Uses of Great Men (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882

Uses of Great Men
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Representative Men, 1850.

It is natural to believe in great men. If the companions of our childhood should turn
out to be heroes, and their condition regal it would not surprise us. All mythology opens
with demigods, and the circumstance is high and poetic; that is, their genius is
paramount. In the legends of the Gautama, the first men ate the earth and found it
deliciously sweet.

Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The world is upheld by the veracity of good
men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and
nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society; and, actually
or ideally, we manage to live with superiors. We call our children and our lands by their
names. Their names are wrought into the verbs of language, their works and effigies are in
our houses, and every circumstance of the day recalls an anecdote of them.

The search after the great man is the dream of youth and the most serious occupation of
manhood. We travel into foreign parts to find his works,- if possible, to get a glimpse of
him. But we are put off with fortune instead. You say, the English are practical; the
Germans are hospitable; in Valencia the climate is delicious; and in the hills of the
Sacramento there is gold for the gathering. Yes, but I do not travel to find comfortable,
rich and hospitable people, or clear sky, or ingots that cost too much. But if there were
any magnet that would point to the countries and houses where are the persons who are
intrinsically rich and powerful, I would sell all and buy it, and put myself on the road
today.

The race goes with us on their credit. The knowledge that in the city is a man who
invented the railroad, raises the credit of all the citizens. But enormous populations, if
they be beggars, are disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or of fleas,- the
more, the worse.

Our religion is the love and cherishing of these patrons. The gods of fable are the
shining moments of great men. We run all our vessels into one mould. Our colossal
theologies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the necessary and structural
action of the human mind. The student of history is like a man going into a warehouse to
buy cloths or carpets. He fancies he has a new article. If he go to the factory, he shall
find that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and rosettes which are found on the
interior walls of the pyramids of Thebes. Our theism is the purification of the human
mind. Man can paint, or make, or think, nothing but man. He believes that the great
material elements had their origin from his thought. And our philosophy finds one essence
collected or distributed.

If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds of service we derive from others, let us be
warned of the danger of modern studies, and begin low enough. We must not contend against
love, or deny the substantial existence of other people. I know not what would happen to
us. We have social strengths. Our affection toward others creates a sort of vantage or
purchase which nothing will supply. I can do that by another which I cannot do alone. I
can say to you what I cannot first say to myself. Other men are lenses through which we
read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as
are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest. The stronger the
nature, the more it is reactive. Let us have the quality pure. A little genius let us
leave alone. A main difference betwixt men is, whether they attend their own affair or
not. Man is that noble endogenous plant which grows, like the palm, from within outward.
His own affair, though impossible to others, he can open with celerity and in sport. It is
easy to sugar to be sweet and to nitre to be salt. We take a great deal of pains to waylay
and entrap that which of itself will fall into our hands. I count him a great man who
inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty;
he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light and in large relations, whilst
they must make painful corrections and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error. His
service to us is of like sort. It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image
on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey
his quality to other men. And every one can do his best thing easiest. “Peu de moyens, beaucoup d’effet.” He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never
reminds us of others.

But he must be related to us, and our life receive from him some promise of
explanation. I cannot tell what I would know; but I have observed there are persons who,
in their character and actions, answer questions which I have not skill to put. One man
answers some question which none of his contemporaries put, and is isolated. The past and
passing religions and philosophies answer some other questions. Certain men affect us as
rich possibilities, but helpless to themselves and to their times,- the sport perhaps of
some instinct that rules in the air;- they do not speak to our want. But the great are
near; we know them at sight. They satisfy expectation and fall into place. What is good is
effective, generative; makes for itself room, food and allies. A sound apple produces
seed,- a hybrid does not. Is a man in his place, he is constructive, fertile, magnetic,
inundating armies with his purpose, which is thus executed. The river makes its own
shores, and each legitimate idea makes its own channels and welcome,- harvests for food,
institutions for expression, weapons to fight with and disciples to explain it. The true
artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing
broader than his own shoes.

Our common discourse respects two kinds of use or service from superior men. Direct
giving is agreeable to the early belief of men; direct giving of material or metaphysical
aid, as of health, eternal youth, fine senses, arts of healing, magical power and
prophecy. The boy believes there is a teacher who can sell him wisdom. Churches believe in
imputed merit. But, in strictness, we are not much cognizant of direct serving. Man is
endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical
compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the
doing, and the effect remains. Right ethics are central and go from the soul outward. Gift
is contrary to the law of the universe. Serving others is serving us. I must absolve me to
myself. “Mind thy affair,” says the spirit:- “coxcomb, would you meddle
with the skies, or with other people?” Indirect service is left. Men have a pictorial
or representative quality, and serve us in the intellect. Behmen (*1)
and Swedenborg saw that things were representative. Men are also representative; first, of
things, and secondly, of ideas.

As plants convert the minerals into food for animals, so each man converts some raw
material in nature to human use. The inventors of fire, electricity, magnetism, iron,
lead, glass, linen, silk, cotton; the makers of tools; the inventor of decimal notation;
the geometer; the engineer; the musician,- severally make an easy way for all, through
unknown and impossible confusions. Each man is by secret liking connected with some
district of nature, whose agent and interpreter he is; as Linnaeus, of plants; Huber, of
bees; Fries, of lichens; Van Mons, of pears; Dalton, of atomic forms; Euclid, of lines;
Newton, of fluxions.

A man is a centre for nature, running out threads of relation through every thing,
fluid and solid, material and elemental. The earth rolls; every clod and stone comes to
the meridian: so every organ, function, acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its relation to
the brain. It waits long, but its turn comes. Each plant has its parasite, and each
created thing its lover and poet. Justice has already been done to steam, to iron, to
wood, to coal, to loadstone, to iodine, to corn and cotton; but how few materials are yet
used by our arts The mass of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant. It
would seem as if each waited, like the enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined
human deliverer. Each must be disenchanted and walk forth to the day in human shape. In
the history of discovery, the ripe and latent truth seems to have fashioned a brain for
itself. A magnet must be made man in some Gilbert (*2) or
Swedenborg, or Oerstad, before the general mind can come to entertain its powers.

If we limit ourselves to the first advantages, a sober grace adheres to the mineral and
botanic kingdoms, which, in the highest moments, comes up as the charm of nature,- the
glitter of the spar, the sureness of affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness,
heat and cold, hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid and gas, circle us round in
a wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable quarrel, beguile the day of life. The eye
repeats every day the first eulogy on things,- “He saw that they were good.” We
know where to find them; and these performers are relished all the more, after a little
experience of the pretending races. We are entitled also to higher advantages. Something
is wanting to science until it has been humanized. The table of logarithms is one thing,
and its vital play in botany, music, optics and architecture, another. There are
advancements to numbers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little suspected at first,
when, by union with intellect and will, they ascend into the life and reappear in
conversation, character and politics.

But this comes later. We speak now only of our acquaintance with them in their own
sphere and the way in which they seem to fascinate and draw to them some genius who
occupies himself with one thing, all his life long. The possibility of interpretation lies
in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial
side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere where
it plays a part as indestructible as any other. And to these, their ends, all things
continually ascend. The gases gather to the solid firmament: the chemic lump arrives at
the plant, and grows; arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives at the man, and thinks.
But also the constituency determines the vote of the representative. He is not only
representative, but participant. Like can only be known by like. The reason why he knows
about them is that he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part of
that thing. Animated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate zinc, of zinc. Their
quality makes his career; and he can variously publish their virtues, because they compose
him. Man, made of the dust of the world, does not forget his origin; and all that is yet
inanimate will one day speak and reason. Unpublished nature will have its whole secret
told. Shall we say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innumerable Werners, Von
Buchs and Beaumonts, and the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solution I know not
what Berzeliuses and Davys?

Thus we sit by the fire and take hold on the poles of the earth. This quasi
omnipresence supplies the imbecility of our condition. In one of those celestial days when
heaven and earth meet and adorn each other, it seems a poverty that we can only spend it
once: we wish for a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its immense
beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good faith, we are multiplied by
our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors! Every ship that comes to America got its
chart from Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a
fore-plane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all round with a
zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light
to our sky. Engineer, broker, jurist, physician, moralist, theologian, and every man,
inasmuch as he has any science,- is a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and
longitudes of our condition. These roadmakers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the
area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a new property
in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.

We are too passive in the reception of these material or semi-material aids. We must
not be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one step,- we are better served through our sympathy.
Activity is contagious. Looking where others look, and conversing with the same things, we
catch the charm which lured them. Napoleon said, “You must not fight too often with
one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.” Talk much with any man of
vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of looking at things in the same light,
and on each occurrence we anticipate his thought.

Men are helpful through the intellect and the affections. Other help I find a false
appearance. If you affect to give me bread and fire, I perceive that I pay for it the full
price, and at last it leaves me as it found me, neither better nor worse: but all mental
and moral force is a positive good. It goes out from you, whether you will or not, and
profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear of personal vigor of any kind,
great power of performance, without fresh resolution. We are emulous of all that man can
do. Cecil’s saying of Sir Walter Raleigh, “I know that he can toil terribly,” is
an electric touch. So are Clarendon’s portraits,- of Hampden, “who was of an industry
and vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the most laborious, and of parts not to be
imposed on by the most subtle and sharp, and of a personal courage equal to his best
parts”;- of Falkland, “who was so severe an adorer of truth, that he could as
easily have given himself leave to steal, as to dissemble.” We cannot read Plutarch
without a tingling of the blood; and I accept the saying of the Chinese Mencius: “A
sage is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the manners of Loo are heard of, the stupid
become intelligent, and the wavering, determined.”

This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to touch the quick like
our own companions, whose names may not last as long. What is he whom I never think of?
Whilst in every solitude are those who succor our genius and stimulate us in wonderful
manners. There is a power in love to divine another’s destiny better than that other can,
and, by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its
sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us? We will never more think cheaply of
ourselves, or of life. We are piqued to some purpose, and the industry of the diggers on
the railroad will not again shame us.

Under this head too falls that homage, very pure as I think, which all ranks pay to the
hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington,
Webster, Lamartine. Hear the shouts in the street! The people cannot see him enough. They
delight in a man. Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! what eyes! Atlantean
shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal inward force to guide the great
machine! This pleasure of full expression to that which, in their private experience, is
usually cramped and obstructed, runs also much higher, and is the secret of the reader’s
joy in literary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse the mountain of
ore. Shakespeare’s principal merit may be conveyed in saying that he of all men best
understands the English language, and can say what he will. Yet these unchoked channels
and floodgates of expression are only health or fortunate constitution. Shakespeare’s name
suggests other and purely intellectual benefits.

Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with their medals, swords and armorial
coats, like the addressing to a human being thoughts out of a certain height, and
presupposing his intelligence. This honor, which is possible in personal intercourse
scarcely twice in a lifetime, genius perpetually pays; contented if now and then in a
century the proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of matter are degraded to a
sort of cooks and confectioners, on the appearance of the indicators of ideas. Genius is
the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by
acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at
once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.

We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power and beauty of the body;
there is the like pleasure and a higher benefit from witnessing intellectual feats of all
kinds; as feats of memory, of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the
transmutings of the imagination, even versatility and concentration,- as these acts expose
the invisible organs and members of the mind, which respond, member for member, to the
parts of the body. For we thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their
truest marks, taught, with Plato, “to choose those who can, without aid from the eyes
or any other sense, proceed to truth and to being.” Foremost among these activities
are the summersaults, spells and resurrections wrought by the imagination. When this
wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times his force. It opens the
delicious sense of indeterminate size and inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as
elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in
conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and
our feet tread the floor of the Pit. And this benefit is real because we are entitled to
these enlargements, and once having passed the bounds shall never again be quite the
miserable pedants we were.

The high functions of the intellect are so allied that some imaginative power usually
appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of the first class, but especially in
meditative men of an intuitive habit of thought. This class serve us, so that they have
the perception of identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakespeare,
Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception of these laws is a
kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little through failure to see them.

Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight in reason degenerates into idolatry
of the herald. Especially when a mind of powerful method has instructed men, we find the
examples of oppression. The dominion of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of
Luther, of Bacon, of Locke;- in religion the history of hierarchies, of saints, and the
sects which have taken the name of each founder, are in point. Alas! every man is such a
victim. The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power. It is the delight
of vulgar talent to dazzle and to blind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us
from itself. True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate, and add new senses. If a
wise man should appear in our village he would create, in those who conversed with him, a
new consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to unobserved advantages; he would
establish a sense of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be
cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guaranties of condition. The rich would
see their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes and their resources.

But nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her remedy. The soul is
impatient of masters and eager for change. Housekeepers say of a domestic who has been
valuable, “She had lived with me long enough.” We are tendencies, or rather,
symptoms, and none of us complete. We touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives.
Rotation is the law of nature. When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon
for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In
some other and quite different field the next man will appear; not Jefferson, not
Franklin, but now a great salesman, then a road-contractor, then a student of fishes, then
a buffalo-hunting explorer, or a semi-savage Western general. Thus we make a stand against
our rougher masters; but against the best there is a finer remedy. The power which they
communicate is not theirs. When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but
to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.

I must not forget that we have a special debt to a single class. Life is a scale of
degrees. Between rank and rank of our great men are wide intervals. Mankind have in all
ages attached themselves to a few persons who either by the quality of that idea they
embodied or by the largeness of their reception were entitled to the position of leaders
and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary nature,- admit us to the
constitution of things. We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions and are effectually
amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is
a sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, “Let there be an entrance opened for me into
realities; (*3) I have worn the fool’s cap too long.” We
will know the meaning of our economies and politics. Give us the cipher, and if persons
and things are scores of a celestial music, let us read off the strains. We have been
cheated of our reason; yet there have been sane men, who enjoyed a rich and related
existence. What they know, they know for us. With each new mind, a new secret of nature
transpires; nor can the Bible be closed until the last great man is born. These men
correct the delirium of the animal spirits, make us considerate and engage us to new aims
and powers. The veneration of mankind selects these for the highest place. Witness the
multitude of statues, pictures and memorials which recall their genius in every city,
village, house and ship:-

“Ever their phantoms arise before us,
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
At bed and table they lord it o’er us
With looks of beauty and words of good.”

How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service rendered by those who
introduce moral truths into the general mind?- I am plagued, in all my living, with a
perpetual tariff of prices. If I work in my garden and prune an apple-tree, I am well
enough entertained, and could continue indefinitely in the like occupation. But it comes
to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this precious nothing done. I go to Boston or
New York and run up and down on my affairs: they are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed
by the recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling advantage. I remember the
peau d’ane on which whoso sat should have his desire, but a piece of the skin was gone for
every wish. I go to a convention of philanthropists. Do what I can, I cannot keep my eyes
off the clock. But if there should appear in the company some gentle soul who knows little
of persons or parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that disposes these
particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which checkmates every false player,
bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of my independence on any conditions of
country, or time, or human body,- that man liberates me; I forget the clock. I pass out of
the sore relation to persons. I am healed of my hurts. I am made immortal by apprehending
my possession of incorruptible goods. Here is great competition of rich and poor. We live
in a market, where is only so much wheat, or wool, or land; and if I have so much more,
every other must have so much less. I seem to have no good without breach of good manners.
Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious
superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our
system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies and hatreds of his
competitors. But in these new fields there is room: here are no self-esteems, no
exclusions.

I admire great men of all classes, those who stand for facts, and for thoughts; I like
rough and smooth, “Scourges of God,” and “Darlings of the human race.”
I like the first Caesar; and Charles V, of Spain; and Charles XII, of Sweden; Richard
Plantagenet; and Bonaparte, in France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer equal to his
office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing firm on legs of iron,
wellborn, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by fascination
into tributaries and supporters of his power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or
staff-like, carry on the work of the world. But I find him greater when he can abolish
himself and all heroes, by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of persons,
this subtilizer and irresistible upward force, into our thought, destroying individualism;
the power so great that the potentate is nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives a
constitution to his people; a pontiff who preaches the equality of souls and releases his
servants from their barbarous homages; an emperor who can spare his empire.

But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three points of service.
Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe, but wherever she mars her creature with some
deformity or defect, lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes
joyfully through life, ignorant of the ruin and incapable of seeing it, though all the
world point their finger at it every day. The worthless and offensive members of society,
whose existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people
alive, and never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their
contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in heroes and archangels,
but in gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare contrivance that lodged the due inertia in
every creature, the conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or changed?
Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each is the pride of opinion, the
security that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame, not a mowing idiot, but uses what
spark of perception and faculty is left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over
the absurdities of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of absurdity. Not one
has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright thought that made things cohere with
this bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the midst of this chuckle of self-gratulation,
some figure goes by which Thersites too can love and admire. This is he that should
marshal us the way we were going. There is no end to his aid. Without Plato we should
almost lose our faith in the possibility of a reasonable book. We seem to want but one,
but we want one. We love to associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity is
unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners easily become great. We are all
wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There needs but one wise man in a company and
all are wise, so rapid is the contagion.

Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism and enable us to see
other people and their works. But there are vices and follies incident to whole
populations and ages. Men resemble their contemporaries even more than their progenitors.
It is observed in old couples, or in persons who have been housemates for a course of
years, that they grow like, and if they should live long enough we should not be able to
know them apart. Nature abhors these complaisances which threaten to melt the world into a
lump, and hastens to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes on
between men of one town, of one sect, of one political party; and the ideas of the time
are in the air, and infect all who breathe it. Viewed from any high point, this city of
New York, yonder city of London, the Western civilization, would seem a bundle of
insanities. We keep each other in countenance and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of
the time. The shield against the stingings of conscience is the universal practice, or our
contemporaries. Again, it is very easy to be as wise and good as your companions. We learn
of our contemporaries what they know without effort, and almost through the pores of the
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife arrives at the intellectual and moral
elevations of her husband. But we stop where they stop. Very hardly can we take another
step. The great, or such as hold of nature and transcend fashions by their fidelity to
universal ideas, are saviors from these federal errors, (*4) and
defend us from our contemporaries. They are the exceptions which we want, where all grows
like. A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism.

Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much conversation with our
mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that direction in which he leads us. What
indemnification is one great man for populations of pigmies! Every mother wishes one son a
genius, though all the rest should be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the excess of
influence of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have become
underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help;- other great
men, new qualities, counterweights and checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each
peculiar greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not
bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, even, “I pray you, let me never hear that
man’s name again.” They cry up the virtues of George Washington,- “Damn George
Washington!” is the poor Jacobin’s whole speech and confutation. But it is human
nature’s indispensable defence. The centripetence augments the centrifugence. We balance
one man with his opposite, and the health of the state depends on the see-saw.

There is however a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius is defended from
approach by quantities of unavailableness. They are very attractive, and seem at a
distance our own: but we are hindered on all sides from approach. The more we are drawn,
the more we are repelled. There is something not solid in the good that is done for us.
The best discovery the discoverer makes for himself. It has something unreal for his
companion until he too has substantiated it. It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul
which he sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men,
and sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote, “Not
transferable” and “Good for this trip only,” on these garments of the soul.
There is somewhat deceptive about the intercourse of minds. The boundaries are invisible,
but they are never crossed. There is such good will to impart, and such good will to
receive, that each threatens to become the other; but the law of individuality collects
its secret strength: you are you, and I am I, and so we remain.

For nature wishes every thing to remain itself; and whilst every individual strives to
grow and exclude and to exclude and grow, to the extremities of the universe, and to
impose the law of its being on every other creature, Nature steadily aims to protect each
against every other. Each is self-defended. Nothing is more marked than the power by which
individuals are guarded from individuals, in a world where every benefactor becomes so
easily a malefactor only by continuation of his activity into places where it is not due;
where children seem so much at the mercy of their foolish parents, and where almost all
men are too social and interfering. We rightly speak of the guardian angels of children.
How superior in their security from infusions of evil persons, from vulgarity and second
thought! They shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they behold. Therefore they
are not at the mercy of such poor educators as we adults. If we huff and chide them they
soon come not to mind it and get a self-reliance; and if we indulge them to folly, they
learn the limitation elsewhere.

We need not fear excessive influence. A more generous trust is permitted. Serve the
great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office thou canst render. Be the limb of their
body, the breath of their mouth. Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou gain
aught wider and nobler? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism: the devotion may easily be
greater than the wretched pride which is guarding its own skirts. Be another: not thyself,
but a Platonist; not a soul, but a Christian; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian; not a
poet, but a Shakespearean. In vain, the wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will all the
forces of inertia, fear, or of love itself hold thee there. On, and forever onward! The
microscope observes a monad or wheel-insect among the infusories circulating in water.
Presently a dot appears on the animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two
perfect animals. The ever-proceeding detachment appears not less in all thought and in
society. Children think they cannot live without their parents. But, long before they are
aware of it, the black dot has appeared and the detachment taken place. Any accident will
now reveal to them their independence.

But great men:- the word is injurious. Is there caste? Is there fate? What becomes of
the promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments the superfoetation of nature.
“Generous and handsome,” he says, “is your hero; but look at yonder poor
Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow; look at his whole nation of Paddies.” Why
are the masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea
dignifies a few leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, self-devotion; and they make
war and death sacred;- but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of
man is every day’s tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be as low as that we
should be low; for we must have society.

Is it a reply to these suggestions to say, Society is a Pestalozzian school: all are
teachers and pupils in turn? We are equally served by receiving and by imparting. Men who
know the same things are not long the best company for each other. But bring to each an
intelligent person of another experience, and it is as if you let off water from a lake by
cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechanical advantage, and great benefit it is to each
speaker, as he can now paint out his thought to himself. We pass very fast, in our
personal moods, from dignity to dependence. And if any appear never to assume the chair,
but always to stand and serve, it is because we do not see the company in a sufficiently
long period for the whole rotation of parts to come about. As to what we call the masses,
and common men,- there are no common men. All men are at last of a size; and true art is
only possible on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair play
and an open field and freshest laurels to all who have won them! But heaven reserves an
equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy until he has produced his private ray unto
the concave sphere and beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.

The heroes of the hour are relatively great; of a faster growth; or they are such in
whom, at the moment of success, a quality is ripe which is then in request. Other days
will demand other qualities. Some rays escape the common observer, and want a finely
adapted eye. Ask the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not the
less great but the more that society cannot see them. Nature never sends a great man into
the planet without confiding the secret to another soul.

One gracious fact emerges from these studies,- that there is true ascension in our
love. The reputations of the nineteenth century will one day be quoted to prove its
barbarism. The genius of humanity is the real subject whose biography is written in our
annals. We must infer much, and supply many chasms in the record. The history of the
universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all the procession of famous
men, is reason or illumination or that essence we were looking for; but is an exhibition,
in some quarter, of new possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense figure which
these flagrant (*5) points compose! The study of many individuals
leads us to an elemental region wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch by
their summits. Thought and feeling that break out there cannot be impounded by any fence
of personality. This is the key to the power of the greatest men,- their spirit diffuses
itself. A new quality of mind travels by night and by day, in concentric circles from its
origin, and publishes itself by unknown methods: the union of all minds appears intimate;
what gets admission to one, cannot be kept out of any other; the smallest acquisition of
truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so much good to the commonwealth of souls. If the
disparities of talent and position vanish when the individuals are seen in the duration
which is necessary to complete the career of each, even more swiftly the seeming injustice
disappears when we ascend to the central identity of all the individuals, and know that
they are made of the substance which ordaineth and doeth.

The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The qualities abide; the
men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and pass away; the qualities remain on
another brow. No experience is more familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone; the
world is not therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems turn out
to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred, and you may still read them
transferred to the walls of the world. For a time our teachers serve us personally, as
metres or milestones of progress. Once they were angels of knowledge and their figures
touched the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture and limits; and they yielded
their place to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names remain so high that we have not been
able to read them nearer, and age and comparison have not robbed them of a ray. But at
last we shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall content ourselves with
their social and delegated quality. All that respects the individual is temporary and
prospective, like the individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a
catholic existence. We have never come at the true and best benefit of any genius so long
as we believe him an original force. In the moment when he ceases to help us as a cause,
he begins to help us more as an effect. Then he appears as an exponent of a vaster mind
and will. The opaque self becomes transparent with the light of the First Cause.

Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say great men exist that
there may be greater men. The destiny of organized nature is amelioration, and who can
tell its limits? It is for man to tame the chaos; on every side, whilst he lives, to
scatter the seeds of science and of song, that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder,
and the germs of love and benefit may be multiplied. (*6)

[Notes from the Centenary Edition of Emerson’s Complete Works, edited by his son,
Edward Waldo Emerson:]

*(1) Jacob Behmen, or Boehme, a Silesian of humble birth in the sixteenth
century, a mystic whose writings later attracted much attention. Mr. Emerson was early
interested in his works and often mentions them.

*(2) William Gilbert (1540-1603), the greatest man of science of Queen
Elizabeth’s reign, especially noted for his discovery that the earth is a great magnet.

*(3) That is, the ideal, instead of the outward shows of things.

