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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson," readers are invited into the profound intellectual landscape shaped by one of America's foremost Transcendentalists. This comprehensive anthology compiles Emerson's essays, speeches, and poems, reflecting his intricate literary style marked by metaphor, vivid imagery, and contemplative prose. Key themes such as individualism, self-reliance, and the relationship between humanity and nature resonate throughout the text, situating it within the broader context of 19th-century American literature and philosophical thought. Emerson's work illustrates how personal experience serves as a guide to universal truths, making this collection an essential resource for understanding both his role in American letters and the Transcendentalist movement itself. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was a philosopher, essayist, and orator whose thoughts were deeply influenced by his Puritan upbringing and experiences in Europe, notably his interactions with contemporary thinkers like Goethe and Coleridge. His keen observations on the nature of existence and individuality were drawn from his belief in the inherent goodness of people and the sanctity of nature. Through his writings, Emerson embarked on a quest to encourage self-sufficiency and a profound connection with the world, inspiring generations to seek truth beyond societal constraints. This volume is highly recommended for those interested in American literature, philosophy, and the Transcendentalist movement. It serves as a vital repository of Emerson's insights, encouraging readers to explore their inner selves while contemplating their roles within a broader social and natural context. Whether you are a scholar, student, or casual reader, this collection will enlighten and challenge your understanding of self and society. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection assembles the central prose of Ralph Waldo Emerson, presenting in one place the major books, essays, and public addresses that trace the arc of his intellectual life. Rather than a miscellany, it offers a coherent portrait of a single author thinking in public, refining ideas across decades, and shaping a distinctly American voice. By gathering foundational volumes alongside influential lectures, the collection invites readers to follow Emerson from first principles to mature reflections, observing how themes recur with renewed force and clarity. Its purpose is both archival and conversational: to preserve a body of work and to keep its arguments alive for fresh consideration.
The texts gathered here are predominantly essays, lectures, and addresses—forms that Emerson made his principal instruments. Many pieces began as lectures delivered on the lyceum circuit and were later revised for print, a circulation between podium and page that left its signature on his prose. The set includes book-length essay collections, individual addresses on religion, literature, and reform, and thematically unified series later published as volumes. There is no fiction here, and poetry appears only tangentially, if at all. The emphasis is on discursive prose: reflective, exhortatory, analytic, and epigrammatic, ranging from philosophical meditations to engagements with the culture and politics of his day.
The works emerged from the ferment of nineteenth-century New England, where religious liberalism, educational experimentation, and an expanding public lecture culture converged. Emerson stands at the center of Transcendentalism, a movement that urged confidence in intuition and the moral authority of the individual. The pieces collected here were written and delivered amid debates on democracy, reform, and national identity, and they answer those debates with a call for intellectual independence and ethical seriousness. The historical setting matters, but these writings do not serve merely as documents; they remain active interlocutors, addressing readers across time who seek principles for living, thinking, and creating under changing conditions.
A few unifying commitments animate the whole. Emerson advocates self-culture: disciplined attention to the growth of character, intellect, and conscience. He treats nature not as scenery but as a source of moral and spiritual insight, a field where the mind discovers its own laws reflected. He trusts intuition as the gateway to first truths while testing intuition against experience. He resists conformity to inherited institutions when they impede moral clarity, yet looks for forms that nurture the soul. Across topics—education, politics, literature, religion—he insists that ideas must be embodied in action and that every person bears responsibility for translating insight into life.
Stylistically, Emerson’s prose is aphoristic, image-rich, and musical, shaped by years of lecturing to general audiences. He favors paragraphs that stand as self-sufficient meditations, composing essays by accretion and return rather than by linear argument alone. Metaphor drives his thinking; analogies and emblematic images knit disparate fields together. The cadence of the sentence carries thought forward with an orator’s lift, while compressed formulations concentrate argument in memorable turns of phrase. He draws liberally on classical, biblical, and historical materials without pedantry, using them as springs for fresh inference. The result is prose that invites rereading, yielding layers of suggestion beyond initial assertion.
Among the volumes included, the early treatise on nature lays a foundation for Emerson’s philosophical orientation. It presents a vision in which the natural world is not merely material but symbolic, a living medium through which the mind apprehends order and value. The book encourages direct encounter over secondhand report and aligns intellectual independence with attentive perception. It also situates American letters on their own footing, proposing that a homegrown thinking can arise from the local landscape without provincialism. In doing so, it sets terms—about perception, spirit, and method—that echo through the subsequent essays and lend the later work both continuity and depth.
The two series of essays collect many of Emerson’s most influential reflections on the self, friendship, love, compensation, spiritual unity, and the education of the mind. Here his core propositions acquire their most concentrated expression, balanced by a willingness to revise, complicate, and even contradict earlier formulations. The essays pursue a dynamic idealism that does not withdraw from the ordinary, but searches the common day for signs of law and meaning. They also model a practice of reading and writing as moral enterprises, asking what standards govern criticism and how a reader might become an active partner in the creation of value.
His study of exemplary figures examines how certain individuals come to represent fundamental human capacities. These portraits are less conventional biography than moral anatomy: the great person appears as a type—the seer, the thinker, the man of the world—through whom readers gauge their own possibilities. Rather than fix reverence on the extraordinary life, the book seeks to distribute its lessons, arguing that the energies admired in a few are latent in many. It is characteristic of Emerson to turn admiration into discipline and imitation into self-trust, and this volume displays that transformation at the scale of whole lives and epochs.
