爾夫·沃爾多·愛默生/Ralph Waldo Emerson
爾夫·沃爾多·愛默生（1803—1882），美國思想家、詩人和散文家。生於波士頓牧師家庭，畢業於波士頓à-丁學校和哈佛大學。21歲時成為神職人員，不久便對基督教產生懷疑，1832年辭職遠遊，遍訪歐洲文化名人。曾經深入研究過荷馬、柏拉圖、但丁、蒙田和莎士比亞。代表作有《論自然》、《美國學者》、《神學院致辭》、《散文選》和《詩集》等。
Life will be imaged,but cannot be divided nor doubled.Any invasion of its unity would be chaos.The soul is not twin-born,but the only beg otten,and though revealing itself as child in time,child in appearance,is of a fatal and universal power,admitting no co-life.Every day,ev ery act betrays the ill-concealed deity.We believe in ourselves,as we do not believe in others.We permit all things to ourselves,and that wh ich we call sin in others,is experiment for us.It is an instance of ou r faith in ourselves,that men never speak of crime as lightly as they t hink,or,every man thinks a latitude safe for himself,which is nowise to be indulged to another.
The act looks very differently on the inside,and on the outside;in its quality,and its consequences.Murder in the murderer is no such rui nous thought as poets and romancers will have it;it does not unsettle h im,or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles:it is an act quit e easy to be contemplated,but in its sequel,it turns out to be a horri ble jangle and confounding all relations.Especially the crimes that spr ing from love,seem right and fair from the actor's point of view,but,when acted,are found destructive of society.No man at last believes th at he can be lost,nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon.Because the intellect qualifies in our own case the moral judgments.F or there is no crime to the intellect.That is antinomian or hypernomian,and judges law as well as fact.