*(4) federal errors: a Latinism for mistakes sanctioned by custom.

*(5) flagrant: a Latinism suggesting that, in the general dimness, the
outlines of the human world may be found in its blazing beacon lights.

*(6) The constant security of Mr Emerson’s belief in Evolution in its
highest sense appears hear as elsewhere in his prose and verse, and also his belief in the
genius of mankind, which is another word for Universal Mind.

* * *

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Plato; or, the Philosopher (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882

Plato; or, the Philosopher
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Representative Men, 1850

AMONG secular (*7) books, Plato only is entitled to Omar’s (*8) fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said, “Burn
the libraries; for their value is in this book.” These sentences contain the culture
of nations; these are the corner-stone of schools; these are the fountain-head of
literatures. A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry, language,
rhetoric, ontology, morals or practical wisdom. There was never such range of speculation.
Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought.
Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all
these drift boulders were detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-two hundred years,
every brisk young man who says in succession fine things to each reluctant generation,-
Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge,- is some reader
of Plato, translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the men of
grander proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune (shall I say?) of coming
after this exhausting generalizer. St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg,
Goethe, are likewise his debtors and must say after him. For it is fair to credit the
broadest generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his thesis.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,- at once the glory and the shame of
mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories. No
wife, no children had he, and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity and
are tinged with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of
night, to be his men,- Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation of genius; the
Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon,
Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus and Picus
Mirandola. Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws all its
philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly, from him. Mysticism finds in
Plato all its texts. This citizen of a town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An
Englishman reads and says, “how English!” a German- “how Teutonic!” an
Italian- “how Roman and how Greek!” As they say that Helen of Argos had that
universal beauty that every body felt related to her, so Plato seems to a reader in New
England an American genius. His broad humanity transcends all sectional lines.

This range of Plato instructs us what to think of the vexed question concerning his
reputed works,- what are genuine, what spurious. It is singular that wherever we find a
man higher by a whole head than any of his contemporaries, it is sure to come into doubt
what are his real works. Thus Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, Shakespeare. For these men
magnetize their contemporaries, so that their companions can do for them what they can
never do for themselves; and the great man does thus live in several bodies, and write, or
paint or act, by many hands; and after some time it is not easy to say what is the
authentic work of the master and what is only of his school.

Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his own times. What is a great man but one
of great affinities, who takes up into himself all arts, sciences, all knowables, as his
food? He can spare nothing; he can dispose of every thing. What is not good for virtue, is
good for knowledge. Hence his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But the inventor
only knows how to borrow; and society is glad to forget the innumerable laborers who
ministered to this architect, and reserves all its gratitude for him. When we are praising
Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and
stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. And this grasping
inventor puts all nations under contribution.

Plato absorbed the learning of his times,- Philolaus, Timaeus, Heraclitus, Parmenides,
and what else; then his master, Socrates; and finding himself still capable of a larger
synthesis,- beyond all example then or since,- he traveled into Italy, to gain what
Pythagoras had for him; then into Egypt, and perhaps still farther East, to import the
other element, which Europe wanted, into the European mind. This breadth entitles him to
stand as the representative of philosophy. He says, in the Republic, “Such a genius
as philosophers must of necessity have, is wont but seldom in all its parts to meet in one
man, but its different parts generally spring up in different persons.” Every man who
would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground. A philosopher must be more
than a philosopher. Plato is clothed with the powers of a poet, stands upon the highest
place of the poet, and (though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric expression),
mainly is not a poet because he chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior purpose.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about
them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and
commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their
readers most resembles them. Plato especially has no external biography. If he had lover,
wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them all into paint. As a good
chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his
intellectual performances.

He was born 427 A.C., about the time of the death of Pericles; was of patrician
connection in his times and city, and is said to have had an early inclination for war,
but, in his twentieth year, meeting with Socrates, was easily dissuaded from this pursuit
and remained for ten years his scholar, until the death of Socrates. He then went to
Megara, accepted the invitations of Dion and of Dionysius to the court of Sicily, and went
thither three times, though very capriciously treated. He traveled into Italy; then into
Egypt, where he stayed a long time; some say three,- some say thirteen years. It is said
he went farther, into Babylonia: this is uncertain. Returning to Athens, he gave lessons
in the Academy to those whom his fame drew thither; and died, as we have received it, in
the act of writing, at eighty-one years.

But the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the supreme elevation of
this man in the intellectual history of our race,- how it happens that in proportion to
the culture of men they become his scholars; that, as our Jewish Bible has implanted
itself in the tabletalk and household life of every man and woman in the European and
American nations, so the writings of Plato have preoccupied every school of learning,
every lover of thought, every church, every poet,- making it impossible to think, on
certain levels, except through him. He stands between the truth and every man’s mind, and
has almost impressed language and the primary forms of thought with his name and seal. I
am struck, in reading him, with the extreme modernness of his style and spirit. Here is
the germ of that Europe we know so well, in its long history of arts and arms; here are
all its traits, already discernible in the mind of Plato,- and in none before him. It has
spread itself since into a hundred histories, but has added no new element. This perpetual
modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art; since the author of it was not
misled by any thing short-lived or local, but abode by real and abiding traits. How Plato
came thus to be Europe, and philosophy, and almost literature, is the problem for us to
solve.

This could not have happened without a sound, sincere and catholic man, able to honor,
at the same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind, and fate, or the order of nature. The
first period of a nation, as of an individual, is the period of unconscious strength.
Children cry, scream and stamp with fury, unable to express their desires. As soon as they
can speak and tell their want and the reason of it, they become gentle. In adult life,
whilst the perceptions are obtuse, men and women talk vehemently and superlatively,
blunder and quarrel: their manners are full of desperation; their speech is full of oaths.
As soon as, with culture, things have cleared up a little, and they see them no longer in
lumps and masses but accurately distributed, they desist from that weak vehemence and
explain their meaning in detail. If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man
would still be a beast in the forest. The same weakness and want, on a higher plane,
occurs daily in the education of ardent young men and women. “Ah! you don’t
understand me; I have never met with any one who comprehends me”: and they sigh and
weep, write verses and walk alone,- fault of power to express their precise meaning. In a
month or two, through the favor of their good genius, they meet some one so related as to
assist their volcanic estate, and, good communication being once established, they are
thenceforward good citizens. It is ever thus. The progress is to accuracy, to skill, to
truth, from blind force.

There is a moment in the history of every nation, when, proceeding out of this brute
youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic: so
that man, at that instant, extends across the entire scale, and, with his feet still
planted on the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar and
stellar creation. That is the moment of adult health, the culmination of power.

Such is the history of Europe, in all points; and such in philosophy. Its early
records, almost perished, are of the immigrations from Asia, bringing with them the dreams
of barbarians; a confusion of crude notions of morals and of natural philosophy, gradually
subsiding through the partial insight of single teachers.

Before Pericles came the Seven Wise Masters, and we have the beginnings of geometry,
metaphysics and ethics: then the partialists,- deducing the origin of things from flux or
water, or from air, or from fire, or from mind. All mix with these causes mythologic
pictures. At last comes Plato, the distributor, who needs no barbaric point, or tattoo, or
whooping; for he can define. He leaves with Asia the vast and superlative; he is the
arrival of accuracy and intelligence. “He shall be as a god to me, who can rightly
divide and define.”

This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to
itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the
one, and the two: 1. Unity, or Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite all things by
perceiving the law which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences and the
profound resemblances. But every mental act,- this very perception of identity or oneness,
recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or
to think without embracing both.

The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many effects; then for the cause of that; and
again the cause, diving still into the profound: self-assured that it shall arrive at an
absolute and sufficient one,- a one that shall be all. “In the midst of the sun is
the light, in the midst of the light is truth, and in the midst of truth is the
imperishable being,” say the Vedas. All philosophy, of East and West, has the same
centripetence. Urged by an opposite necessity, the mind returns from the one to that which
is not one, but other or many; from cause to effect; and affirms the necessary existence
of variety, the self-existence of both, as each is involved in the other. These
strictly-blended elements it is the problem of thought to separate and to reconcile. Their
existence is mutually contradictory and exclusive; and each so fast slides into the other
that we can never say what is one, and what it is not. The Proteus is as nimble in the
highest as in the lowest grounds; when we contemplate the one, the true, the good,- as in
the surfaces and extremities of matter.

In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the
fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all being in one
Being. This tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East,
and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu
Purana. Those writings contain little else than this idea, and they rise to pure and
sublime strains in celebrating it.

The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough and the
furrow are of one stuff; and the stuff is such and so much that the variations of form are
unimportant. “You are fit” (says the supreme Krishna to a sage) “to
apprehend that you are not distinct from me. That which I am, thou art, and that also is
this world, with its gods and heroes and mankind. Men contemplate distinctions, because
they are stupefied with ignorance.” “The words I and mine constitute ignorance.
What is the great end of all, you shall now learn from me. It is soul,- one in all bodies,
pervading, uniform, perfect, preeminent over nature, exempt from birth, growth and decay,
omnipresent, made up of true knowledge, independent, unconnected with unrealities, with
name, species and the rest, in time past, present and to come. The knowledge that this
spirit, which is essentially one, is in one’s own and in all other bodies, is the wisdom
of one who knows the unity of things. As one diffusive air, passing through the
perforations of a flute, is distinguished as the notes of a scale, so the nature of the
Great Spirit is single, though its forms be manifold, arising from the consequences of
acts. When the difference of the investing form, as that of god or the rest, is destroyed,
there is no distinction.” “The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu, who
is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise as not differing from, but
as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor coming; nor is my dwelling in any one
place; nor art thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am I, I.” As if he had said,
“All is for the soul, and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient
paintings; and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment;
and heaven itself a decoy.” That which the soul seeks is resolution into being above
form, out of Tartarus and out of heaven,- liberation from nature.

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action
tends directly backwards to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the
second is the power of nature. Nature is the manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or
reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all
things, all thought; the one, the many. One is being; the other, intellect: one is
necessity; the other, freedom: one, rest; the other, motion: one, power; the other,
distribution: one, strength; the other, pleasure: one, consciousness; the other,
definition: one, genius; the other, talent: one, earnestness; the other, knowledge: one,
possession; the other, trade: one, caste; the other, culture: one, king; the other,
democracy: and, if we dare carry these generalizations a step higher, and name the last
tendency of both, we might say, that the end of the one is escape from organization,- pure
science; and the end of the other is the highest instrumentality, or use of means, or
executive deity.

Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or to the second of
these gods of the mind. By religion, he tends to unity; by intellect, or by the senses, to
the many. A too rapid unification, and an excessive appliance to parts and particulars,
are the twin dangers of speculation.

To this partiality the history of nations corresponded. The country of unity, of
immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in abstractions, of men
faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is
Asia; and it realizes this faith in the social institution of caste. On the other side,
the genius of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its philosophy
was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the East loved
infinity, the West delighted in boundaries.

European civility is the triumph of talent, the extension of system, the sharpened
understanding, adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight in manifestation, in
comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens, Greece, had been working in this element with
the joy of genius not yet chilled by any foresight of the detriment of an excess. They saw
before them no sinister political economy; no ominous Malthus; no Paris or London; no
pitiless subdivision of classes,- the doom of the pin-makers, the doom of the weavers, of
dressers, of stockingers, of carders, of spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no Indian
caste, superinduced by the efforts of Europe to throw it off. The understanding was in its
health and prime. Art was in its splendid novelty. They cut the Pentelican marble as if it
were snow, and their perfect works in architecture and sculpture seemed things of course,
not more difficult than the completion of a new ship at the Medford yards, or new mills at
Lowell. These things are in course, and may be taken for granted. The Roman legion,
Byzantine legislation, English trade, the saloons of Versailles, the cafes of Paris, the
steam-mill, steamboat, steam-coach, may all be seen in perspective; the town-meeting, the
ballot-box, the newspaper and cheap press.

Meantime, Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in
which all things are absorbed. The unity of Asia and the detail of Europe; the infinitude
of the Asiatic soul and the defining, result-loving, machine-making, surface-seeking,
opera-going Europe,- Plato came to join, and, by contact, to enhance the energy of each.
The excellence of Europe and Asia are in his brain. Metaphysics and natural philosophy
expressed the genius of Europe; he substructs the religion of Asia, as the base.

In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two elements. It is as easy to be
great as to be small. The reason why we do not at once believe in admirable souls is
because they are not in our experience. In actual life, they are so rare as to be
incredible; but primarily there is not only no presumption against them, but the strongest
presumption in favor of their appearance. But whether voices were heard in the sky, or
not; whether his mother or his father dreamed that the infant man-child was the son of
Apollo; whether a swarm of bees settled on his lips, or not;- a man who could see two
sides of a thing was born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature; the upper and
the under side of the medal of Jove; the union of impossibilities, which reappears in
every object; its real and its ideal power,- was now also transferred entire to the
consciousness of a man.

