Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/261

248 over the fire. Most of you have doubtless seen such; I have, to my sorrow. That is one form of the regressive force. He is what the Bible calls a heaviness to his mother, and a grief to his father. There is a worse retarding force than this; to wit: sometimes a bad boy is born into the family with head enough, but with a devilish heart; he is a malformation in respect to all the higher faculties,—a destructive form of the regressive force. Now, a nation may have that regressive force in these two forms,—the lazy retardative, the wicked destructive.

Sometimes this progressive force seems limited to a small class of persons,—men of genius, like the Hebrew prophets, the Socratic philosophers, the German reformers of the sixteenth century, or the French savants of the eighteenth. But it is not likely, it is really thus limited; for these men of genius are merely trees of the common kind, rooted into the public soil, but grown to taller stature than the rest.

In the Northern States of America, and also in England and Scotland, it is plain this progressive force is widely spread among the great mass of the people, who are not only instinctively, but of set purpose, eager for progress; that is, for the increasing development of faculties, and for the consequent increasing power over the material world, transforming it to use and beauty. New England is a monument attesting this fact. But still this force arrives to its highest form in men of genius. Here, in the North, you may find men of money, men of education, literary culture, and scientific skill; men of talent, able to learn readily what can now be taught—who do not share this progressive instinct, whose will is regressive; but these are exceptional men—some maimed by accident, others impotent from their mother's womb; whom no Peter and John could make otherwise than halt and lame. But all the men of genius—aboriginal power of sight, ability to create, to know and teach what none learned before—are on the side of this progressive force. In all the Northern States, I know but one exception among the men of politics, science, art, letters, or religion. Even in his cradle, the Northern genius strangles the regressive snakes of Fogydom. Still, these men of genius are not the cause of the progressive force, only expressions of it; not its exclusive depositaries.