Cultivating the seeds of virtue in Mencius and Thoreau.

Morrison, Ronald P.

Self-culture was a moral imperative for American transcendentalists, and reading was one of the principal means of pursuing it. Reading was a search for insights that would further the spiritual development of the individual. So when Thoreau read ancient Hindu or Chinese texts, it was not with a view to gaining historical or cultural understanding, but rather an understanding of timeless moral and spiritual truths. Having discovered that the 13th century Persian poet Saadi once entertained "identically the same thought that I do," Thoreau asserts that he and Saadi are personally identical. The same "sacred self " transcends their separate historical identities (1997, 289-90). In Walden, he says, "The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of divinity ... and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision" (1971, 99). For Thoreau, self-culture is the process of lifting the veil from the statue of the divinity that is present in everyone. Even though "divinity" is not something Mencius would ascribe to human nature, it is not surprising that Thoreau should be drawn to his philosophy of self-cultivation. According to Philip Ivanhoe, Mencius "believed that to develop oneself according to one's true nature is to fulfill a design inscribed by Heaven upon our human hearts" (Ivanhoe 2000, 17). Mencius and Thoreau use the same metaphor to describe the process of developing our true nature as one in which we cultivate the seeds of virtue. It may be the case that each independently entertained "identically the same thought." Indeed, as Maryanne Horowitz has shown in her Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge, the seeds-of-virtue metaphor has been a staple of Western thought since the Stoics, and of Cicero in particular. Yet despite marked similarities between Thoreau and Cicero, in this regard, Thoreau does not quote him, even though he had read him. Given the contexts in which Thoreau quotes Mencius, it is more likely, therefore, that he borrowed the metaphor from Mencius.

Thoreau read Mencius in boThenglish and French translations (Cady 21); and he published selected quotations from Mencius in The Dial, as well as quoted him in both A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden. In A Week, there is but one quotation: "If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of his heart, he does not know how to seek them again.... The duties of practical philosophy consist only in seeking after those sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all" (1980a, 264 [Mencius, 6A11]. This bears an obvious resemblance to a famously enigmatic passage in Walden: "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken to concerning them.... I have met one or two who ... seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves" (1971, 17). (The "one or two" were no doubt those of his friends who found him deficient in sentiments of the heart.) This passage comes five paragraphs after Thoreau identifies himself as a practical philosopher with the duty "to so love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust" (1971, 15). There is no direct correlation here between these virtues and A Week's sentiments of the heart. But one of Walden's (two) quotations from Mencius makes the connection explicit.

This comes in the chapter "Spring." For Thoreau, spring is the "morning" of the year, and spring and morning are repeatedly associated with the possibility of moral rebirth. Having died "down to its root" in winter, human life "puts forth its green blade to eternity in spring" (1971, 311). A spring morning is a time of "recovered innocence," when "all men's sins are forgiven." Even in the thief and drunkard one sees, Thoreau says, "some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled rind ... tender and fresh as the youngest plant" (1971, 314-15). In this context, Thoreau gives us an extended quotation from the Ox Mountain parable (Mencius, 6A8). Here is Thoreau's translation from the French:

A return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature of man, as the sprouts of the forest which has been felled. In like manner the evil one does in the interval of a day prevents the germs of virtues which began to spring up again from developing themselves and destroys them.

After the germs of virtue have thus been prevented many times from developing themselves, then the beneficent breath of evening does not suffice to preserve them. As soon as the breath of evening does not suffice longer to preserve them, then the nature of man does not differ much from that of the brute. Men seeing the nature of this man like that of the brute, think that he has never possessed the innate faculty of reason. Are those the true and natural sentiments of man? (1971, 315) (1)

The D. C. Lau translation says "likes and dislikes" where Thoreau has "virtue and vice," and "native endowment" where Thoreau has "innate faculty of reason" (Lau 127). Otherwise, Thoreau got the gist of it. Although "innate faculty of reason" is wide of the mark, "virtue and vice" is not, for it is just those innate likes and dislikes, or "natural sentiments," that are for Mencius the germs or sprouts of virtue.