A later sequence of essays on conduct signals a more tempered, practical turn, keeping faith with aspiration while acknowledging limits. Fate, power, wealth, culture, and behavior are treated as conditions to be understood and improved rather than merely denounced or celebrated. The emphasis falls on resourcefulness, on character as both inheritance and achievement, and on the conversion of circumstance into instrument. If the early work proclaims emancipation, this period stresses stewardship. The result is not a retreat from idealism but its application to the terms of daily life, with counsel that continues to speak to personal and civic challenges.
The addresses and lectures gathered here display Emerson as a public moralist. The address delivered at the Divinity College confronts religious complacency and urges a return to immediate intuition. Literary Ethics considers the vocation of the scholar and the responsibilities of criticism. The Method of Nature, Man the Reformer, and Lecture on The Times test philosophical claims against social need. The Conservative and The Transcendentalist stage a dialogue within reform, probing the uses and dangers of each impulse. The Young American reflects on national promise and peril. Together, these pieces show thought speaking in the forum, with risks and rewards particular to that setting.
Taken together, the works maintain their force because they link inward freedom to outward action, and thought to world. They offer a vocabulary—character, culture, intuition, nature—that readers can use to assess their own lives and institutions. The writing remains generative: it asks questions and models inquiry rather than prescribing systems. Its environmental sensitivity, educational ideal, and vision of civic participation continue to resonate, while its insistence on intellectual honesty retains tonic value. As a whole, the collection stands not only as a monument of the American Renaissance but as a living companion for anyone engaged in the work of self-governance.
This edition presents the major books alongside pivotal lectures so that readers can move between concentrated theory and its public testing. It encourages non-linear reading—following a theme across volumes, comparing an address with a later essay, or tracing how an image migrates and matures. The arrangement highlights continuity without obscuring change, inviting attention to Emerson’s habit of revisiting questions under new pressures. Experienced readers will recognize familiar landmarks made new by proximity; newcomers can begin anywhere and find pathways outward. The aim is not to close interpretation but to open it, allowing the collected works to speak in chorus and in counterpoint.
Author Biography
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a 19th-century American essayist, lecturer, and poet, central figure in New England Transcendentalism. Writing from the 1830s through the post–Civil War era, he urged intellectual and moral independence, placing intuition and the natural world at the heart of experience. His addresses and essays helped define an American voice distinct from European models, while his poetry distilled philosophical insights into memorable epigrams. Best known for Nature and Self-Reliance, Emerson bridged literature, philosophy, and public oratory, shaping debates on culture, religion, and reform. He remains a touchstone for discussions of individuality, creativity, and the ethical possibilities of democratic life.
Raised in Boston, Emerson received a classical education and graduated from Harvard College in the early 1820s. He taught school before pursuing ministerial study at Harvard Divinity School, where he encountered liberal Unitarian thought. Early reading in classical authors and English moralists broadened into deep engagement with Plato, Montaigne, and later German and English Romanticism. He drew enduring impulses from Kantian idealism, the poetic philosophy of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and comparative scripture available in translation. These sources, combined with New England habits of self-scrutiny, pushed him toward a view of the mind as inherently creative and of nature as symbolically alive.
In the late 1820s Emerson entered the Unitarian ministry, serving a Boston congregation. Doubts about formal rites and the limits of inherited doctrine, sharpened by personal bereavement, led him to resign in the early 1830s. He traveled to Europe soon after, visiting Britain and the Continent. Encounters with prominent writers, including Wordsworth and Coleridge, and a formative friendship with Thomas Carlyle, strengthened his confidence in a vocation as independent lecturer and writer. Returning to Massachusetts, he settled in Concord and began the sustained public speaking that would finance his work, circulate his ideas nationally, and provide the crucible for many essays.
Nature appeared in the mid 1830s, announcing a program that joined empiric alertness with spiritual intuition. In The American Scholar, an address delivered to a learned society, he urged cultural self-reliance for the United States. His Divinity School Address challenged theological orthodoxy by elevating personal revelation and moral sentiment over tradition, provoking controversy within religious circles. Around the same time he joined with like-minded writers in the Transcendental Club and helped launch the journal The Dial, later serving as its editor. His Concord lectures and informal mentoring fostered a circle that included Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller.
Emerson’s mature prose arrived with Essays, First Series and Essays, Second Series, which include Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Experience, and The Poet. Their aphoristic style, analogical reasoning, and reliance on image made them both gnomic and galvanizing. He also wrote poems that entwined meditation with public memory, among them Concord Hymn, Threnody, and Brahma. Reception was mixed, with critics objecting to abstraction while many readers found liberation in his calls to trust the inner voice. Through tireless lecturing across towns and cities, he revised material, tested formulations before audiences, and established himself as a national presence in American letters.
Subsequent books developed social and cultural themes. Representative Men offered portraits of thinkers as types of human possibility; English Traits distilled observations from travel; The Conduct of Life and later collections wrestled with fate, power, and character. Though wary of party politics, Emerson increasingly spoke against slavery, condemning the Fugitive Slave Act and delivering fervent remarks on John Brown in the late 1850s. He supported the Union cause during the Civil War and continued a demanding lecture circuit afterward. His encouragement of new voices was notable; he famously welcomed the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
In his later years Emerson’s memory weakened, and after a house fire in the early 1870s he traveled abroad while repairs were made. He continued to publish selections and to appear publicly, though with diminishing stamina, and died in Concord in the early 1880s. His legacy endures in classrooms and public discourse, where essays such as Self-Reliance and The American Scholar are still read as manifestos of intellectual independence. Emerson influenced figures from Thoreau to William James and helped open American literature to comparative philosophy and ecological feeling. His language and example continue to inspire experiments in thought and life.
