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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com-Walden by Henry David Thoreau


We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as
our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps
cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and
health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but
never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its
own; that we may be well, yet not pure. The other day I picked up
the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which
suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the
spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means than temperance
and purity. "That in which men differ from brute beasts," says
Mencius, "is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it
very soon; superior men preserve it carefully." Who knows what sort
of life would result if we had attained to purity? If I knew so wise a
man as could teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. "A
command over our passions, and over the external senses of the
body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in
the mind’s approximation to God." Yet the spirit can for the time
pervade and control every member and function of the body, and
transmute what ill form is the grossest sensuality into purity and
devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose,
dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates
and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called
Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which
succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is
open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down.
He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day
by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but
has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to
which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as
fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to

beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very
life is our dis-grace.

"How happy’s he who hath due place assigned To his beasts and
disafforested his mind!

Can use this horse, goat, wolf, and ev’ry beast, And is not ass
himself to all the rest!

Else man not only is the herd of swine, But he’s those devils too
which did incline Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse."

All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It
is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep
sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a
person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he
is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile
is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another.
If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity?
How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We
have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We speak
conformably to the rumor which we have heard. From exertion come
wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. In the
student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An unclean person is
universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun
shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. If you
would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it
be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must
be overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are not
purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not
more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed
heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke
him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites
merely.

I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject-I
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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com-Walden by Henry David Thoreau



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