Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how; Instruct them how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells.

Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our minds impress; That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness.

God knows, I’m no the thing I should be, Nor am I even the thing I could be.

Oh wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us,

This life’s dim windows of the soul Distorts the heavens from pole to pole And leads you to believe a lie When you see with, not through, the eye. 2

God Appears and God is Light To those poor Souls who dwell in Night, But does a Human Form Display To those who Dwell in Realms of day.

He who doubts from what he sees Will ne’er believe, do what you please. If the sun and moon should doubt They’d immediately go out.

Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live.

I am the Spirit that always denies! 11

Two souls alas! dwell in my breast.

And here, poor fool! with all my lore I stand! no wiser than before. 10

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds; And as the mind is pitch’d the ear is pleas’d With melting airs or martial, brisk, or grave: Some chord in unison with what we hear Is touch’d within us, and the heart replies.

Absence of occupation is not rest, A mind quite vacant is a mind distress’d.

They please, are pleas’d, they give to get esteem, Till, seeming blest, they grow to what they seem. 2

How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consign’d, Our own felicity we make or find.

Who has not the spirit of his age, Of his age has all the unhappiness. 12

Awake, my St. John! 4 leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of kings. Let us, since life can little more supply Than just to look about us, and to die, Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man; A mighty maze! but not without a plan.

’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

At thirty, a man suspects himself a fool; Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan; At fifty chides his infamous delay, Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve; In all the magnanimity of thought Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.

All men think all men mortal but themselves.

A man so various that he seem’d to be Not one, but all mankind’s epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong; Was everything by starts, and nothing long: But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.

So absolute she seems And in herself complete, so well to know Her own, that what she wills to do or say, Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.

Not to know me argues yourselves unknown.