Historical Context
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on 25 May 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts, a seaport city whose post‑Revolutionary prosperity sustained a dense culture of churches, schools, and publishing houses. The early republic’s debates over virtue, commerce, and national character surrounded his upbringing in a prominent Unitarian family. New England’s intellectual institutions—Boston’s Athenaeum, Harvard College in Cambridge, and a network of learned societies—shaped a generation that would question inherited orthodoxy. The aftermath of the War of 1812, the expansion of print, and the rise of voluntary associations formed the civic backdrop against which Emerson’s mature essays and lectures would seek a distinctly American voice.
Educated at Harvard College (Class of 1821) and Harvard Divinity School, Emerson entered the Unitarian ministry, being ordained at Boston’s Second Church in 1829. Personal loss—his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, died in 1831—and theological scruple led him to resign in 1832 over the Lord’s Supper. A European journey in 1833 exposed him to Paris’s Jardin des Plantes and to British and Scottish thinkers, experiences that widened his intellectual horizons. This passage from pulpit to platform and page marks the institutional shift underlying much of his prose: a move from parish duties to a vocation as itinerant lecturer, essayist, and national moralist.
The emergence of Transcendentalism in New England during the 1830s supplied Emerson with allies and a lexicon. Nature (1836) announced an idealist philosophy indebted to Kant (as mediated by Coleridge and Carlyle) and to Romantic poetics. The informal Transcendental Club, convened from 1836, included Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, George Ripley, and others. Their quarterly, The Dial (1840–44), edited first by Fuller and later by Emerson, disseminated essays linking self‑culture to social reform. Emerson’s An Address in Divinity College (1838) challenged ecclesiastical complacency and provoked controversy within New England Unitarianism and at Harvard, sharpening lines between inherited creed and intuitive religion.
The American lyceum movement, organized by reformers such as Josiah Holbrook from 1826 onward, created a national lecture circuit that became Emerson’s principal stage. Between the mid‑1830s and the 1870s he delivered hundreds of talks from Boston and Concord to the Old Northwest, revising and recombining material before publishing it as essays. This public pedagogy shaped volumes like Essays (1841, 1844), Nature; Addresses and Lectures (1849), and The Conduct of Life (1860). The lyceum’s mixed audiences—mechanics, merchants, and college students—favored Emerson’s aphoristic condensation and moral example, encouraging him to braid literary criticism, philosophical reflection, and practical counsel into a single, portable prose.
Emerson’s transatlantic encounters fed his comparative method. In 1833 he studied natural history in Paris and visited Thomas Carlyle at Craigenputtock in Scotland, forging a lifelong correspondence that linked Boston and London’s literary worlds. He met William Wordsworth and absorbed the legacies of Coleridge and Goethe. A second trip, 1847–48, saw him lecture in Manchester, Liverpool, and London amid the turbulence of the 1848 revolutions. Out of these exchanges came Representative Men (1850), character studies of Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe, and later English Traits (1856). Transatlantic commerce in ideas, as much as in goods, animated his reflections on national character and culture.
The so‑called American Renaissance (c. 1830–1865) provided a fertile milieu. Emerson’s Concord home became a node in a regional network that included Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne (who lived at the Old Manse in 1842–45), the Alcotts, and Margaret Fuller. His oration “The American Scholar” (Harvard, 31 August 1837) famously urged independence from European models, anticipating essays on self‑reliance, culture, and books. Publishers in Boston and New York sought distinctly American letters; periodicals multiplied; and reading societies proliferated. Within this climate Emerson’s drive to reconcile inward illumination with public obligation gained urgency, framing many of the themes distributed across his collected lectures and essays.
Industrialization and the market revolution altered the social landscape Emerson addressed. Textile mills transformed towns like Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1820s and 1830s; railroads knit regions in the 1830s and 1840s; Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph flashed news after 1844. The Panic of 1837 exposed volatility beneath prosperity. Workingmen’s associations and debates over factory time, wages, and education multiplied. Emerson’s lectures on reform, economy, and culture were delivered to mechanics’ institutes and library associations as well as to colleges, probing how character might resist or redirect the pressures of cash‑nexus society. His balancing of innovation and restraint underlies essays that confront wealth, work, and moral purpose.
Political turbulence during the Jacksonian era framed Emerson’s reflections on society and the state. Andrew Jackson’s presidency (1829–1837), the Bank War, and the rise of mass party politics raised questions about majority rule, executive power, and the claims of conscience. Utopian experiments—Brook Farm in West Roxbury (founded 1841 by George Ripley) and Fourierist projects—tested communal reform. Emerson, often speaking before merchants and young men’s associations, weighed civic optimism against institutional skepticism. Addresses later gathered with titles on conservatism and transcendentalism explored these tensions, encouraging an audience of voters and readers to cultivate inward independence while negotiating the demands and excitements of democratic expansion.
Slavery and antislavery activism became unavoidable contexts for Emerson’s public work. William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator began in Boston in 1831; abolitionists faced mob violence (notably in 1835) and the murder of editor Elijah Lovejoy in 1837. The Fugitive Slave Act (1850) brought federal enforcement to Northern streets; in Boston the case of Anthony Burns (1854) galvanized protest. Emerson’s speeches denounced the law and criticized the Kansas‑Nebraska Act (1854). After John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry (1859), he defended Brown’s character in Concord. These struggles sharpened his appeals to conscience and framed lectures and essays in which moral law, not expedience, defined national destiny.