The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract truth, he saved himself by propounding the
most popular of all principles, the absolute good, which rules rulers, and judges the
judge. If he made transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by drawing all his
illustrations from sources disdained by orators and polite conversers; from mares and
puppies; from pitchers and soup-ladles; from cooks and criers; the shops of potters,
horse-doctors, butchers and fishmongers. He cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is
resolved that the two poles of thought shall appear in his statement. His argument and his
sentence are self-imposed and spherical. The two poles appear; yes, and become two hands,
to grasp and appropriate their own.

Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is transitional,
alternating; or, shall I say, a thread of two strands. The sea-shore, sea seen from shore,
shore seen from sea; the taste of two metals in contact; and our enlarged powers at the
approach and at the departure of a friend; the experience of poetic creativeness, which is
not found in staying at home, nor yet in traveling, but in transitions from one to the
other, which must therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional surface as
possible; this command of two elements must explain the power and the charm of Plato. Art
expresses the one or the same by the different. Thought seeks to know unity in unity;
poetry to show it by variety; that is, always by an object or symbol. Plato keeps the two
vases, one of aether and one of pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both. Things
added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language
are inexhaustibly attractive. Plato turns incessantly the obverse and the reverse of the
medal of Jove.

To take an example:- The physical philosophers had sketched each his theory of the
world; the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit; theories mechanical and chemical
in their genius. Plato, a master of mathematics, studious of all natural laws and causes,
feels these, as second causes, to be no theories of the world but bare inventories and
lists. To the study of nature he therefore prefixes the dogma,- “Let us declare the
cause which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and compose the universe. He was good; and
he who is good has no kind of envy. Exempt from envy, he wished that all things should be
as much as possible like himself. Whosoever, taught by wise men, shall admit this as the
prime cause of the origin and foundation of the world, will be in the truth.” (*9)  “All things are for the sake of the good, and it is the
cause of every thing beautiful.” This dogma animates and impersonates his philosophy.

The synthesis which makes the character of his mind appears in all his talents. Where
there is great compass of wit, we usually find excellencies that combine easily in the
living man, but in description appear incompatible. The mind of Plato is not to be
exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but is to be apprehended by an original mind in the
exercise of its original power. In him the freest abandonment is united with the precision
of a geometer. His daring imagination gives him the more solid grasp of facts; as the
birds of highest flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician polish, his intrinsic
elegance, edged by an irony so subtle that it stings and paralyzes, adorn the soundest
health and strength of frame. According to the old sentence, “If Jove should descend
to the earth, he would speak in the style of Plato.”

With this palatial air there is, for the direct aim of several of his works and running
through the tenor of them all, a certain earnestness, which mounts, in the Republic and in
the Phaedo, to piety. He has been charged with feigning sickness at the time of the death
of Socrates. But the anecdotes that have come down from the times attest his manly
interference before the people in his master’s behalf, since even the savage cry of the
assembly to Plato is preserved; and the indignation towards popular government, in many of
his pieces, expresses a personal exasperation. He has a probity, a native reverence for
justice and honor, and a humanity which makes him tender for the superstitions of the
people. Add to this, he believes that poetry, prophecy and the high insight are from a
wisdom of which man is not master; that the gods never philosophize, but by a celestial
mania these miracles are accomplished. Horsed on these winged steeds, he sweeps the dim
regions, visits worlds which flesh cannot enter; he saw the souls in pain, he hears the
doom of the judge, he beholds the penal metempsychosis, the Fates, with the rock and
shears, and hears the intoxicating hum of their spindle.

But his circumspection never forsook him. One would say he had read the inscription on
the gates of Busyrane,- “Be bold”; and on the second gate,- “Be bold, be
bold, and evermore be bold”; and then again had paused well at the third gate,-
“Be not too bold.” His strength is like the momentum of a falling planet, and
his discretion the return of its due and perfect curve,- so excellent is his Greek love of
boundary and his skill in definition. In reading logarithms one is not more secure than in
following Plato in his flights. Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings
of his imagination are playing in the sky. He has finished his thinking before he brings
it to the reader, and he abounds in the surprises of a literary master. He has that
opulence which furnishes, at every turn, the precise weapon he needs. As the rich man
wears no more garments, drives no more horses, sits in no more chambers than the poor,-
but has that one dress, or equipage, or instrument, which is fit for the hour and the
need; so Plato, in his plenty, is never restricted, but has the fit word. There is indeed
no weapon in all the armory of wit which he did not possess and use,- epic, analysis,
mania, intuition, music, satire and irony, down to the customary and polite. His
illustrations are poetry and his jests illustrations. Socrates’ profession of obstetric
art (*10) is good philosophy; and his finding that word
“cookery,” and “adulatory art,” for rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us
a substantial service still. No orator can measure in effect with him who can give good
nicknames.

What moderation and understatement and checking his thunder in mid volley! He has
good-naturedly furnished the courtier and citizen with all that can be said against the
schools. “For philosophy is an elegant thing, if any one modestly meddles with it;
but if he is conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts the man.” He could
well afford to be generous,- he, who from the sunlike centrality and reach of his vision,
had a faith without cloud. Such as his perception, was his speech: he plays with the doubt
and makes the most of it: he paints and quibbles; and by and by comes a sentence that
moves the sea and land. The admirable earnest comes not only at intervals, in the perfect
yes and no of the dialogue, but in bursts of light. “I, therefore, Callicles, am
persuaded by these accounts, and consider how I may exhibit my soul before the judge in a
healthy condition. Wherefore, disregarding the honors that most men value, and looking to
the truth, I shall endeavor in reality to live as virtuously as I can; and when I die, to
die so. And I invite all other men, to the utmost of my power; and you too I in turn
invite to this contest, which, I affirm, surpasses all contests here.” (*11)

He is a great average man; one who, to the best thinking, adds a proportion and
equality in his faculties, so that men see in him their own dreams and glimpses made
available and made to pass for what they are. A great common-sense is his warrant and
qualification to be the world’s interpreter. He has reason, as all the philosophic and
poetic class have: but he has also what they have not,- this strong solving sense to
reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the
streets of cities to the Atlantis. He omits never this graduation, but slopes his thought,
however picturesque the precipice on one side, to an access from the plain. He never
writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic raptures.

Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could prostrate himself on the earth and cover
his eyes whilst he adored that which cannot be numbered, or gauged, or known, or named:
that of which every thing can be affirmed and denied: that “which is entity and
nonentity.” He called it super-essential. He even stood ready, as in the Parmenides,
to demonstrate that it was so,- that this Being exceeded the limits of intellect. No man
ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable. Having paid his homage, as for the human race,
to the Illimitable, he then stood erect, and for the human race affirmed, “And yet
things are knowable!”- that is, the Asia in his mind was first heartily honored,- the
ocean of love and power, before form, before will, before knowledge, the Same, the Good,
the One; and now, refreshed and empowered by this worship, the instinct of Europe, namely,
culture, returns; and he cries, “Yet things are knowable!” They are knowable,
because being from one, things correspond. There is a scale; and the correspondence of
heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a
science of stars, called astronomy; a science of quantities, called mathematics; a science
of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,- I call it Dialectic,-
which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true. It rests on the observation
of identity and diversity; for to judge is to unite to an object the notion which belongs
to it. The sciences, even the best,- mathematics and astronomy,- are like sportsmen, who
seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it. Dialectic must
teach the use of them. “This is of that rank that no intellectual man will enter on
any study for its own sake, but only with a view to advance himself in that one sole
science which embraces all.” (*12)

“The essence or peculiarity of man is to comprehend a whole; or that which in the
diversity of sensations can be comprised under a rational unity.” “The soul
which has never perceived the truth, cannot pass into the human form.” (*13)  I announce to men the Intellect. I announce the good of
being interpenetrated by the mind that made nature: this benefit, namely, that it can
understand nature, which it made and maketh. Nature is good, but intellect is better: as
the lawgiver is before the law-receiver. I give you joy, O sons of men! that truth is
altogether wholesome; that we have hope to search out what might be the very self of
everything. The misery of man is to be baulked of the sight of essence and to be stuffed
with conjectures; but the supreme good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and all
virtue and all felicity depend on this science of the real: for courage is nothing else
than knowledge; the fairest fortune that can befall man is to be guided by his daemon to
that which is truly his own. This also is the essence of justice,- to attend every one his
own: nay, the notion of virtue is not to be arrived at except through direct contemplation
of the divine essence. Courage then for “the persuasion that we must search that
which we do not know, will render us, beyond comparison, better, braver and more
industrious than if we thought it impossible to discover what we do not know, and useless
to search for it.” He secures a position not to be commanded, by his passion for
reality; valuing philosophy only as it is the pleasure of conversing with real being.

Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said, Culture. He saw the institutions of Sparta
and recognized, more genially one would say than any since, the hope of education. He
delighted in every accomplishment, in every graceful and useful and truthful performance;
above all in the splendors of genius and intellectual achievement. “The whole of
life, O Socrates,” said Glauco, “is, with the wise, the measure of hearing such
discourses as these.” What a price he sets on the feats of talent, on the powers of
Pericles, of Isocrates, of Parmenides! What price above price on the talents themselves!
He called the several faculties, gods, in his beautiful personation. What value he gives
to the art of gymnastic in education; what to geometry; what to music; what to astronomy,
whose appeasing and medicinal power he celebrates! In the Timaeus he indicates the highest
employment of the eyes. “By us it is asserted that God invented and bestowed sight on
us for this purpose,- that on surveying the circles of intelligence in the heavens, we
might properly employ those of our own minds, which, though disturbed when compared with
the others that are uniform, are still allied to their circulations; and that having thus
learned, and being naturally possessed of a correct reasoning faculty, we might, by
imitating the uniform revolutions of divinity, set right our own wanderings and
blunders.” And in the Republic,- “By each of these disciplines a certain organ
of the soul is both purified and reanimated which is blinded and buried by studies of
another kind; an organ better worth saving than ten thousand eyes, since truth is
perceived by this alone.”

He said, Culture; but he first admitted its basis, and gave immeasurably the first
place to advantages of nature. His patrician tastes laid stress on the distinctions of
birth. In the doctrine of the organic character and disposition is the origin of caste.
“Such as were fit to govern, into their composition the informing Deity mingled gold;
into the military, silver; iron and brass for husbandmen and artificers.” The East
confirms itself, in all ages, in this faith. The Koran is explicit on this point of caste.
“Men have their metal, as of gold and silver. Those of you who were the worthy ones
in the state of ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon as you
embrace it.” Plato was not less firm. “Of the five orders of things, only four
can be taught to the generality of men.” In the Republic he insists on the
temperaments of the youth, as first of the first.

A happier example of the stress laid on nature is in the dialogue with the young
Theages, who wishes to receive lessons from Socrates. Socrates declares that if some have
grown wise by associating with him, no thanks are due to him; but, simply, whilst they
were with him they grew wise, not because of him; he pretends not to know the way of it.
“It is adverse to many, nor can those be benefited by associating with me whom the
Daemon opposes; so that it is not possible for me to live with these. With many however he
does not prevent me from conversing, who yet are not at all benefited by associating with
me. Such, O Theages, is the association with me; for, if it pleases the God, you will make
great and rapid proficiency: you will not, if he does not please. Judge whether it is not
safer to be instructed by some one of those who have power over the benefit which they
impart to men, than by me, who benefit or not, just as it may happen.” As if he had
said, “I have no system. I cannot be answerable for you. You will be what you must.
If there is love between us, inconceivably delicious and profitable will our intercourse
be; if not, your time is lost and you will only annoy me. I shall seem to you stupid, and
the reputation I have, false. Quite above us, beyond the will of you or me, is this secret
affinity or repulsion laid. All my good is magnetic, and I educate, not by lessons, but by
going about my business.”

He said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he failed not to add, “There is also the
divine.” There is no thought in any mind but it quickly tends to convert itself into
a power and organizes a huge instrumentality of means. Plato, lover of limits, loved the
illimitable, saw the enlargement and nobility which come from truth itself and good
itself, and attempted as if on the part of the human intellect, once for all to do it
adequate homage,- homage fit for the immense soul to receive, and yet homage becoming the
intellect to render. He said then, “Our faculties run out into infinity, and return
to us thence. We can define but a little way; but here is a fact which will not be
skipped, and which to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All things are in a scale; and, begin
where we will, ascend and ascend. All things are symbolical; and what we call results are
beginnings.”