Mencius is quite specific about what the germs of virtue are. We are naturally endowed with four of them just as we have four limbs (2A6). To call them germs is not to say that we are naturally good, but only that we have a natural inclination toward the good. We may become bad, in the way that our limbs can become crippled, but this "is not the fault of our natural endowment" (6A6). The germs of virtue are more resilient than our limbs, however. A single accident is not enough to render them impotent. The point of the Ox Mountain parable is that it takes a determined effort to destroy the native likes and dislikes that incline us toward the good. To become an intractable brute requires that we habitually neglect our true selves during the course of each day; otherwise, as Thoreau says, some innocent, fair shoots will come bursting forth. Because the germs of virtue continue to sprout despite our neglect of them, there is the possibility of breaking bad habits, if only we can learn to recognize and cultivate the seedling. Mencius recounts how King Xuan of Qi took pity on an ox being led to the sacrifice and spared it by substituting a lamb. Why not pity the lamb as well, one asks? In taking pity on the ox the king demonstrated that the germ of compassion remained alive in him, but it needed to be cultivated before it could be extended to the lamb and eventually, as Mencius hoped, to the king's subjects. In learning of the king's momentarily awakened compassion for the ox, Mencius was able to conclude, in effect, that the king was not morally crippled. The king, therefore, retained the native ability to become a true, benevolent king. Only by extending the practice of compassion, from ox to lamb to subject, however, would he actually become one (1A7).

The four germs of virtue, our native "likes and dislikes," incline us toward compassion, disdain, deference, and approval [of what is right] or disapproval [of what is wrong], in the Van Norden translation (Ivanhoe and Van Norden 130, 147). (2) These germs are not simply sentiments of the heart, but a combination of sentiments and the capacity for judgment that belies any dichotomy between reason and feeling. When appropriately cultivated, the four germs flower into the four virtues, respectively, of benevolence, dutifulness or righteousness, propriety or ritual observance, and wisdom (combining Lau and Van Norden). Mencius gives as the "content" of these virtues the paradigmatic instances in which they are practiced. Thus, the paradigm of benevolence is caring for one's parents; the paradigm of righteousness, obedience to one's elder brothers; the paradigm of propriety, the "regulation and adornment" of the rites; and the paradigm of wisdom, the understanding of benevolence and duty (Lau 4A27). The virtues must first be grounded in these paradigmatic practices before they can be extended outward beyond the family. Paradigmatic practices are essential, because what needs to be nurtured are the appropriate moral impulses. It seems to be the function of wisdom, which is defined in terms of the other virtues, to discern what those appropriate impulses are. Mencius does not demonstrate to the king that no relevant moral distinction can be made between the ox and the lamb, and that, therefore, it would be irrational to treat them differently. Instead, he seems to be asking the king to have the same feeling toward the lamb. This makes the problem of extension more difficult, because reason moves more easily from like to like than does feeling. Instead of giving the king an argument, Mencius calls the king's attention to what compassion "feels like," as Ivanhoe points out (Ivanhoe 2002, 231). This, then, is the function of the paradigmatic practices by which we cultivate the germs of virtue. They give us a natural grounding in what the virtues feel like. There would be no point in knowing what compassion feels like, in the case of the ox, for example, unless one likes what it feels like, and thereby has a reason to practice compassion by extending it toward the lamb. Because it is in our nature to be compassionate, Mencius believes that a normally endowed human being, who is not morally crippled, will like it. To exercise the four germs of virtue is analogous to exercising the four limbs. Just as a dancer will take joy in the artful exercise of her limbs, so will a life in which we nurture the germs of virtue to maturity be intrinsically satisfying (Ivanhoe 2002, 224). Hence, it is important to situate the germs of virtue in natural human tendencies; they give us a motive to be moral.

From this overview, we can see that Mencius has a theory of the virtues. The theory, first, explains the roots of virtue in specific human attributes. Second, it correlates these with a precise set of virtues appropriate to a well-ordered society, as Mencius understood it. Third, it describes the process by which native attributes are transformed into virtues by means of a set of practices. Finally, it gives an answer to the age-old question, why should I be moral? Nothing so precise is to be found in Thoreau. Yet the parallels between these thinkers make it possible to use Mencius as a guide to assessing Thoreau.