Territorial growth intensified ethical debates. The Indian Removal Act (1830) and the Trail of Tears (1838–39) exposed the violence at the nation’s edge. Texas annexation (1845), the Mexican‑American War (1846–48), and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) expanded the map; the Oregon settlement (1846) and the California Gold Rush (1848–49) accelerated migration. “Manifest destiny” rhetoric collided with republican virtue and with questions of citizenship and sovereignty. Emerson’s addresses on American youth, national character, and the cultural uses of land and labor wrestled with these contradictions, urging cultivation of the interior life even as rivers, rails, and settlers remade the continent’s physical and moral geography.
Emerson’s career intertwined with educational reform and literary institutions. His Phi Beta Kappa oration “The American Scholar” (1837) and the lecture “Literary Ethics” (delivered at Dartmouth College in 1838) addressed the duties of writers in a commercial society. College literary societies, lyceums, and mechanics’ libraries multiplied venues for argument; Horace Mann’s common‑school reforms in Massachusetts from 1837 broadened literacy and audiences. By speaking in town halls and college chapels alike, Emerson developed a prose suited to instruction and provocation, one that could discuss books, reading, and the “method of nature” while pressing the broader question of how learning equips citizens for reform and culture.
Scientific discourse shaped Emerson’s vocabulary of law and form. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33) challenged traditional chronologies; Alexander von Humboldt’s multivolume Cosmos (1845–62) modeled a synthesis of nature; Louis Agassiz arrived at Harvard in 1846 to champion natural history; botanist Asa Gray defended Darwinism. After On the Origin of Species (1859), Emerson incorporated evolutionary and statistical images in essays like “Fate” and “Power” in The Conduct of Life (1860). Visits to the Cambridge Botanic Garden and daily walks in the Concord woods grounded abstraction in observation. His nature served as both emblem and evidence, mediating between empirical science and moral intuition.
Publishing networks and periodicals conditioned Emerson’s reach. James Munroe and Company issued Nature (1836) and early Essays; later, Ticknor and Fields of Boston brought his work to a broad middle‑class public in uniform editions. The Dial, the North American Review, and other magazines serialized, reviewed, and debated his writings. Weak international copyright spurred Emerson and Carlyle to protest transatlantic piracy while also widening their readership. The lecture hall doubled as workshop: texts were tested before audiences, revised through seasons, and then arranged in thematic volumes—Nature; Addresses and Lectures, the two Essay series, Representative Men, and The Conduct of Life—producing a modular, quotable prose.
Questions of gender and domestic order inflect the intellectual climate of Emerson’s essays. Margaret Fuller, his close colleague and editor of The Dial, published Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), and abolitionist sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimké lectured in the late 1830s, expanding acceptable female public speech. The Seneca Falls Convention (1848) crystallized claims to rights. Emerson’s marriage to Lydia (Lidian) Jackson (1835) and the conversations of his household, including his daughter Ellen, supplied experiential counterpoint to public debates. Though cautious at times about suffrage, his reflections on culture, friendship, and character engage the era’s rethinking of education, vocation, and the equitable organization of family life.
The Civil War concentrated themes long present in Emerson’s work. After Fort Sumter (April 1861), he championed the Union and emancipation, praising the Emancipation Proclamation (1 January 1863) in public addresses. His eulogy for Abraham Lincoln at Concord in April 1865 joined national mourning to a moral argument about leadership and character. Wartime sacrifice and postwar uncertainty sharpened his analysis of power, wealth, and culture in lectures of the 1860s. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments seemed to codify principles earlier announced from the lyceum, yet violence and backlash ensured that the essays’ calls for self‑reliance and justice remained tasks rather than triumphs.
Emerson’s cosmopolitan reading gave his American prose a global frame. He drew on Hindu scripture—especially the Bhagavad Gītā (in Charles Wilkins’s 1785 translation) and the Vishnu Purana—Confucian Analects, and Persian poets Saadi and Hafez (often via Sir William Jones or German intermediaries). Neoplatonists like Plotinus underwrote his language of unity and emanation. He admired Montaigne’s elastic essay form and Goethe’s morphology, and he wrestled with Emanuel Swedenborg’s visionary science. Representative Men distills this comparative habit, but the sources permeate the essays generally, enabling Emerson to claim universality for intuition and for the correspondence of nature and mind while engaging America’s particular landscapes and crises.
In later years Emerson’s health declined; memory faltered after 1867. A fire damaged his Concord home in 1872, prompting friends to raise funds and encouraging a restorative journey to Europe and Egypt (1872–73). He continued to lecture, though more sparingly, into the late 1870s. Emerson died on 27 April 1882 and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord. The subsequent organization of his lectures and essays into collected volumes, and in the twentieth century the authoritative Harvard (Belknap) editions, made his career legible as a whole. Together they preserve a public philosophy forged in New England yet conversant with the world’s books and movements.
Synopsis (Selection)
Introduction
An editorial preface that outlines Emerson’s central themes—nature, self-reliance, and idealism—and situates the works in their 19th-century American context.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A brief biographical sketch of Emerson’s life and career, tracing his development from minister to leading essayist-lecturer and his influence on American Transcendentalism.
Books
An essay on the uses of reading, urging selective, strenuous engagement with great books and the independence to read for truth rather than for authority.
The Conduct of Life
A late collection of essays on fate, power, wealth, culture, behavior, and worship, balancing Emerson’s idealism with pragmatic counsel for ethical living in a modern, industrial society.