A key to the method and completeness of Plato is his twice bisected line. After he has
illustrated the relation between the absolute good and true and the forms of the
intelligible world, he says: “Let there be a line cut in two unequal parts. Cut again
each of these two main parts,- one representing the visible, the other the intelligible
world,- and let these two new sections represent the bright part and the dark part of each
of these worlds. You will have, for one of the sections of the visible world, images, that
is, both shadows and reflections;- for the other section, the objects of these images,
that is, plants, animals, and the works of art and nature. Then divide the intelligible
world in like manner; the one section will be of opinions and hypotheses, and the other
section of truths.” (*14)  To these four sections, the four
operations of the soul correspond,- conjecture, faith, understanding, reason. As every
pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing restores us an image and
creature of the supreme Good. The universe is perforated by a million channels for his
activity. All things mount and mount.

All his thought has this ascension; in Phaedrus, teaching that beauty is the most
lovely of all things, exciting hilarity and shedding desire and confidence through the
universe wherever it enters, and it enters in some degree into all things:- but that there
is another, which is as much more beautiful than beauty as beauty is than chaos; namely,
wisdom, which our wonderful organ of sight cannot reach unto, but which, could it be seen,
would ravish us with its perfect reality. He has the same regard to it as the source of
excellence in works of art. When an artificer, he says, in the fabrication of any work,
looks to that which always subsists according to the same; and, employing a model of this
kind, expresses its idea and power in his work,- it must follow that his production should
be beautiful. But when he beholds that which is born and dies, it will be far from
beautiful.

Thus ever: the Banquet is a teaching in the same spirit, familiar now to all the poetry
and to all the sermons of the world, that the love of the sexes is initial, and symbolizes
at a distance the passion of the soul for that immense lake of beauty it exists to seek.
This faith in the Divinity is never out of mind, and constitutes the ground of all his
dogmas. Body cannot teach wisdom;- God only. In the same mind he constantly affirms that
virtue cannot be taught; that it is not a science, but an inspiration; that the greatest
goods are produced to us through mania and are assigned to us by a divine gift.

This leads me to that central figure which he has established in his Academy as the
organ through which every considered opinion shall be announced, and whose biography he
has likewise so labored that the historic facts are lost in the light of Plato’s mind.
Socrates and Plato are the double star which the most powerful instruments will not
entirely separate. Socrates again, in his traits and genius, is the best example of that
synthesis which constitutes Plato’s extraordinary power. Socrates, a man of humble stem,
but honest enough; of the commonest history; of a personal homeliness so remarkable as to
be a cause of wit in others:- the rather that his broad good nature and exquisite taste
for a joke invited the sally, which was sure to be paid. The players personated him on the
stage; the potters copied his ugly face on their stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, adding
to his humor a perfect temper and a knowledge of his man, be he who he might whom he
talked with, which laid the companion open to certain defeat in any debate,- and in debate
he immoderately delighted. The young men are prodigiously fond of him and invite him to
their feasts, whither he goes for conversation. He can drink, too; has the strongest head
in Athens; and after leaving the whole party under the table, goes away as if nothing had
happened, to begin new dialogues with somebody that is sober. In short, he was what our
country-people call an old one.

He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was monstrously fond of Athens, hated
trees, never willingly went beyond the walls, knew the old characters, valued the bores
and philistines, thought every thing in Athens a little better than anything in any other
place. He was plain as a Quaker in habit and speech, affected low phrases, and
illustrations from cocks and quails, soup-pans and sycamore-spoons, grooms and farriers,
and unnamable offices,- especially if he talked with any superfine person. He had a
Franklin-like wisdom. Thus he showed one who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia, that it
was no more than his daily walk within doors, if continuously extended, would easily
reach.

Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears, an immense talker,- the rumor ran that
on one or two occasions, in the war with Boeotia, he had shown a determination which had
covered the retreat of a troop; and there was some story that under cover of folly, he
had, in the city government, when one day he chanced to hold a seat there, evinced a
courage in opposing singly the popular voice, which had well-nigh ruined him. He is very
poor; but then he is hardy as a soldier, and can live on a few olives; usually, in the
strictest sense, on bread and water, except when entertained by his friends. His necessary
expenses were exceedingly small, and no one could live as he did. He wore no under
garment; his upper garment was the same for summer and winter, and he went barefooted; and
it is said that to procure the pleasure, which he loves, of talking at his ease all day
with the most elegant and cultivated young men, he will now and then return to his shop
and carve statues, good or bad, for sale. However that be, it is certain that he had grown
to delight in nothing else than this conversation; and that, under his hypocritical
pretence of knowing nothing, he attacks and brings down all the fine speakers, all the
fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives or strangers from Asia Minor and the islands.
Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so honest and really curious to know; a man who
was willingly confuted if he did not speak the truth, and who willingly confuted others
asserting what was false; and not less pleased when confuted than when confuting; for he
thought not any evil happened to men of such a magnitude as false opinion respecting the
just and unjust. A pitiless disputant, who knows nothing, but the bounds of whose
conquering intelligence no man had ever reached; whose temper was imperturbable; whose
dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so careless and ignorant as to disarm
the wariest and draw them, in the pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts and confusion.
But he always knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape; he drives them
to terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hippiases and Gorgiases with their
grand reputations, as a boy tosses his balls. The tyrannous realist!- Meno has discoursed
a thousand times, at length, on virtue, before many companies, and very well, as it
appeared to him; but at this moment he cannot even tell what it is,- this cramp-fish of a
Socrates has so bewitched him.

This hard-headed humorist, whose strange conceits, drollery and bonhommie diverted the
young patricians, whilst the rumor of his sayings and quibbles gets abroad every day,-
turns out, in the sequel, to have a probity as invincible as his logic, and to be either
insane, or at least, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his religion. When accused
before the judges of subverting the popular creed, he affirms the immortality of the soul,
the future reward and punishment; and refusing to recant, in a caprice of the popular
government was condemned to die, and sent to the prison. Socrates entered the prison and
took away all ignominy from the place, which could not be a prison whilst he was there.
Crito bribed the jailer; but Socrates would not go out by treachery. “Whatever
inconvenience ensue, nothing is to be preferred before justice. These things I hear like
pipes and drums, whose sound makes me deaf to every thing you say.” The fame of this
prison, the fame of the discourses there and the drinking of the hemlock are one of the
most precious passages in the history of the world.

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr, the keen street
and market debater with the sweetest saint known to any history at that time, had forcibly
struck the mind of Plato, so capacious of these contrasts; and the figure of Socrates by a
necessity placed itself in the foreground of the scene, as the fittest dispenser of the
intellectual treasures he had to communicate. It was a rare fortune that this Aesop of the
mob and this robed scholar should meet, to make each other immortal in their mutual
faculty. The strange synthesis in the character of Socrates capped the synthesis in the
mind of Plato. Moreover by this means he was able, in the direct way and without envy to
avail himself of the wit and weight of Socrates, to which unquestionably his own debt was
great; and these derived again their principal advantage from the perfect art of Plato.

It remains to say that the defect of Plato in power is only that which results
inevitably from his quality. He is intellectual in his aim; and therefore, in expression,
literary. Mounting into heaven, diving into the pit, expounding the laws of the state, the
passion of love, the remorse of crime, the hope of the parting soul,- he is literary, and
never otherwise. It is almost the sole deduction from the merit of Plato that his writings
have not,- what is no doubt incident to this regnancy of intellect in his work,- the vital
authority which the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews
possess. There is an interval; and to cohesion, contact is necessary.

I know not what can be said in reply to this criticism but that we have come to a fact
in the nature of things: an oak is not an orange. The qualities of sugar remain with
sugar, and those of salt with salt.

In the second place, he has not a system. The dearest defenders and disciples are at
fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not complete or
self-evident. One man thinks he means this, and another that; he has said one thing in one
place, and the reverse of it in another place. He is charged with having failed to make
the transition from ideas to matter. Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the
smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching,
or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a
known and accurate expression for the world, and it should be accurate. It shall be the
world passed through the mind of Plato,- nothing less. Every atom shall have the Platonic
tinge; every atom, every relation or quality you knew before, you shall know again and
find here, but now ordered; not nature, but art. And you shall feel that Alexander indeed
overran, with men and horses, some countries of the planet; but countries, and things of
which countries are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of men, have passed
through this man as bread into his body, and become no longer bread, but body: so all this
mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has clapped copyright on the world. This is the
ambition of individualism. But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor has good
will to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting, gets
strangled: the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth. There he perishes:
unconquered nature lives on and forgets him. So it fares with all: so must it fare with
Plato. In view of eternal nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercitations. He
argues on this side and on that. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never
tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every
great question from him. (*15)

These things we are forced to say if we must consider the effort of Plato or of any
philosopher to dispose of nature,- which will not be disposed of. No power of genius has
ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains. But
there is an injustice in assuming this ambition for Plato. Let us not seem to treat with
flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion to their intellect, have admitted his
transcendent claims. The way to know him is to compare him, not with nature, but with
other men. How many ages have gone by, and he remains unapproached! A chief structure of
human wit, like Karnac, or the medieval cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains, it requires
all the breath of human faculty to know it. I think it is trueliest seen when seen with
the most respect. His sense deepens, his merits multiply, with study. When we say, Here is
a fine collection of fables; or when we praise the style, or the common sense, or
arithmetic, we speak as boys, and much of our impatient criticism of the dialectic, I
suspect, is no better.

The criticism is like our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it is still
best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards. The great-eyed Plato
proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our life.

[Notes from the Centenary Edition of Emerson’s Complete Works, edited by his son,
Edward Waldo Emerson:]

*(7) The less usual use of “secular,” in its strict classical
sense, to mean “that live through the ages.”

*(8) Omar the Caliph was Mahomet’s cousin and second successor.

*(9) From the Timaeus.

*(10) From the Theaetetus.

*(11) From the Gorgias.

*(12) Compare the Republic, Book VII.

*(13) From the Phaedrus.

*(14) See the Republic, Book VI.

*(15) What Mr. Emerson says here of Plato, and also earlier, “He
cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two poles of thought
shall appear in his statement,” cannot but recall his own method of presenting in
turn different facets of the gem of truth. Churchman and Agnostic can easily find good
weapons for argument in his works. Dr. Holmes says of this passage, “Some will smile
at hearing him say this of another.” It illustrates the felicity of the Doctor’s
remark that Emerson holds up the mirror to his characters at just such an angle that we
see his own face as well as that of his hero.

* * *

Plato: New Readings (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882

Plato: New Readings
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Representative Men, 1850

The publication, in Mr. Bohn’s “Serial Library,” of the excellent
translations of Plato, which we esteem one of the chief benefits the cheap press has
yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a few more notes of the elevation and
bearings of this fixed star; or to add a bulletin, like the journals, of Plato at the
latest dates.

Modern science, by the extent of its generalization, has learned to indemnify the
student of man for the defects of individuals by tracing growth and ascent in races; and,
by the simple expedient of lighting up the vast background, generates a feeling of
complacency and hope. The human being has the saurian and the plant in his rear. His arts
and sciences, the easy issue of his brain, look glorious when prospectively beheld from
the distant brain of ox, crocodile and fish. It seems as if nature, in regarding the
geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or
six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result.
These samples attested the virtue of the tree. These were a clear amelioration of
trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for further proceeding. With this artist, time and
space are cheap, and she is insensible to what you say of tedious preparation. She waited
tranquilly the flowing periods of paleontology, for the hour to be struck when man should
arrive. Then periods must pass before the motion of the earth can be suspected; then
before the map of the instincts and the cultivable powers can be drawn. But as of races,
so the succession of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato has the fortune in
the history of mankind to mark an epoch.