In both Walden and in Cape Cod, his book on "human culture" (1988, 3), Thoreau makes extensive use of the metaphor of the "seeds of a higher life." Walden's second quotation from Mencius occurs in the chapter "Higher Laws," where, again, the cultivation of the "seeds of a better life" is the main theme. Here it is, again in Thoreau's translation from the French: "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'" (1971, 210 [Mencius 4B19]). For Mencius, the human capacities for compassion or moral judgment only slightly distinguish us because they are only the germs of virtue. They are tender seedlings that need to be developed and secured in appropriate practices; that is, they need to be planted in the right soil. If we neglect them, they wither and die, and we lapse into an animal-like existence. In such a state, the animal-man is immune to moral influence. We know we are in the presence of an animal-man when consistent benevolence and courtesy on our part fail to evoke the appropriate response (4B28).

Thoreau is ambivalent about our animality. On one hand, the animal man is embedded in nature, and as such is in a state of innocence. Thoreau admires the various avatars of the noble savage that appear in his work, because they are uncorrupted by civilization; yet they enjoy only an "embryonic" existence, morally speaking. After drawing a favorable portrait of the Canadian wood-chopper in Walden, Thoreau says, "Yet I never, by any manoeuvering, could get him to take a spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true of most men" (1971, 150). In "Higher Laws," we are told that the boy who has "the seeds of a better life in him" will graduate from the simple expediency of hunting and fishing to make a higher use of nature than "the embryo man" in the hunter stage of development (1971, 213). The whole point of Walden is that we can and must "dive deeper and soar higher than Nature goes" (1971, 288), while at the same time being rooted in it.

Like Mencius, Thoreau believes that the seeds of virtue need to be planted in uncorrupted soil to grow properly. In the opening pages of Walden, we learn that the soil "is suited to the seed" only when we leave behind the narrow and corrupted modes of existence prescribed by custom. When we do, the possibility of a higher life is proportional to the degree to which the seed becomes rooted in the soil; that is, in nature (1971, 15). In the chapter "The Bean-Field," we learn that the place to plant the seeds of virtue is where there is a "connecting link between wild and cultivated fields;" midway, that is, between raw nature and the settled village (1971, 158). After his first year of planting beans in his "half-cultivated field," Thoreau decides that the next summer he will plant instead "such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil." "Alas," he reports, the seeds he planted, "if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues ... did not come up." Both the seeds and the customary method of cultivating them, handed down from generation to generation, had lost their vitality. The point he makes is that for the seeds of the virtues to grow "in this soil"--in the depleted soil of New England culture--would have taken more "toil and manurance" than he gave them (1971, 164).

Mencius also makes the point that how well the seeds of virtue grow will depend on the richness of the soil and the supply of water--that is, on the cultural context--as well as on the "amount of human effort spent on it." The difference in effort between one person and another "is due to what ensnares their hearts" (Lau 6A7). There seems to be a kind of natural law at work in how the heart is ensnared: "When one thing acts on another, all it does is to attract it." If the senses are ensnared by "external things," we lead a morally unreflective life (Lau 6A15). If instead the appropriate moral influences act on us, the germs of virtue will naturally be attracted to them. For Thoreau, "man in the larva state" is ensnared by external things through gross appetite and sensuality. Sometimes "whole nations [are] in that condition" (1971, 215). Such is the soil of New England. The remedy is to plant the seeds of virtue in the unexhausted soil of a "new world." This is one of the themes of Cape Cod. Shipwreck on the shores of a new world, literally and figuratively, is the means by which seeds from the old world are sown in the unexhausted soil of a new world. The Wellfleet oysterman shows Thoreau his garden of "vegetables which he had raised from seeds that came out of [the wreck of ] the Franklin" (1988, 78). Noting elsewhere that some of the seeds from the Franklin had sown themselves, Thoreau sees in shipwreck the means by which "various plants may have been dispersed over the world." The crews perish, but the cargo of seeds is scattered on the shore, where they are free to grow unchecked, unbent, and undistorted by the customs of the old world (1988, 130-31).

