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Passage 1

(1) In dealing with the State we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was at man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make them better. (2) But politics rests on necessary foundations and cannot be treated with levity. (3) Republics abound in young civilians who believe that the laws make the city; that commerce, education, and religion may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. (4) The law is only a memorandum. (5) We are superstitious and esteem the statute somewhat. (6) The statute stands there to say, "Yesterday we agreed so and so, but how feel ye this article today?" (7) Our statute is a coin which we stamp with our own portrait; it soon becomes unrecognizable and in process of time will return to the mint. (8) Nature is not democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority by the protest of her sons; as fast as the public mind is opened to more intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering. (9) It speaks not articulately and must be made to. (10) Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. (11) The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. (12) What the tender poetic youth dreams, prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies. (13) The history of the State sketches in coarse outline the progress of thought and follows at a distance the delicacy of culture and aspiration.

Passage 2
I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun;[10] and, after sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden.[11] The scholar must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.[12] Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find,—so entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendors shine, system on system shooting [23] like rays, upward, downward, without center, without circumference,—in the mass and in the particle, Nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on forever to animate the last fiber of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested that he and it proceed from one Root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, [24] sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that root? Is not that the soul of his soul?—A thought too bold?—A dream too wild? Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures,—when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand,—he shall look forward to an ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator.[13] He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself,"[14] and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.

Grade 11 Compare and Contrast CCSS: CCRA.R.2, RI.11-12.2

What do both passages have in common?

A high view of nature
A negative view of government
The importance of intelligence
The focus on changing the norm

Question Info

Compare and Contrast Question

Grade 11 Compare and Contrast CCSS: CCRA.R.2, RI.11-12.2