Plato’s fame does not stand on a syllogism, or on any masterpieces of the Socratic
reasoning, or on any thesis, as for example the immortality of the soul. He is more than
an expert, or a schoolman, or a geometer, or the prophet of a peculiar message. He
represents the privilege of the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to
successive platforms and so disclosing in every fact a germ of expansion. These expansions
are in the essence of thought. The naturalist would never help us to them by any
discoveries of the extent of the universe, but is as poor when cataloguing the resolved
nebula of Orion, as when measuring the angles of an acre. But the Republic of Plato, by
these expansions, may be said to require and so to anticipate the astronomy of Laplace.
The expansions are organic. The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the
eye creates the rose. In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing them, we only say,
Here was a more complete man, who could apply to nature the whole scale of the senses, the
understanding and the reason. These expansions or extensions consist in continuing the
spiritual sight where the horizon falls on our natural vision, and by this second sight
discovering the long lines of law which shoot in every direction. Everywhere he stands on
a path which has no end, but runs continuously round the universe. Therefore every word
becomes an exponent of nature. Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense, and
ulterior senses. His perception of the generation of contraries, of death out of life and
life out of death,- that law by which, in nature, decomposition is recomposition, and
putrefaction and cholera are only signals of a new creation; his discernment of the little
in the large and the large in the small; studying the state in the citizen and the citizen
in the state; and leaving it doubtful whether he exhibited the Republic as an allegory on
the education of the private soul; his beautiful definitions of ideas, of time, of form,
of figure, of the line, sometimes hypothetically given, as his defining of virtue,
courage, justice, temperance; his love of the apologue, and his apologues themselves; the
cave of Trophonius; the ring of Gyges; the charioteer and two horses; the golden, silver,
brass and iron temperaments; Theuth and Thamus; and the visions of Hades and the Fates,-
fables which have imprinted themselves in the human memory like the signs of the zodiac;
his soliform eye and his boniform soul; (*16) his doctrine of
assimilation; his doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of the laws of return, or
reaction, which secure instant justice throughout the universe, instanced everywhere, but
specially in the doctrine, “what comes from God to us, returns from us to God,”
and in Socrates’ belief that the laws below are sisters of the laws above.

More striking examples are his moral conclusions. Plato affirms the coincidence of
science and virtue; for vice can never know itself and virtue, but virtue knows both
itself and vice. The eye attested that justice was best, as long as it was profitable;
Plato affirms that it is profitable throughout; that the profit is intrinsic, though the
just conceal his justice from gods and men; that it is better to suffer injustice than to
do it; that the sinner ought to covet punishment; that the lie was more hurtful than
homicide; and that ignorance, or the involuntary lie, was more calamitous than involuntary
homicide; that the soul is unwillingly deprived of true opinions, and that no man sins
willingly; that the order or proceeding of nature was from the mind to the body, and,
though a sound body cannot restore an unsound mind, yet a good soul can, by its virtue,
render the body the best possible. The intelligent have a right over the ignorant, namely,
the right of instructing them. The right punishment of one out of tune is to make him play
in tune; the fine which the good, refusing to govern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by
a worse man; that his guards shall not handle gold and silver, but shall be instructed
that there is gold and silver in their souls, which will make men willing to give them
every thing which they need.

This second sight explains the stress laid on geometry. He saw that the globe of earth
was not more lawful and precise than was the supersensible; that a celestial geometry was
in place there, as a logic of lines and angles here below; that the world was throughout
mathematical; the proportions are constant of oxygen, azote and lime; there is just so
much water and slate and magnesia; not less are the proportions constant of the moral
elements.

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and falsehood, delighted in revealing the real at
the base of the accidental; in discovering connection, continuity and representation
everywhere, hating insulation; and appears like the god of wealth among the cabins of
vagabonds, opening power and capability in everything he touches. Ethical science was new
and vacant when Plato could write thus:- “Of all whose arguments are left to the men
of the present time, no one has ever yet condemned injustice, or praised justice,
otherwise than as respects the repute, honors and emoluments arising therefrom; while, as
respects either of them in itself, and subsisting by its own power in the soul of the
possessor, and concealed both from gods and men, no one has yet sufficiently investigated,
either in poetry or prose writings,- how, namely, that injustice is the greatest of all
the evils that the soul has within it, and justice the greatest good.”

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform and self-existent,
forever discriminating them from the notions of the understanding, marks an era in the
world. He was born to behold the self-evolving power of spirit, endless, generator of new
ends; a power which is the key at once to the centrality and the evanescence of things.
Plato is so centred that he can well spare all his dogmas. Thus the fact of knowledge and
ideas reveals to him the fact of eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he offers as
the most probable particular explication. Call that fanciful,- it matters not: the
connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication
must be not less magnificent.

He has indicated every eminent point in speculation. He wrote on the scale of the mind
itself, so that all things have symmetry in his tablet. He put in all the past, without
weariness, and descended into detail with a courage like that he witnessed in nature. One
would say that his forerunners had mapped out each a farm or a district or an island, in
intellectual geography, but that Plato first drew the sphere. He domesticates the soul in
nature: man is the microcosm. All the circles of the visible heaven represent as many
circles in the rational soul. There is no lawless particle, and there is nothing casual in
the action of the human mind. The names of things, too, are fatal, following the nature of
things. All the gods of the Pantheon are, by their names, significant of a profound sense.
The gods are the ideas. Pan is speech, or manifestation; Saturn, the contemplative; Jove,
the regal soul; and Mars, passion. Venus is proportion; Calliope, the soul of the world;
Aglaia, intellectual illustration.

These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had appeared often to pious and to poetic souls;
but this well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes with command, gathers them all up
into rank and gradation, the Euclid of holiness, and marries the two parts of nature.
Before all men, he saw the intellectual values of the moral sentiment. He describes his
own ideal, when he paints, in Timaeus, a god leading things from disorder into order. He
kindled a fire so truly in the centre that we see the sphere illuminated, and can
distinguish poles, equator and lines of latitude, every arc and node: a theory so
averaged, so modulated, that you would say the winds of ages had swept through this
rhythmic structure, and not that it was the brief extempore blotting of one short-lived
scribe. Hence it has happened that a very well-marked class of souls, namely those who
delight in giving a spiritual, that is, an ethico-intellectual expression to every truth,
by exhibiting an ulterior end which is yet legitimate to it,- are said to Platonize. Thus,
Michael Angelo is a Platonist in his sonnets: Shakespeare is a Platonist when he writes,-

“Nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean,”

or,-

          “He, that can endure
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,
Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
And earns a place in the story.”

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and ’tis the magnitude only of Shakespeare’s proper genius
that hinders him from being classed as the most eminent of this school. Swedenborg,
throughout his prose poem of “Conjugal Love,” is a Platonist.

His subtlety commended him to men of thought. The secret of his popular success is the
moral aim which endeared him to mankind. “Intellect,” he said, “is king of
heaven and of earth”; but in Plato, intellect is always moral. His writings have also
the sempiternal youth of poetry. For their arguments, most of them, might have been
couched in sonnets: and poetry has never soared higher than in the Timaeus and the
Phaedrus. As the poet, too, he is only contemplative. He did not, like Pythagoras, break
himself with an institution. All his painting in the Republic must be esteemed mythical,
with intent to bring out, sometimes in violent colors, his thought. You cannot institute,
without peril of charlatanism.

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege for the best (which, to make emphatic, he
expressed by community of women), as the premium which he would set on grandeur. There
shall be exempts of two kinds: first, those who by demerit have put themselves below
protection,- outlaws; and secondly, those who by eminence of nature and desert are out of
the reach of your rewards. Let such be free of the city and above the law. We confide them
to themselves; let them do with us as they will. Let none presume to measure the
irregularities of Michael Angelo and Socrates by village scales.

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a little mathematical dust in our eyes. I
am sorry to see him, after such noble superiorities, permitting the lie to governors.
Plato plays Providence a little with the baser sort, as people allow themselves with their
dogs and cats.

[Notes from the Centenary Edition of Emerson’s Complete Works, edited by his son,
Edward Waldo Emerson:]

*(16) …his soliform eye and his boniform soul: Dr. Holmes says,
“These two quaint adjectives are from the mint of Cudworth.”

* * *

Swedenborg; or, the Mystic (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882

Swedenborg; or, the Mystic
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Representative Men, 1850

Among eminent persons, those who are most dear to men are not of the class which the
economist calls producers: they have nothing in their hands; they have not cultivated
corn, nor made bread; they have not led out a colony, nor invented a loom. A higher class,
in the estimation and love of this city-building market-going race of mankind, are the
poets, who, from the intellectual kingdom, feed the thought and imagination with ideas and
pictures which raise men out of the world of corn and money, and console them for the
shortcomings of the day and the meanness of labor and traffic. Then, also, the philosopher
has his value, who flatters the intellect of this laborer by engaging him with subtleties
which instruct him in new faculties. Others may build cities; he is to understand them and
keep them in awe. But there is a class who lead us into another region,- the world of
morals or of will. What is singular about this region of thought is its claim. Wherever
the sentiment of right comes in, it takes precedence of every thing else. For other
things, I make poetry of them; but the moral sentiment makes poetry of me.

I have sometimes thought that he would render the greatest service to modern criticism,
who should draw the line of relation that subsists between Shakespeare and Swedenborg. The
human mind stands ever in perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient
equally of each without the other. The reconciler has not yet appeared. If we tire of the
saints, Shakespeare is our city of refuge. Yet the instincts presently teach that the
problem of essence must take precedence of all others;- the questions of Whence? What? and
Whither? and the solution of these must be in a life, and not in a book. A drama or poem
is a proximate or oblique reply; but Moses, Menu, Jesus, work directly on this problem.
The atmosphere of moral sentiment is a region of grandeur which reduces all material
magnificence to toys, yet opens to every wretch that has reason the doors of the universe.
Almost with a fierce haste it lays its empire on the man. In the language of the Koran,
“God said, The heaven and the earth and all that is between them, think ye that we
created them in jest, and that ye shall not return to us?” It is the kingdom of the
will, and by inspiring the will, which is the seat of personality, seems to convert the
universe into a person;-

“The realms of being to no other bow,
Not only all are thine, but all are Thou.”

All men are commanded by the saint. The Koran makes a distinct class of those who are
by nature good, and whose goodness has an influence on others, and pronounces this class
to be the aim of creation: the other classes are admitted to the feast of being, only as
following in the train of this. And the Persian poet exclaims to a soul of this kind,-

“Go boldly forth, and feast on being’s banquet;
Thou art the called,- the rest admitted with thee.”

The privilege of this caste is an access to the secrets and structure of nature by some
higher method than by experience. In common parlance, what one man is said to learn by
experience, a man of extraordinary sagacity is said, without experience, to divine. The
Arabians say, that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Seena, the philosopher, conferred
together; and, on parting, the philosopher said, “All that he sees, I know”; and
the mystic said, “All that he knows, I see.” If one should ask the reason of
this intuition, the solution would lead us into that property which Plato denoted as
Reminiscence, and which is implied by the Bramins in the tenet of Transmigration. The soul
having been often born, or, as the Hindoos say, “travelling the path of existence
through thousands of births,” having beheld the things which are here, those which
are in heaven and those which are beneath, there is nothing of which she has not gained
the knowledge: no wonder that she is able to recollect, in regard to any one thing, what
formerly she knew. “For, all things in nature being linked and related, and the soul
having heretofore known all, nothing hinders but that any man who has recalled to mind, or
according to the common phrase has learned, one thing only, should of himself recover all
his ancient knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he have but courage and faint
not in the midst of his researches. For inquiry and learning is reminiscence all.” (*17) How much more, if he that inquires be a holy and godlike
soul For by being assimilated to the original soul, by whom and after whom all things
subsist, the soul of man does then easily flow into all things, and all things flow into
it: they mix; and he is present and sympathetic with their structure and law.

This path is difficult, secret and beset with terror. The ancients called it ecstasy or
absence,- a getting out of their bodies to think. All religious history contains traces of
the trance of saints,- a beatitude, but without any sign of joy; earnest, solitary, even
sad; “the flight,” Plotinus called it, “of the alone to the alone”;
Muesiz, the closing of the eyes,- whence our word, Mystic. The trances of Socrates,
Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guyon, Swedenborg, will readily come to
mind. But what as readily comes to mind is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude
comes in terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver.

“It o’erinforms the tenement of clay,”

and drives the man mad; or gives a certain violent bias which taints his judgment. In
the chief examples of religious illumination somewhat morbid has mingled, in spite of the
unquestionable increase of mental power. Must the highest good drag after it a quality
which neutralizes and discredits it?-

                “Indeed,
it takes
From our achievements, when performed at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.”

Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses so much earth and so much fire, by
weight and meter, to make a man, and will not add a pennyweight, though a nation is
perishing for a leader? Therefore the men of God purchased their science by folly or pain.
If you will have pure carbon, carbuncle, or diamond, to make the brain transparent, the
trunk and organs shall be so much the grosser: instead of porcelain they are potter’s
earth, clay, or mud.