Thoreau is more than a little vague about what the seeds of virtue are. There does not seem to be a definite number of them. Nor is there a precise list of the corresponding virtues. The virtues that are the aims of practical philosophy (wisdom, simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust) are not quite the same as those he tried to cultivate in his garden (sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, "and the like"). Philip Cafaro claims to find more than a hundred virtues that Thoreau praises in Walden (Cafaro 55-58). It would not be surprising, in that case, if Thoreau were vague about what seeds to cultivate. But perhaps the most relevant point concerning the virtues is one that Herbert Fingarette makes about Confucius: "The virtues that Confucius stresses are indeed all 'dynamic' and social." "Such 'static' and 'inner' virtues as purity or innocence play no role in the Analects" (Fingarette 55). Purity or personal integrity does count for something in the Mencius: "The conduct of the sages is not always the same. Some live in retirement, others enter the world; some withdraw, others stay on; but it all comes to keeping their integrity intact" (Lau 5A7). And with regard to self-cultivation, Mencius exhorts the gentleman to weed his own field and not leave it "to weed the fields of others" (Lau 7B32). Nonetheless, Mencius' theory of virtue is almost wholly dynamic and social. Even wisdom is defined as the understanding of the virtues of benevolence and dutifulness, which in turn are defined in terms of obligations to others. In Walden, on the other hand, the inner virtues of purity, simplicity, innocence, and independence are the primary virtues, and arguably, purity above all. His morning bath in the pond, the purity of which is the focal point of the book, "was a religious exercise." "They say [in The Great Learning] that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to this effect: 'Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.'" (1971, 88). For Thoreau this quotation reiterates the point made in the Ox Mountain parable that the influence of the morning air redeems us from what we have done "during the interval of the day." In Thoreau's hands, however, purity very nearly becomes an end in itself. The social virtues (magnanimity and trust, for instance) are not absent; but, as we have seen, Thoreau lets us know that even his friends are curious to locate the sentiments of the heart behind them. On one of his trips to Cape Cod, he tells us, "my companion had declared ... that I had not a particle of sentiment, in rather absolute terms," but Thoreau then attempts an ironic dismissal of the charge (1988, 61).

Like Mencius, Thoreau seems to think of the seeds of virtue as the common stock of humanity, but how they are is less clear. Although metaphorically linked with dispositions of the heart, as we saw, we learn nothing more about those dispositions. He also says that they are "for the most part broadcast and floating in the air," which seems to make them independent of human dispositions. He even suggests that the seeds of the virtues, if not the virtues themselves, may vary with culture, and that we might find in another culture the seed of a more vigorous variety--of justice, say, than we are accustomed to cultivating here at home. For this reason, he says, "our ambassadors should be instructed to send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to distribute them all over the land" (1971, 164). Thoreau's reading of Hindu and Chinese texts can be seen as just such a search for the most vigorous varieties of the seeds of the virtues. However, if the seeds of the virtues are not linked to specific human dispositions, and if they are indefinite in number, then we cannot expect to find in Thoreau a description of the paradigmatic practices by which they are cultivated. Perhaps we expect too much. Perhaps Thoreau just lost control of his metaphor. If he has anything like a theory of virtue, he will be able to say both what the seeds are and how they are cultivated. On closer inspection, he does. We find that the seeds are more like dispositions of the heart than cultural variants, and that there is something like a paradigmatic practice for cultivating them.