Essays – First Series
Essays advancing the creed of self-reliance, compensation, spiritual unity (the Over-Soul), and the ceaseless change of mind and morals, urging trust in intuition over convention.
Essays – Second Series
Companion volume probing experience, character, fate, and art; it examines the limits of perception, the vocation of the poet, and the tension between idealism and practical life.
Nature
Emerson’s foundational statement of Transcendentalism, presenting nature as a living symbol of spirit through which the individual apprehends truth and achieves self-reliance.
Representative Men
A series of intellectual portraits—Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Goethe—using exemplary figures to illuminate types of genius and the powers they represent.
Addresses and Lectures
A collection of public addresses on religion, culture, and society that call for moral reform, intellectual independence, and recognition of the divine law manifest in nature and the self.
An Address in Divinity College
A controversial address affirming the immediacy of the divine to the individual soul and criticizing reliance on historical miracles and ecclesiastical authority.
Literary Ethics
An address defining the scholar’s moral vocation, advocating integrity, plain living, and the reforming power of ideas over custom and material success.
The Method of Nature
A meditation on how nature educates and reveals law, asserting that creative intuition, not mechanical procedure alone, opens the way to higher knowledge.
Man the Reformer
A call for social and economic reform grounded in personal renovation, challenging commercialism and urging work and institutions to serve moral ends.
Lecture on The Times
A topical survey of contemporary American conditions, weighing democratic promise against the levelling pressures of commerce, speed, and conformity.
The Conservative
An analysis of the conservative and reforming temperaments, arguing for their necessary balance while warning against rigidity and reckless innovation.
The Transcendentalist
A clear statement of Transcendentalist principles, contrasting them with empiricism and depicting reliance on intuition, inward law, and the supremacy of the ideal.
The Young American
An exhortation to the rising generation that celebrates national energy and expansion while urging culture, conscience, and respect for nature to guide ambition.
The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Introduction
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson, although he has written very little in this way, comes accredited to us by unmistakable manifestations of an original and poetical mind. He is the author of a volume of profound Essays, recently republished in England, under the editorship of Mr. Carlyle, who discovered in him a spiritual faculty congenial to his own. Mr. Emerson was formerly a Unitarian minister, but he embraced the Quaker interpretation of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and threw up his church. He is now the editor of a quarterly magazine in Boston. The same thoughtful spirit which pervades his prose writings is visible in his poetry, bathed in the “purple light” of a rich fancy. Unfortunately, he has written too little to ensure him a great reputation; but what he has written is quaint and peculiar, and native to his own genius. From a little poem addressed “To the Humble Bee,” which, without being in the slightest degree an imitation, constantly reminds us of the gorgeous beauty of “l’Allegro,” we extract two or three passages.
Fine humble-bee! fine humble-bee! Where thou art is clime for me, Let them sail for Porto Rique, Far-off heats through seas to seek— I will follow thee alone, Thou animated torrid-zone!
* * * * *
When the south-wind, in May days, With a net of shining haze, Silvers the horizon wall, And with softness touching all, Tints the human countenance With a color of romance, And infusing subtle heats Turns the sod to violets— Thou in sunny solitudes, Rover of the underwoods, The green silence dust displace With thy mellow breezy bass.
* * * * *
Aught unsavory or unclean Hath my insect never seen, But violets, and bilberry bells, Maple sap, and daffodels, Clover, catchfly, adders-tongue, And brier-roses dwelt among.All besides was unknown waste,All was picture as he past.
This is not merely beautiful, though “beauty is its OWN excuse for being.” There is pleasant wisdom hived in the bag of the “yellow-breeched philosopher,” who sees only what is fair and sips only what is sweet. Mr. Emerson evidently cares little about any reputation to be gained by writing verses; his intellect seeks other vents, where it is untrammelled by forms and conditions. But he cannot help his inspiration. He is a poet in his prose.
Books
The Conduct of Life
I. Fate
Delicate omens traced in air To the lone bard true witness bare; Birds with auguries on their wings Chanted undeceiving things Him to beckon, him to warn; Well might then the poet scorn To learn of scribe or courier Hints writ in vaster character; And on his mind, at dawn of day, Soft shadows of the evening lay. For the prevision is allied Unto the thing so signified; Or say, the foresight that awaits Is the same Genius that creates.
It chanced during one winter, a few years ago, that our cities were bent on discussing the theory of the Age. By an odd coincidence, four or five noted men were each reading a discourse to the citizens of Boston or New York, on the Spirit of the Times. It so happened that the subject had the same prominence in some remarkable pamphlets and journals issued in London in the same season. To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity. ‘Tis fine for us to speculate and elect our course, if we must accept an irresistible dictation.
In our first steps to gain our wishes, we come upon immovable limitations. We are fired with the hope to reform men. After many experiments, we find that we must begin earlier, — at school. But the boys and girls are not docile; we can make nothing of them. We decide that they are not of good stock. We must begin our reform earlier still, — at generation: that is to say, there is Fate, or laws of the world.
But if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation understands itself. If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character. This is true, and that other is true. But our geometry cannot span these extreme points, and reconcile them. What to do? By obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we learn at last its power. By the same obedience to other thoughts, we learn theirs, and then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing them. We are sure, that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times. The riddle of the age has for each a private solution. If one would study his own time, it must be by this method of taking up in turn each of the leading topics which belong to our scheme of human life, and, by firmly stating all that is agreeable to experience on one, and doing the same justice to the opposing facts in the others, the true limitations will appear. Any excess of emphasis, on one part, would be corrected, and a just balance would be made.