In modern times no such remarkable example of this introverted mind has occurred as in
Emanuel Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, in 1688. This man, who appeared to his
contemporaries a visionary and elixir of moonbeams, no doubt led the most real life of any
man then in the world: and now, when the royal and ducal Frederics, Christians and
Brunswicks of that day have slid into oblivion, he begins to spread himself into the minds
of thousands. As happens in great men, he seemed, by the variety and amount of his powers,
to be a composition of several persons,- like the giant fruits which are matured in
gardens by the union of four or five single blossoms. His frame is on a larger scale and
possesses the advantages of size. As it is easier to see the reflection of the great
sphere in large globes, though defaced by some crack or blemish, than in drops of water,
so men of large calibre, though with some eccentricity or madness, like Pascal or Newton,
help us more than balanced mediocre minds.

His youth and training could not fail to be extraordinary. Such a boy could not whistle
or dance, but goes grubbing into mines and mountains, prying into chemistry and optics,
physiology, mathematics and astronomy, to find images fit for the measure of his versatile
and capacious brain. He was a scholar from a child, and was educated at Upsala. At the age
of twenty-eight he was made Assessor of the Board of Mines by Charles XII. In 1716, he
left home for four years and visited the universities of England, Holland, France and
Germany. He performed a notable feat of engineering in 1718, at the siege of
Frederikshald, by hauling two galleys, five boats and a sloop, some fourteen English miles
overland, for the royal service. In 1721 he journeyed over Europe to examine mines and
smelting works. He published in 1716 his Daedalus Hyperboreus, and from this time for the
next thirty years was employed in the composition and publication of his scientific works.
With the like force he threw himself into theology. In 1743, when he was fifty-four years
old, what is called his illumination began. All his metallurgy and transportation of ships
overland was absorbed into this ecstasy. He ceased to publish any more scientific books,
withdrew from his practical labors and devoted himself to the writing and publication of
his voluminous theological works, which were printed at his own expense, or at that of the
Duke of Brunswick or other prince, at Dresden, Leipsic, London, or Amsterdam. Later, he
resigned his office of Assessor: the salary attached to this office continued to be paid
to him during his life. His duties had brought him into intimate acquaintance with King
Charles XII, by whom he was much consulted and honored. The like favor was continued to
him by his successor. At the Diet of 1751, Count Hopken says, the most solid memorials on
finance were from his pen. In Sweden he appears to have attracted a marked regard. His
rare science and practical skill, and the added fame of second sight and extraordinary
religious knowledge and gifts, drew to him queens, nobles, clergy, shipmasters and people
about the ports through which he was wont to pass in his many voyages. The clergy
interfered a little with the importation and publication of his religious works, but he
seems to have kept the friendship of men in power. He was never married. He had great
modesty and gentleness of bearing. His habits were simple; he lived on bread, milk and
vegetables; he lived in a house situated in a large garden; he went several times to
England, where he does not seem to have attracted any attention whatever from the learned
or the eminent; and died at London, March 29, 1772, of apoplexy, in his eighty-fifth year.
He is described, when in London, as a man of a quiet, clerical habit, not averse to tea
and coffee, and kind to children. He wore a sword when in full velvet dress, and, whenever
he walked out, carried a gold-headed cane. There is a common portrait of him in antique
coat and wig, but the face has a wandering or vacant air.

The genius which was to penetrate the science of the age with a far more subtle
science; to pass the bounds of space and time, venture into the dim spirit-realm, and
attempt to establish a new religion in the world,- began its lessons in quarries and
forges, in the smelting-pot and crucible, in ship-yards and dissecting-rooms. No one man
is perhaps able to judge of the merits of his works on so many subjects. One is glad to
learn that his books on mines and metals are held in the highest esteem by those who
understand these matters. It seems that he anticipated much science of the nineteenth
century; anticipated, in astronomy, the discovery of the seventh planet,- but, unhappily,
not also of the eighth; anticipated the views of modern astronomy in regard to the
generation of earths by the sun; in magnetism, some important experiments and conclusions
of later students; in chemistry, the atomic theory; in anatomy, the discoveries of
Schlichting, Monro and Wilson; and first demonstrated the office of the lungs. His
excellent English editor magnanimously lays no stress on his discoveries, since he was too
great to care to be original; and we are to judge, by what he can spare, of what remains.

A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by them, and requires
a long focal distance to be seen; suggests, as Aristotle, Bacon, Selden, (*18) Humboldt, that a certain vastness of learning, or quasi
omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is possible. His superb speculation, as from a
tower, over nature and arts, without ever losing sight of the texture and sequence of
things, almost realizes his own picture, in the “Principia,” of the original
integrity of man. Over and above the merit of his particular discoveries, is the capital
merit of his self-equality. A drop of water has the properties of the sea, but cannot
exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as of a flute; strength of a host,
as well as of a hero; and, in Swedenborg, those who are best acquainted with modern books
will most admire the merit of mass. One of the missouriums and mastodons of literature, he
is not to be measured by whole colleges of ordinary scholars. His stalwart presence would
flutter the gowns of an university. Our books are false by being fragmentary: their
sentences are bonmots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of
surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or
aversion from the order of nature;- being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in
harmony with nature and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing
their means. But Swedenborg is systematic and respective of the world in every sentence;
all the means are orderly given; his faculties work with astronomic punctuality, and this
admirable writing is pure from all pertness or egotism.

Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of great ideas. It is hard to say what was his
own: yet his life was dignified by noblest pictures of the universe. The robust
Aristotelian method, with its breadth and adequateness, shaming our sterile and linear
logic by its genial radiation, conversant with series and degree, with effects and ends,
skilful to discriminate power from form, essence from accident, and opening, by its
terminology and definition, high roads into nature, had trained a race of athletic
philosophers. Harvey had shown the circulation of the blood; Gilbert had shown that the
earth was a magnet; Descartes, taught by Gilbert’s magnet, with its vortex, spiral and
polarity, had filled Europe with the leading thought of vortical motion, as the secret of
nature. Newton, in the year in which Swedenborg was born, published the
“Principia,” and established the universal gravity. Malpighi, (*19) following the high doctrines of Hippocrates, Leucippus (*20) and Lucretius, had given emphasis to the dogma that nature
works in leasts,- “tota in minimis existit natura.” Unrivalled dissectors,
Swammerdam, Leuwenhoek, Winslow, Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius, Boerhaave, (*21) had left nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in
human or comparative anatomy: Linnaeus, his contemporary, was affirming, in his beautiful
science, that “Nature is always like herself”; and, lastly, the nobility of
method, the largest application of principles, had been exhibited by Leibnitz (*22) and Christian Wolff, in cosmology; whilst Locke and Grotius
had drawn the moral argument. What was left for a genius of the largest calibre but to go
over their ground and verify and unite? It is easy to see, in these minds, the origin of
Swedenborg’s studies, and the suggestion of his problems. He had a capacity to entertain
and vivify these volumes of thought. Yet the proximity of these geniuses, one or other of
whom had introduced all his leading ideas, makes Swedenborg another example of the
difficulty, even in a highly fertile genius, of proving originality, the first birth and
annunciation of one of the laws of nature.

He named his favorite views the doctrine of Forms, the doctrine of Series and Degrees,
the doctrine of Influx, the doctrine of Correspondence. His statement of these doctrines
deserves to be studied in his books. Not every man can read them, but they will reward him
who can. His theologic works are valuable to illustrate these. His writings would be a
sufficient library to a lonely and athletic student; and the “Economy of the Animal
Kingdom” is one of those books which, by the sustained dignity of thinking, is an
honor to the human race. He had studied spars and metals to some purpose. His varied and
solid knowledge makes his style lustrous with points and shooting spiculae of thought, and
resembling one of those winter mornings when the air sparkles with crystals. The grandeur
of the topics makes the grandeur of the style. He was apt for cosmology, because of that
native perception of identity which made mere size of no account to him. In the atom of
magnetic iron he saw the quality which would generate the spiral motion of sun and planet.

The thoughts in which he lived were, the universality of each law in nature; the
Platonic doctrine of the scale or degrees; the version or conversion of each into other,
and so the correspondence of all the parts; the fine secret that little explains large,
and large, little; the centrality of man in nature, and the connection that subsists
throughout all things: he saw that the human body was strictly universal, or an instrument
through which the soul feeds and is fed by the whole of matter; so that he held, in exact
antagonism to the skeptics, that “the wiser a man is, the more will he be a
worshipper of the Deity.” In short, he was a believer in the Identity-philosophy,
which he held not idly, as the dreamers of Berlin or Boston, but which he experimented
with and established through years of labor, with the heart and strength of the rudest
Viking that his rough Sweden ever sent to battle.

This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, and derives perhaps its best
illustration from the newest. It is this, that Nature iterates her means perpetually on
successive planes. In the old aphorism, nature is always self-similar. In the plant, the
eye or germinative point opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of
transforming the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed. The
whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without end, the more or less of
heat, light, moisture and food determining the form it shall assume. In the animal, nature
makes a vertebra, or a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a new spine, with a
limited power of modifying its form,- spine on spine, to the end of the world. A poetic
anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake, being a horizontal line, and man, being
an erect line, constitute a right angle; and between the lines of this mystical quadrant
all animated beings find their place: and he assumes the hair-worm, the span-worm, or the
snake, as the type or prediction of the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the spine, Nature
puts out smaller spines, as arms; at the end of the arms, new spines, as hands; at the
other end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet. At the top of the column she puts
out another spine, which doubles or loops itself over, as a span-worm, into a ball, and
forms the skull, with extremities again: the hands being now the upper jaw, the feet the
lower jaw, the fingers and toes being represented this time by upper and lower teeth. This
new spine is destined to high uses. It is a new man on the shoulders of the last. It can
almost shed its trunk and manage to live alone, according to the Platonic idea in the
Timaeus. Within it, on a higher plane, all that was done in the trunk repeats itself.
Nature recites her lesson once more in a higher mood. The mind is a finer body, and
resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding and generating, in a new
and ethereal element. Here in the brain is all the process of alimentation repeated, in
the acquiring, comparing, digesting and assimilating of experience. Here again is the
mystery of generation repeated. In the brain are male and female faculties; here is
marriage, here is fruit. And there is no limit to this ascending scale, but series on
series. Every thing, at the end of one use, is taken up into the next, each series
punctually repeating every organ and process of the last. We are adapted to infinity. We
are hard to please, and love nothing which ends; and in nature is no end, but every thing
at the end of one use is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs
into daemonic and celestial natures. Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on
unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten
thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.

Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is good, but grander when we find chemistry only
an extension of the law of masses into particles, and that the atomic theory shows the
action of chemistry to be mechanical also. Metaphysics shows us a sort of gravitation
operative also in the mental phenomena; and the terrible tabulation of the French statists
brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If
one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes or marries his grandmother,
then in every twenty thousand or thirty thousand is found one man who eats shoes or
marries his grandmother. What we call gravitation, and fancy ultimate, is one fork of a
mightier stream for which we have yet no name. Astronomy is excellent; but it must come up
into life to have its full value, and not remain there in globes and spaces. The globule
of blood gyrates around its own axis in the human veins, as the planet in the sky; and the
circles of intellect relate to those of the heavens. Each law of nature has the like
universality; eating, sleep or hybernation, rotation, generation, metamorphosis, vortical
motion, which is seen in eggs as in planets. These grand rhymes or returns in nature,- the
dear, best-known face startling us at every turn, under a mask so unexpected that we think
it the face of a stranger, and carrying up the semblance into divine forms,- delighted the
prophetic eye of Swedenborg; and he must be reckoned a leader in that revolution, which,
by giving to science an idea, has given to an aimless accumulation of experiments,
guidance and form and a beating heart.

I own with some regret that his printed works amount to about fifty stout octavos, his
scientific works being about half of the whole number; and it appears that a mass of
manuscript still unedited remains in the royal library at Stockholm. The scientific works
have just now been translated into English, in an excellent edition.

Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the ten years from 1734 to 1744, and they
remained from that time neglected; and now, after their century is complete, he has at
last found a pupil in Mr. Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic critic, with a coequal vigor
of understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon’s, who has restored his
master’s buried books to the day, and transferred them, with every advantage, from their
forgotten Latin into English, to go round the world in our commercial and conquering
tongue. This startling reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred years, in his pupil, is
not the least remarkable fact in his history. Aided it is said by the munificence of Mr.
Clissold, and also by his literary skill, this piece of poetic justice is done. The
admirable preliminary discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes,
throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into shade, and leave me nothing to say
on their proper grounds.

The “Animal Kingdom” is a book of wonderful merits. It was written with the
highest end,- to put science and the soul, long estranged from each other, at one again.
It was an anatomist’s account of the human body, in the highest style of poetry. Nothing
can exceed the bold and brilliant treatment of a subject usually so dry and repulsive. He
saw nature “wreathing through an everlasting spiral, with wheels that never dry, on
axles that never creak,” and sometimes sought “to uncover those secret recesses
where Nature is sitting at the fires in the depths of her laboratory”; whilst the
picture comes recommended by the hard fidelity with which it is based on practical
anatomy. It is remarkable that this sublime genius decides peremptorily for the analytic,
against the synthetic method; and, in a book whose genius is a daring poetic synthesis,
claims to confine himself to a rigid experience.