In "Higher Laws," he calls them "faint intimations." Cicero, too, speaks of the seeds of virtue in this way and indicates that our task is to cultivate them. For the Stoics, however, the seeds of virtue are seminal reasons, logoi spermatikoi (Horowitz 29-30). (3) Thoreau emphasizes what might be called seminal feelings, instead of seminal reasons. Noting the incongruity between having given up his fowling-piece but not his fishing-pole, he says of fishing, "I did not perceive that my feelings were much affected. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. This was habit" (1971, 211). In other words, he saw the ox but not the lamb. Where fish are concerned, habit prevents a perception that would engage his sympathies. One of Walden's great themes is that habit, routine, custom, and tradition lull us into a kind of sleep which is a failure to see. The sage is a seer, and "moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep" (1971, 90). It is not the illogic of his attitudes toward hunting and fishing that concerns him, however. Moral progress is not a case of extending the argument from birds to fish. It is rather a case, not unlike in Mencius' thought, of extending the sentiment from birds to fish. What is required is learning to see all aspects of life in a way that properly engages one's feelings. His attitude toward fishing changes when he finds "repeatedly" that he "cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect." It's a change he attributes to a "faint intimation," and adds "yet so are the first streaks of morning" (1971, 213-14). In other words, it is a kind of awakening, a hint which engages our imagination and enlarges our capacity for felt experience. At the same time, he says that the moral life is "a life in conformity to higher principles." However, he defines such a life not as one directed by principles of reason, but one in which "one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of [one's] genius." His repeated emphasis on the faintness of moral insight corresponds to a distrust in rational argument as an instrument of moral progress. "The faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind" (1971, 216). Moral argument can only be persuasive within the boundaries of a prevailing set of values; and these, more often than not, inhibit the insights that lead to moral reform. This assessment recalls Mencius' commentary on Confucius' view that "the village worthies are the enemies of virtue." An enemy of virtue, Mencius says, "shares with others the practices of the day and is in harmony with this sordid world ... and is self-righteous" (Lau 7B37). The enemies of virtue blindly embody customary values and thereby perpetuate the conditions in which the seeds of the virtues will not take root. Of Daniel Webster, certainly an enemy of virtue where slavery was concerned, Thoreau says, in "Resistance to Civil Government": "The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency, or a consistent expediency." It is not that Webster was without principle, but his principles were the established principles of the Constitution. When Thoreau speaks of "higher principle," however, he is not referring to rules of reason that, like natural laws in the Stoic sense, supersede civil laws. In the same essay, he defines "action from a principle" as "the perception and the performance of right" (emphasis added). He follows his commentary on Webster with the observation that "they who know of no purer sources of truth ... wisely stand by the Bible and the Constitution." There is a purer source of moral truth, however. The truths that lead to moral renewal come "trickling into this lake or that pool"--into the consciousness of individuals--from a fountain-head that lies beyond the accepted and conventional truths of the day (1973, 87, 72, 88). The faint but persistent intimations he perceives are, therefore, revelations, not rules of reason. In the Journal, he tells us to "Obey the law which reveals and not the law revealed" (1991, 201).

Thoreau is vague about what the seeds of virtue are, because it is a paradigmatic practice that discloses them; it is not paradigmatic practices that develop them. "No method or discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert" (1971, 111). Self-culture is fundamentally rooted in the paradigmatic practice of sensitive seeing, "when the whole body is one sense," and we are in "sympathy" with the world around us (1971, 129). There is an important passage in A Week in which Thoreau equates the germs of virtue with the senses. "What is it, then, to educate but to develope [sic] these divine germs called the senses?" The higher life is not "mere allegory" but a life in which we actually "see God." Thus, "We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, the purely sensuous life" (1980a, 382). The seeds of virtue are not simply the innate givens of human nature that we cultivate in paradigmatic practices. Rather, they arrive from nature (reality) itself through the paradigmatic practice of living wakefully in a kind of whole-body attunement with nature. In a somewhat ironic Pythagorean image, Thoreau tells us that he puts his ear against the telegraph pole to listen to the music of the wind passing through the wires, not to what was being transmitted over the wires (1980a, 176-177). In Walden, he tells us that he spent autumn and winter days "outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind" and "to telegraph any new arrival" (1971, 17-18). The seeds of virtue are the sensory analogues of the "seminal reasons" that the Stoics identify with God's creative force in the cosmos, and which can be thought of as incipient reason in the human soul (Horowitz 27-30). Thoreau, too, associates the seeds of virtue with God's creative power, but as sown in the senses. Through the "pure" senses we see the creative power of the universe unfolding before us as a dynamic process of continual creation. "Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed" (1971, 134). Moreover, as Thoreau increasingly comes to see nature as wild, he associates that power with divine will, not divine reason. In the Journal, he notes an etymological connection between "wild" and "willed." "The fates are wild for they will--& the Almighty is wild above all." Implicitly, Thoreau thinks of the power that fashions our being as a will immanent in nature. (Perhaps we could think of it as a transmutation of the New England Calvinist's transcendent God of will.) Since natural law is continually being executed in an evolving universe, moral progress is a matter of revelation, not reason. "A man of will" is therefore "a man of hope and of the future tense" (1997, 458). The seeds of virtue are indeterminate in number, because reality itself is indeterminate; hence the need for living wakefully and being "forever on the alert." "The highest we can attain to," he tells us, "is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence" (1980b, 128).

