our conversation. He had what is most wrongly termed an exceedingly practical mind,—that is, not one that appreciates the practical existence and value of thought as such, considering that a praxis, but a mind that denied the existence of a thought until it had become realized in visible action.
"'The end of a man is an action, and not a thought, though it be the noblest,' as Carlyle has well written," he triumphantly quoted to me, as, leaning over the little railing of the yacht, watching, at least I was, the smooth, green water gliding under the clean-cutting keel, we had been talking earnestly for some time. "A thought has value only as it is a potential action; if the action be abortive, the thought is as useless as a crank that fails to move an engine-wheel."
"Then, if action is the wheel, and thought only the crank, what does the body of your engine represent? For what purpose are your wheels turning? For the sake of merely moving?"
"No," said he, "moving to promote another action, and that another,—and–so on ad infinitum."
"Then you leave out of your scheme a real engine, with a journey to accomplish, and an end to arrive at; for so wheels would only move wheels, and there would be an endless chain of machinery, with no plan, no object for its existence. Does not the very necessity we feel of having a reason for the existence, the operation of anything, a large plan in which to gather up all ravelled threads of various objects, proclaim thought as the final end, the real thing, of which action, more especially human action, is but the inadequate visible expression? What kinds of action does Carlyle mean, that are to be the wheels for our obedient thoughts to set in motion? Hand, arm, leg, foot action? These are all our operative machinery. Does he mean that our 'noblest thought' is to be chained as a galley-slave to these, to give them means for working a channel through which motive power may be poured in upon them? Are we to think that our fingers and feet may move and so we live, or they to run for our thought, and we live to think?"
"Supposing we are," said Herndon, "what practical good results from knowing it? Action for action's sake, or for thinking's sake, is still action, and all that we have to look out for. What business have the brakemen at the wheels with the destiny of the train? Their business is simply to lock and unlock the wheels; so that their end is in the wheels, and not in the train."
"A somewhat dreary end," I said, half to myself. "The whole world, then, must content itself with spinning one blind action out of another; which means that we must continually alter or displace something, merely to be able to displace and alter something else."
"On the contrary, we exchange vague, speculative mystifications for definite, tangible fact. In America we have too much reality, too many iron and steam facts, to waste much time over mere thinking. That, Sir, does for a sleepy old country, begging your pardon, like yours; but for one that has the world's destiny in its hands,—that is laying iron foot-paths from the Atlantic to the Pacific for future civilization to take an evening stroll along to see the sun set,—that is converting black wool into white cotton, to clothe the inhabitants of Borrioboolagha,—that is trading, farming, electing, governing, fighting, annexing, destroying, building, puffing, blowing, steaming, racing, as our young two-hundred-year-old is,—we must work, we must act, and think afterwards. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might."
"And what," I said, "when hand-and-foot-action shall have ceased? will you then allow some play for thought-action?"
"We have no time to think of that," he returned, walking away, and thus stopping our conversation.
The man was consistent in his theory, at least. Having exalted physical motion (or action) to the place he did, he refused to see that the action he prized was more valuable through the thought it developed; consequently he reduced all actions to the same level, and prided himself upon stripping a deed of all its marvellousness or majesty. He did uncommon things in such a matter-of-fact way that he made them common by the performance. The faint spiritual double which I found lurking behind his steel and iron he either solidified with his metallic touch or pertinaciously denied its existence.
"Plato was a fool," he said, "to talk of an ideal table; for, supposing he could see it, and prove its existence, what good could it do? You can neither eat off it, nor iron on it, nor do anything else with it; so, for all practical purposes, a pine table serves perfectly well without hunting after the ideal. I want something that I can go up to, and know it is there by seeing and touching."
"But," said I, "does not that very susceptibility to bodily contact remove the table to an indefinite distance from you? If we can see and handle a thing, and yet not be able to hold that subtile property of generic existence, by which, one table being made, an infinite class is created, so real that tables may actually be modelled on it, and yet so indefinite that you cannot set your hand on any table or collection of tables and say, 'It is here,'—if we can be absolutely conscious that we see the table, and yet have no idea how its image reflected on our retina can produce that absolute consciousness, does not the table grow dim and misty, and slip far away out of reach, of apprehension, much more of comprehension?"
"Stuff!" cried my companion. "If your metaphysics lead to proving that a board that I am touching with my hand is not there, I'll say, as I have already said, 'Throw (meta)physics to the dogs! I'll none of it!' A fine preparation for living in a material world, where we have to live in matter, by matter, and for matter, to wind one's self up in a snarl that puts matter out of reach, and leaves us with nothing to live in, or by, or for! Now you, for instance, are not content with this poor old Nile as it stands, but must go fussing and wondering and mystifying about it till you have positively nothing of a river left. I look at the water, the banks, the trees growing on them, the islands in which we get occasionally entangled: here, at least, I have a real, substantial river,—not equal for navigation to the Ohio or Mississippi, but still very fair.—Confound these flies!" he added, parenthetically, making a vigorous plunge at a dark cloud of the little pests that were closing down upon us.
"Then you see nothing strange and solemn in this wonderful stream? nothing in the weird civilization crouching at the feet, vainly looking to the head of its master hidden in the clouds? nothing in the echoing footsteps of nations passing down its banks to their destiny? nothing in the solemn, unbroken silence brooding over the fountain whence sprang this marvellous river, to bear precious gifts to thousands and millions, and again retreat unknown? Is there no mystery in unsolved questions, no wonder in miracles, no awe in inapproachability?"
"I see," said he, steadily, "that a river of some thousand miles long has run through a country peopled by contented, or ignorant, or barbarous people, none of whom, of course, would take the slightest interest in tracing the river; that the dangers that have guarded the marvellous secret, as you call it, are not intrinsic to the secret itself, but are purely accidental and contingent There is no more reason why the source of the Nile should not be found than that of the Connecticut; so I do not see that it is really at all inapproachable or awful."
"What in the world, Herndon," cried I, in desperation, "what in the name of common sense ever induced you to set out on this expedition? What do you want to discover the source of the Nile for?"
He answered with the ready air of one who has long ago made up his mind confidently on the subject he is going to speak about.
"It has long been evident to me, that civilization, flowing in a return current from America, must penetrate into Africa, and turn its immense natural advantages to such account, that it shall become the seat of the most flourishing and important empires of the earth. These, however, should be consolidated, and not split up into multitudinous missionary stations. If a stream of immigration could be started from the eastern side, up the Nile for instance, penetrating to the interior, it might meet the increased tide of a kindred nature from the west, and uniting somewhere in the middle of Soudan, the central point of action, the capital city could be founded there, as a heart for the country,