尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生/Ralph Waldo Emerson
尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生（1803—1882），美国思想家、诗人和散文家。生于波士顿牧师家庭，毕业于波士顿à-丁学校和哈佛大学。21岁时成为神职人员，不久便对基督教产生怀疑，1832年辞职远游，遍访欧洲文化名人。曾经深入研究过荷马、柏拉图、但丁、蒙田和莎士比亚。代表作有《论自然》、《美国学者》、《神学院致辞》、《散文选》和《诗集》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.