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and to all mankind; who had no intention of encroaching on my rights as an individual in any way whatever; and who, furthermore, had no suspicion of me as a person alien to himself.
The criticism made of him by my young brother held good of him then and always,--that “he looked like one of Christ's disciples.”
His aspect was intelligently mild and gentle, unmixed with the slightest taint of worldly selfinterest.
He heard that Goethe had said, “We begin to sin as soon as we act;” but he did not agree to this, and was determined that one man at least should live in this world without sinning.
He carried this plan out so consistently that, as he once confessed to me, it brought him to the verge of starvation.
Then he realized that in order to play our part in the general order of things,--in order to obviate the perpetual tendency in human affairs to chaos,--we are continually obliged to compromise.
However, to the last he would never touch animal food.
Others might murder sheep and oxen, but he, Bronson Alcott, would not be a partaker in what he considered a serious transgression of moral law. This brought him into antagonism with the current of modern opinion, which considers man the natural ruler of this earth, and that it is both his right and his duty to remodel it according to his ideas of usefulness and beauty.
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