Thoreau believes that focusing on his own self-cultivation is morally justified if it sets an example of a life well-lived. Walden is, in effect, a demonstration of the possibility of a higher life, even in 19th century New England. Yet, Thoreau makes a tendentious--and very un-Mencian--distinction between being good and doing good, in order to justify his seemingly "selfish" concern with his own spiritual development (1971, 72-79). In spite of his caustic commentary on the social injustices he sees around him, he wants us to believe that the example of a life well-lived will do more good than philanthropic good deeds. His account of his night in jail concludes with a quotation from Confucius, which seems to suggest that he subscribed to the Confucian doctrine of the moral charisma of the virtuous person. "You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments? Love virtue and the people will be virtuous. The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of the common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends" (1971, 172, [Analects 12.19]). But whereas Mencius has a theory of human nature that gives some warrant for the belief that self-cultivation will have a favorable moral influence on others, Thoreau does not. It is not much more than a bald assertion.

For Mencius, the possibility of propagating the virtues through the moral charisma of the sage or benevolent king follows from the following premises: (a) the sprouts of virtue are native to us; (b) they are difficult to eradicate; (c) it is a law of nature that when one thing acts on another it attracts it; and (d) virtue is an action towards others. Thus, because there is something to act on in all but the most intractable person, it is reasonable to claim that virtue begets virtue. The moral influence of the sage or ruler is due to acts of benevolence. Although Thoreau has faith in the possibility of "recovered innocence" for all, he gives no account of how the "innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from the gnarled rind" of the thief and drunkard will be favorably influenced by the virtuous. Unlike Mencius, he does not locate the seeds of virtue in specific natural human tendencies already present in the "animal man." Instead, the seeds of a higher life seem to be present only in those (few?) who have the capacity to graduate from an expedient use of nature to a spiritual use. Shipwrecked on the shores of a new world, the seeds of virtue are more like gifts granted in moments of extraordinary perception. Nonetheless, and this is an important point, given his iconoclastic tendencies, Thoreau has a kind of faith, if I may so put it, that everyone in that state of grace will receive the same gift. In other words, a "spiritual view of things" will result in moral consensus. In effect, Thoreau, substitutes for a moral consensus based on custom, a moral consensus deriving from a nearness to the perennial source of life. This seems to follow from his references to Saadi and to "the oldest Hindoo or Egyptian philosopher":

The entertaining a single thought of a certain elevation makes all men of one religion.... I know for instance that Sadi entertained once identically the same thought that I do and thereafter I can find no essential difference between Sadi and myself.... Truth and a true man is something essentially public not private.... By living the life of a man is made common property.... The difference between any man and that posterity amid whom he is famous is too insignificant to sanction that he should be set up again in any world as distinct from them. (1997, 289-90)