But let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it. The Spartan, embodying his religion in his country, dies before its majesty without a question. The Turk, who believes his doom is written on the iron leaf in the moment when he entered the world, rushes on the enemy’s sabre with undivided will. The Turk, the Arab, the Persian, accepts the foreordained fate.
“On two days, it steads not to run from thy grave, The appointed, and the unappointed day; On the first, neither balm nor physician can save, Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay.”
The Hindoo, under the wheel, is as firm. Our Calvinists, in the last generation, had something of the same dignity. They felt that the weight of the Universe held them down to their place. What could they do? Wise men feel that there is something which cannot be talked or voted away, — a strap or belt which girds the world.
“The Destiny, minister general, That executeth in the world o’er all, The purveyance which God hath seen beforne, So strong it is, that tho’ the world had sworn The contrary of a thing by yea or nay, Yet sometime it shall fallen on a day That falleth not oft in a thousand year; For, certainly, our appetites here, Be it of war, or peace, or hate, or love, All this is ruled by the sight above.” Chaucer: The Knighte’s Tale.
The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense: “Whatever is fated, that will take place. The great immense mind of Jove is not to be transgressed.”
Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The broad ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which preach an election or favoritism. And, now and then, an amiable parson, like Jung Stilling, or Robert Huntington, believes in a pistareen-Providence, which, whenever the good man wants a dinner, makes that somebody shall knock at his door, and leave a half-dollar. But Nature is no sentimentalist, — does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda, — these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, — expensive races, — race living at the expense of race. The planet is liable to shocks from comets, perturbations from planets, rendings from earthquake and volcano, alterations of climate, precessions of equinoxes. Rivers dry up by opening of the forest. The sea changes its bed. Towns and counties fall into it. At Lisbon, an earthquake killed men like flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed in a few minutes. The scurvy at sea; the sword of the climate in the west of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New Orleans, cut off men like a massacre. Our western prairie shakes with fever and ague. The cholera, the small-pox, have proved as mortal to some tribes, as a frost to the crickets, which, having filled the summer with noise, are silenced by a fall of the temperature of one night. Without uncovering what does not concern us, or counting how many species of parasites hang on a bombyx; or groping after intestinal parasites, or infusory biters, or the obscurities of alternate generation; — the forms of the shark, the labrus, the jaw of the sea-wolf paved with crushing teeth, the weapons of the grampus, and other warriors hidden in the sea, — are hints of ferocity in the interiors of nature. Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.
Will you say, the disasters which threaten mankind are exceptional, and one need not lay his account for cataclysms every day? Aye, but what happens once, may happen again, and so long as these strokes are not to be parried by us, they must be feared.
But these shocks and ruins are less destructive to us, than the stealthy power of other laws which act on us daily. An expense of ends to means is fate; — organization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. So is the scale of races, of temperaments; so is sex; so is climate; so is the reaction of talents imprisoning the vital power in certain directions. Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit.
The gross lines are legible to the dull: the cabman is phrenologist so far: he looks in your face to see if his shilling is sure. A dome of brow denotes one thing; a pot-belly another; a squint, a pug-nose, mats of hair, the pigment of the epidermis, betray character. People seem sheathed in their tough organization. Ask Spurzheim, ask the doctors, ask Quetelet, if temperaments decide nothing? or if there be any-thing they do not decide? Read the description in medical books of the four temperaments, and you will think you are reading your own thoughts which you had not yet told. Find the part which black eyes, and which blue eyes, play severally in the company. How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father’s or his mother’s life? It often appears in a family, as if all the qualities of the progenitors were potted in several jars, — some ruling quality in each son or daughter of the house, — and sometimes the unmixed temperament, the rank unmitigated elixir, the family vice, is drawn off in a separate individual, and the others are proportionally relieved. We sometimes see a change of expression in our companion, and say, his father, or his mother, comes to the windows of his eyes, and sometimes a remote relative. In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin — seven or eight ancestors at least, — and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is. At the corner of the street, you read the possibility of each passenger, in the facial angle, in the complexion, in the depth of his eye. His parentage determines it. Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckaback, why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber. Ask the digger in the ditch to explain Newton’s laws: the fine organs of his brain have been pinched by overwork and squalid poverty from father to son, for a hundred years. When each comes forth from his mother’s womb, the gate of gifts closes behind him. Let him value his hands and feet, he has but one pair. So he has but one future, and that is already predetermined in his lobes, and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form. All the privilege and all the legislation of the world cannot meddle or help to make a poet or a prince of him.
Jesus said, “When he looketh on her, he hath committed adultery.” But he is an adulterer before he has yet looked on the woman, by the superfluity of animal, and the defect of thought, in his constitution. Who meets him, or who meets her, in the street, sees that they are ripe to be each other’s victim.
In certain men, digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger these are, the individual is so much weaker. The more of these drones perish, the better for the hive. If, later, they give birth to some superior individual, with force enough to add to this animal a new aim, and a complete apparatus to work it out, all the ancestors are gladly forgotten. Most men and most women are merely one couple more. Now and then, one has a new cell or camarilla opened in his brain, — an architectural, a musical, or a philological knack, some stray taste or talent for flowers, or chemistry, or pigments, or story-telling, a good hand for drawing, a good foot for dancing, an athletic frame for wide journeying, &c. — which skill nowise alters rank in the scale of nature, but serves to pass the time, the life of sensation going on as before. At last, these hints and tendencies are fixed in one, or in a succession. Each absorbs so much food and force, as to become itself a new centre. The new talent draws off so rapidly the vital force, that not enough remains for the animal functions, hardly enough for health; so that, in the second generation, if the like genius appear, the health is visibly deteriorated, and the generative force impaired.