In The Maine Woods, somewhat more democratically, Thoreau extends this shared identity to the noble savage. His discovery of phosphorescent wood (in 1857, three years after the publication of Walden), a phenomenon already well-known to the Indians, is for him the "revelation" of a "light shining in the darkness of the wilderness," and it leads him to conclude "that the same experience always gives birth to the same sort of belief or religion" (1972, 181). But even if we allow that the seeds of virtue are embedded in certain elevated experiences, and that these are accessible to poets, noble savages, thieves and drunkards alike, then, at most, Thoreau tells us how to cultivate the experience, not how to cultivate the virtue out of the seed implanted in the experience. Because he has no general theory as to how to develop those "innocent fair shoots," he can give no account of how tending to his own garden will have the social benefit he claims for it. Thoreau undermines his claim by putting so much emphasis on the cultivation of experiences, which, whatever might be said about the correlation between the experiencer and the experience, are essentially invisible to the outsider. This, then, begs the question of how they can be influential. The moral example that a life of self-cultivation is supposed to provide has nothing to latch onto in those, the majority presumably, who have not had the same revelatory experience. Conversely, those who have had the same experience appear not to need our example. For Mencius, the morally cultivated exert their influence by instituting the appropriate cultural practices that reinforce the stirrings of virtue present in all of us.

As an accomplished carpenter, Thoreau might have taken note of another recurring moral metaphor in the Mencius: the compass and the square. "The sage, having taxed his eyes to their utmost capacity, went on to invent the compasses and the square, the level and the plumb-line" (Lau 4A1) (emphasis added). In other words, it is not enough to be a seer. Craftsmanship is also required. As with Thoreau, Mencius recognizes that moral insight, like craftsmanship, can perish in rules. Thus, for Mencius, exercising moral discretion in accordance with the Way takes precedence over ritual observance. "It is prescribed by the rites that, in giving and receiving, man and woman should not touch each other, but in stretching out a helping hand to a drowning sister in law one uses one's discretion" (Lau 4A17; see also 4B6, 4B11). Nonetheless, discretion is a moral skill more successfully employed by the sage than by the apprentice. "A carpenter or a carriage-maker can pass on to another the rules of his craft, but he cannot make him skilful" (Lau 7B5). For this reason, the sage invents the compass and the square as guides to the practices that may lead to moral virtuosity. In other words, the moral influence of the sage is not so straightforward as the wind blowing over the grass. "In teaching others, the master carpenter naturally does so by means of compasses and the square, and the student naturally also learns by means of compasses and the square" (Lau 6A20). The student does not learn merely by standing downwind of the sage. Moral inclinations may come naturally to us all, but moral insight, discernment and discretion do not. Thoreau's seeds of virtue seem, at least on some occasions, to be more like the insights of the sage. That is, for the seed to be revealed at all already requires a certain virtuosity of perception. Settled practices are inimical to perceptions of that kind, instead of being, if properly chosen, preparation for them. Thoreau leaves nearly everything in the hands of the wind.

References

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Cafaro, Philip. 2004. Thoreau's Living Ethics. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Fingarette, Herbert. 1972. Confucius: The Secular as Sacred. Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland Press.

Horwitz, Maryanne Cline. 1998. Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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(1) Cady has demonstrated that Thoreau translated from a French collection, Les Livres sacres de l'Orient, published in 1841, which included original translations by G. Pauthier of the Chinese Four Books.

(2) Van Norden's choice of "approval and disapproval" instead of "right and wrong," in the Lau translation, seems to make the appropriate distinction between the seed and the developed virtue. Thus, the native inclination to express approval and disapproval is the precursor to developed judgments of right and wrong.

(3) There is a seeds-of-virtue passage in Cicero's Tusculan Disputations to which Thoreau would have warmed; but I have not found evidence that he read this work. "[Nature] has furnished us only with some feeble rays of light, which we immediately extinguish so completely by evil habits and erroneous opinions, that the light of nature is nowhere visible. The seeds of virtues are natural to our constitutions, and, were they suffered to come to maturity, would naturally conduct us to a happy life; but now, as soon as we are born and received into the world, we are instantly familiarized with all kinds of depravity and perversity of opinions; so that we may be said almost to suck in error with our nurse's milk." Marcus Tullius Cicero. 1887. The Academic Questions, Treatise De Finibus, and Tusculan Disputations, trans. C.D. Yonge. London: George Bell and Sons, 364.