People are born with the moral or with the material bias; — uterine brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with high magnifiers, Mr. Frauenhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a Whig, and that a Free-soiler.
It was a poetic attempt to lift this mountain of Fate, to reconcile this despotism of race with liberty, which led the Hindoos to say, “Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.” I find the coincidence of the extremes of eastern and western speculation in the daring statement of Schelling, “there is in every man a certain feeling, that he has been what he is from all eternity, and by no means became such in time.” To say it less sublimely, — in the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.
A good deal of our politics is physiological. Now and then, a man of wealth in the heyday of youth adopts the tenet of broadest freedom. In England, there is always some man of wealth and large connection planting himself, during all his years of health, on the side of progress, who, as soon as he begins to die, checks his forward play, calls in his troops, and becomes conservative. All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive. But strong natures, backwoodsmen, New Hampshire giants, Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams, Websters, Kossuths, are inevitable patriots, until their life ebbs, and their defects and gout, palsy and money, warp them.
The strongest idea incarnates itself in majorities and nations, in the healthiest and strongest. Probably, the election goes by avoirdupois weight, and, if you could weigh bodily the tonnage of any hundred of the Whig and the Democratic party in a town, on the Dearborn balance, as they passed the hayscales, you could predict with certainty which party would carry it. On the whole, it would be rather the speediest way of deciding the vote, to put the selectmen or the mayor and aldermen at the hayscales.
In science, we have to consider two things: power and circumstance. All we know of the egg, from each successive discovery, is, another vesicle; and if, after five hundred years, you get a better observer, or a better glass, he finds within the last observed another. In vegetable and animal tissue, it is just alike, and all that the primary power or spasm operates, is, still, vesicles, vesicles. Yes, — but the tyrannical Circumstance! A vesicle in new circumstances, a vesicle lodged in darkness, Oken thought, became animal; in light, a plant. Lodged in the parent animal, it suffers changes, which end in unsheathing miraculous capability in the unaltered vesicle, and it unlocks itself to fish, bird, or quadruped, head and foot, eye and claw. The Circumstance is Nature. Nature is, what you may do. There is much you may not. We have two things, — the circumstance, and the life. Once we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn, that negative power, or circumstance, is half. Nature is the tyrannous circumstance, the thick skull, the sheathed snake, the ponderous, rock-like jaw; necessitated activity; violent direction; the conditions of a tool, like the locomotive, strong enough on its track, but which can do nothing but mischief off of it; or skates, which are wings on the ice, but fetters on the ground.
The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages, — leaf after leaf, — never returning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand ages, and a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of marl and mud: vegetable forms appear; her first misshapen animals, zoophyte, trilobium, fish; then, saurians, — rude forms, in which she has only blocked her future statue, concealing under these unwieldly monsters the fine type of her coming king. The face of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it comes no more again.
The population of the world is a conditional population not the best, but the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the steadiness with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to another, is as uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in history what weight belongs to race. We see the English, French, and Germans planting themselves on every shore and market of America and Australia, and monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain. Look at the unpalatable conclusions of Knox, in his “Fragment of Races,” — a rash and unsatisfactory writer, but charged with pungent and unforgetable truths. “Nature respects race, and not hybrids.” “Every race has its own habitat.” “Detach a colony from the race, and it deteriorates to the crab.” See the shades of the picture. The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie.
One more fagot of these adamantine bandages, is, the new science of Statistics. It is a rule, that the most casual and extraordinary events — if the basis of population is broad enough — become matter of fixed calculation. It would not be safe to say when a captain like Bonaparte, a singer like Jenny Lind, or a navigator like Bowditch, would be born in Boston: but, on a population of twenty or two hundred millions, something like accuracy may be had. 1
‘Tis frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as the need is. ‘Tis hard to find the right Homer Zoroaster, or Menu; harder still to find the Tubal Cain, or Vulcan, or Cadmus, or Copernicus, or Fust, or Fulton, the indisputable inventor. There are scores and centuries of them. “The air is full of men.” This kind of talent so abounds, this constructive tool-making efficiency, as if it adhered to the chemic atoms, as if the air he breathes were made of Vaucansons, Franklins, and Watts.
Doubtless, in every million there will be an astronomer, a mathematician, a comic poet, a mystic. No one can read the history of astronomy, without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empedocles, Aristarchus, Pythagoras,;oEnopides, had anticipated them; each had the same tense geometrical brain, apt for the same vigorous computation and logic, a mind parallel to the movement of the world. The Roman mile probably rested on a measure of a degree of the meridian. Mahometan and Chinese know what we know of leap-year, of the Gregorian calendar, and of the precession of the equinoxes. As, in every barrel of cowries, brought to New Bedford, there shall be one orangia, so there will, in a dozen millions of Malays and Mahometans, be one or two astronomical skulls. In a large city, the most casual things, and things whose beauty lies in their casualty, are produced as punctually and to order as the baker’s muffin for breakfast. Punch makes exactly one capital joke a week; and the journals contrive to furnish one good piece of news every day.
And not less work the laws of repression, the penalties of violated functions. Famine, typhus, frost, war, suicide, and effete races, must be reckoned calculable parts of the system of the world.
These are pebbles from the mountain, hints of the terms by which our life is walled up, and which show a kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom or mill, in what we call casual or fortuitous events.
The force with which we resist these torrents of tendency looks so ridiculously inadequate, that it amounts to little more than a criticism or a protest made by a minority of one, under compulsion of millions. I seemed, in the height of a tempest, to see men overboard struggling in the waves, and driven about here and there. They glanced intelligently at each other, but ‘twas little they could do for one another; ‘twas much if each could keep afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their eye-beams, and all the rest was Fate.
We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man’s power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.
The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate. If we are brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and dreadful shape. As we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form. In the Hindoo fables, Vishnu follows Maya through all her ascending changes, from insect and crawfish up to elephant; whatever form she took, he took the male form of that kind, until she became at last woman and goddess, and he a man and a god. The limitations refine as the soul purifies, but the ring of necessity is always perched at the top.
When the gods in the Norse heaven were unable to bind the Fenris Wolf with steel or with weight of mountains, — the one he snapped and the other he spurned with his heel — they put round his foot a limp band softer than silk or cobweb, and this held him: the more he spurned it, the stiffer it drew. So soft and so stanch is the ring of Fate. Neither brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hell-fire, nor ichor, nor poetry, nor genius, can get rid of this limp band. For if we give it the high sense in which the poets use it, even thought itself is not above Fate: that too must act according to eternal laws, and all that is wilful and fantastic in it is in opposition to its fundamental essence.
And, last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals, Fate appears as vindicator, levelling the high, lifting the low, requiring justice in man, and always striking soon or late, when justice is not done. What is useful will last; what is hurtful will sink. “The doer must suffer,” said the Greeks: “you would soothe a Deity not to be soothed.” “God himself cannot procure good for the wicked,” said the Welsh triad. “God may consent, but only for a time,” said the bard of Spain. The limitation is impassable by any insight of man. In its last and loftiest ascensions, insight itself, and the freedom of the will, is one of its obedient members. But we must not run into generalizations too large, but show the natural bounds or essential distinctions, and seek to do justice to the other elements as well.
Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind, and morals, — in race, in retardations of strata, and in thought and character as well. It is everywhere bound or limitation. But Fate has its lord; limitation its limits; is different seen from above and from below; from within and from without. For, though Fate is immense, so is power, which is the other fact in the dual world, immense. If Fate follows and limits power, power attends and antagonizes Fate. We must respect Fate as natural history, but there is more than natural history. For who and what is this criticism that pries into the matter? Man is not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and members, link in a chain, nor any ignominious baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the Universe. He betrays his relation to what is below him, — thick-skulled, small-brained, fishy, quadrumanous, — quadruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into biped, and has paid for the new powers by loss of some of the old ones. But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side, elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and, on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature, — here they are, side by side, god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.
Nor can he blink the freewill. To hazard the contradiction, — freedom is necessary. If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul. Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. And though nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a “Declaration of Independence,” or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act, yet it is wholesome to man to look not at Fate, but the other way: the practical view is the other. His sound relation to these facts is to use and command, not to cringe to them. “Look not on nature, for her name is fatal,” said the oracle. The too much contemplation of these limits induces meanness. They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, &c., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.
I cited the instinctive and heroic races as proud believers in Destiny. They conspire with it; a loving resignation is with the event. But the dogma makes a different impression, when it is held by the weak and lazy. ‘Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature. Rude and invincible except by themselves are the elements. So let man be. Let him empty his breast of his windy conceits, and show his lordship by manners and deeds on the scale of nature. Let him hold his purpose as with the tug of gravitation. No power, no persuasion, no bribe shall make him give up his point. A man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He shall have not less the flow, the expansion, and the resistance of these.
‘Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend’s house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.
For, if Fate is so prevailing, man also is part of it, and can confront fate with fate. If the Universe have these savage accidents, our atoms are as savage in resistance. We should be crushed by the atmosphere, but for the reaction of the air within the body. A tube made of a film of glass can resist the shock of the ocean, if filled with the same water. If there be omnipotence in the stroke, there is omnipotence of recoil.
1. But Fate against Fate is only parrying and defence: there are, also, the noble creative forces. The revelation of Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom. We rightly say of ourselves, we were born, and afterward we were born again, and many times. We have successive experiences so important, that the new forgets the old, and hence the mythology of the seven or the nine heavens. The day of days, the great day of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things, to the omnipresence of law; — sees that what is must be, and ought to be, or is the best. This beatitude dips from on high down on us, and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it. If the air come to our lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die. If the light come to our eyes, we see; else not. And if truth come to our mind, we suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds. We are as lawgivers; we speak for Nature; we prophesy and divine.
This insight throws us on the party and interest of the Universe, against all and sundry; against ourselves, as much as others. A man speaking from insight affirms of himself what is true of the mind: seeing its immortality, he says, I am immortal; seeing its invincibility, he says, I am strong. It is not in us, but we are in it. It is of the maker, not of what is made. All things are touched and changed by it. This uses, and is not used. It distances those who share it, from those who share it not. Those who share it not are flocks and herds. It dates from itself; — not from former men or better men, — gospel, or constitution, or college, or custom. Where it shines, Nature is no longer intrusive, but all things make a musical or pictorial impression. The world of men show like a comedy without laughter:— populations, interests, government, history; — ‘tis all toy figures in a toy house. It does not overvalue particular truths. We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from an intellectual man. But, in his presence, our own mind is roused to activity, and we forget very fast what he says, much more interested in the new play of our own thought, than in any thought of his. ‘Tis the majesty into which we have suddenly mounted, the impersonality, the scorn of egotisms, the sphere of laws, that engage us. Once we were stepping a little this way, and a little that way; now, we are as men in a balloon, and do not think so much of the point we have left, or the point we would make, as of the liberty and glory of the way.