He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature, and how wise was that old answer of Amasis (*23) to him who bade him drink up the sea,- “Yes, willingly,
if you will stop the rivers that flow in.” Few knew as much about nature and her
subtle manners, or expressed more subtly her goings. He thought as large a demand is made
on our faith by nature, as by miracles. “He noted that in her proceeding from first
principles through her several subordinations, there was no state through which she did
not pass, as if her path lay through all things.” “For as often as she betakes
herself upward from visible phenomena, or, in other words, withdraws herself inward, she
instantly as it were disappears, while no one knows what has become of her, or whither she
is gone: so that it is necessary to take science as a guide in pursuing her steps.”

The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an end or final cause gives wonderful
animation, a sort of personality to the whole writing. This book announces his favorite
dogmas. The ancient doctrine of Hippocrates, that the brain is a gland; and of Leucippus,
that the atom may be known by the mass; or, in Plato, the macrocosm by the microcosm; and,
in the verses of Lucretius,-

Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis
Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis
Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari
Sanguinis inter se multis coeuntibus guttis;
Ex aurique putat micis consistere posse
Aurum, et de terris terram concrescere parvis;
Ignibus ex igneis, humorem humoribus esse.
                                                                                 Lib. I. 835.

 “The principle of all things, entrails made
Of smallest entrails; bone, of smallest bone;
Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one;
Gold, of small grains; earth, of small sands compacted;
Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted”;

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim that “nature exists entire in
leasts,”- is a favorite thought of Swedenborg. “It is a constant law of the
organic body that large, compound, or visible forms exist and subsist from smaller,
simpler and ultimately from invisible forms, which act similarly to the larger ones, but
more perfectly and more universally; and the least forms so perfectly and universally as
to involve an idea representative of their entire universe.” The unities of each
organ are so many little organs, homogeneous with their compound: the unities of the
tongue are little tongues; those of the stomach, little stomachs; those of the heart are
little hearts. This fruitful idea furnishes a key to every secret. What was too small for
the eye to detect was read by the aggregates; what was too large, by the units. There is
no end to his application of the thought. “Hunger is an aggregate of very many little
hungers, or losses of blood by the little veins all over the body.” It is a key to
his theology also. “Man is a kind of very minute heaven, corresponding to the world
of spirits and to heaven. Every particular idea of man, and every affection, yea, every
smallest part of his affection, is an image and effigy of him. A spirit may be known from
only a single thought. God is the grand man.”

The hardihood and thoroughness of his study of nature required a theory of forms also.
“Forms ascend in order from the lowest to the highest. The lowest form is angular, or
the terrestrial and corporeal. The second and next higher form is the circular, which is
also called the perpetual-angular, because the circumference of a circle is a perpetual
angle. The form above this is the spiral, parent and measure of circular forms: its
diameters are not rectilinear, but variously circular, and have a spherical surface for
centre; therefore it is called the perpetual-circular. The form above this is the
vortical, or perpetual-spiral: next, the perpetual-vortical, or celestial: last, the
perpetual-celestial, or spiritual.”

Was it strange that a genius so bold should take the last step also, should conceive
that he might attain the science of all sciences, to unlock the meaning of the world? In
the first volume of the “Animal Kingdom,” he broaches the subject in a
remarkable note:- “In our doctrine of Representations and Correspondences we shall
treat of both these symbolical and typical resemblances, and of the astonishing things
which occur, I will not say in the living body only, but throughout nature, and which
correspond so entirely to supreme and spiritual things that one would swear that the
physical world was purely symbolical of the spiritual world; insomuch that if we choose to
express any natural truth in physical and definite vocal terms, and to convert these terms
only into the corresponding and spiritual terms, we shall by this means elicit a spiritual
truth or theological dogma, in place of the physical truth or precept: although no mortal
would have predicted that any thing of the kind could possibly arise by bare literal
transposition; inasmuch as the one precept, considered separately from the other, appears
to have absolutely no relation to it. I intend hereafter to communicate a number of
examples of such correspondences, together with a vocabulary containing the terms of
spiritual things, as well as of the physical things for which they are to be substituted.
This symbolism pervades the living body.”

The fact thus explicitly stated is implied in all poetry, in allegory, in fable, in the
use of emblems and in the structure of language. Plato knew it, as is evident from his
twice bisected line in the sixth book of the Republic. Lord Bacon had found that truth and
nature differed only as seal and print; and he instanced some physical propositions, with
their translation into a moral or political sense. Behmen, and all mystics, imply this law
in their dark riddle-writing. The poets, in as far as they are poets, use it; but it is
known to them only as the magnet was known for ages, as a toy. Swedenborg first put the
fact into a detached and scientific statement, because it was habitually present to him,
and never not seen. It was involved, as we explained already, in the doctrine of identity
and iteration, because the mental series exactly tallies with the material series. It
required an insight that could rank things in order and series; or rather it required such
rightness of position that the poles of the eye should coincide with the axis of the
world. The earth had fed its mankind through five or six millenniums, and they had
sciences, religions, philosophies, and yet had failed to see the correspondence of meaning
between every part and every other part. And, down to this hour, literature has no book in
which the symbolism of things is scientifically opened. One would say that as soon as men
had the first hint that every sensible object,- animal, rock, river, air,- nay, space and
time, subsists not for itself, nor finally to a material end, but as a picture-language to
tell another story of beings and duties, other science would be put by, and a science of
such grand presage would absorb all faculties: that each man would ask of all objects what
they mean: Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my joy and grief, in this centre? Why
hear I the same sense from countless differing voices, and read one never quite expressed
fact in endless picture-language? Yet whether it be that these things will not be
intellectually learned, or that many centuries must elaborate and compose so rare and
opulent a soul,- there is no comet, rock-stratum, fossil, fish, quadruped, spider, or
fungus, that, for itself, does not interest more scholars and classifiers than the meaning
and upshot of the frame of things.

But Swedenborg was not content with the culinary use of the world. In his fifty-fourth
year these thoughts held him fast, and his profound mind admitted the perilous opinion,
too frequent in religious history, that he was an abnormal person, to whom was granted the
privilege of conversing with angels and spirits; and this ecstasy connected itself with
just this office of explaining the moral import of the sensible world. To a right
perception, at once broad and minute, of the order of nature, he added the comprehension
of the moral laws in their widest social aspects; but whatever he saw, through some
excessive determination to form in his constitution, he saw not abstractly, but in
pictures, heard it in dialogues, constructed it in events. When he attempted to announce
the law most sanely, he was forced to couch it in parable.

Modern psychology offers no similar example of a deranged balance. The principal powers
continued to maintain a healthy action, and to a reader who can make due allowance in the
report for the reporter’s peculiarities, the results are still instructive, and a more
striking testimony to the sublime laws he announced than any that balanced dulness could
afford. He attempts to give some account of the modus of the new state, affirming that
“his presence in the spiritual world is attended with a certain separation, but only
as to the intellectual part of his mind, not as to the will part”; and he affirms
that “he sees, with the internal sight, the things that are in another life, more
clearly than he sees the things which are here in the world.”

Having adopted the belief that certain books of the Old and New Testaments were exact
allegories, or written in the angelic and ecstatic mode, he employed his remaining years
in extricating from the literal, the universal sense. He had borrowed from Plato the fine
fable (*24) of “a most ancient people, men better than we
and dwelling nigher to the gods”; and Swedenborg added that they used the earth
symbolically; that these, when they saw terrestrial objects, did not think at all about
them, but only about those which they signified. The correspondence between thoughts and
things henceforward occupied him. “The very organic form resembles the end inscribed
on it.” A man is in general and in particular an organized justice or injustice,
selfishness or gratitude. And the cause of this harmony he assigned in the Arcana:
“The reason why all and single things, in the heavens and on earth, are
representative, is because they exist from an influx of the Lord, through heaven.”
This design of exhibiting such correspondences, which, if adequately executed, would be
the poem of the world, in which all history and science would play an essential part, was
narrowed and defeated by the exclusively theologic direction which his inquiries took. His
perception of nature is not human and universal, but is mystical and Hebraic. He fastens
each natural object to a theologic notion;- a horse signifies carnal understanding; a
tree, perception; the moon, faith; a cat means this; an ostrich that; an artichoke this
other;- and poorly tethers every symbol to a several ecclesiastic sense. The slippery
Proteus is not so easily caught. In nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable
parts, as each particle of matter circulates in turn through every system. The central
identity enables any one symbol to express successively all the qualities and shades of
real being. In the transmission of the heavenly waters, every hose fits every hydrant.
Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no
literalist. Every thing must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition
to understand any thing rightly.

His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his interpretation of nature, and the
dictionary of symbols is yet to be written. But the interpreter whom mankind must still
expect, will find no predecessor who has approached so near to the true problem.

Swedenborg styles himself in the title-page of his books, “Servant of the Lord
Jesus Christ”; and by force of intellect, and in effect, he is the last Father in the
Church, and is not likely to have a successor. No wonder that his depth of ethical wisdom
should give him influence as a teacher. To the withered traditional church, yielding dry
catechisms, he let in nature again, and the worshipper, escaping from the vestry of verbs
and texts, is surprised to find himself a party to the whole of his religion. His religion
thinks for him and is of universal application. He turns it on every side; it fits every
part of life, interprets and dignifies every circumstance. Instead of a religion which
visited him diplomatically three or four times,- when he was born, when he married, when
he fell sick and when he died, and, for the rest, never interfered with him,- here was a
teaching which accompanied him all day, accompanied him even into sleep and dreams; into
his thinking, and showed him through what a long ancestry his thoughts descend; into
society, and showed by what affinities he was girt to his equals and his counterparts;
into natural objects, and showed their origin and meaning, what are friendly, and what are
hurtful; and opened the future world by indicating the continuity of the same laws. His
disciples allege that their intellect is invigorated by the study of his books.

There is no such problem for criticism as his theological writings, their merits are so
commanding, yet such grave deductions must be made. Their immense and sandy diffuseness is
like the prairie or the desert, and their incongruities are like the last deliration. He
is superfluously explanatory, and his feeling of the ignorance of men, strangely
exaggerated. Men take truths of this nature very fast. Yet he abounds in assertions, he is
a rich discoverer, and of things which most import us to know. His thought dwells in
essential resemblances, like the resemblance of a house to the man who built it. He saw
things in their law, in likeness of function, not of structure. There is an invariable
method and order in his delivery of his truth, the habitual proceeding of the mind from
inmost to outmost. What earnestness and weightiness,- his eye never roving, without one
swell of vanity, or one look to self in any common form of literary pride! a theoretic or
speculative man, but whom no practical man in the universe could affect to scorn. Plato is
a gownsman; his garment, though of purple, and almost sky-woven, is an academic robe and
hinders action with its voluminous folds. But this mystic is awful to Caesar. Lycurgus
himself would bow.

The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correction of popular errors, the announcement of
ethical laws, take him out of comparison with any other modern writer and entitle him to a
place, vacant for some ages, among the lawgivers of mankind. That slow but commanding
influence which he has acquired, like that of other religious geniuses, must be excessive
also, and have its tides, before it subsides into a permanent amount. Of course what is
real and universal cannot be confined to the circle of those who sympathize strictly with
his genius, but will pass forth into the common stock of wise and just thinking. The world
has a sure chemistry, by which it extracts what is excellent in its children and lets fall
the infirmities and limitations of the grandest mind.

That metempsychosis which is familiar in the old mythology of the Greeks, collected in
Ovid and in the Indian Transmigration, and is there objective, or really takes place in
bodies by alien will,- in Swedenborg’s mind has a more philosophic character. It is
subjective, or depends entirely upon the thought of the person. All things in the universe
arrange themselves to each person anew, according to his ruling love. Man is such as his
affection and thought are. Man is man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of knowing and
understanding. As he is, so he sees. The marriages of the world are broken up. Interiors
associate all in the spiritual world. Whatever the angels looked upon was to them
celestial. Each Satan appears to himself a man; to those as bad as he, a comely man; to
the purified, a heap of carrion. Nothing can resist states: every thing gravitates: like
will to like: what we call poetic justice takes effect on the spot. We have come into a
world which is a living poem. Every thing is as I am. Bird and beast is not bird and
beast, but emanation and effluvia of the minds and wills of men there present. Every one
makes his own house and state. The ghosts are tormented with the fear of death and cannot
remember that they have died. They who are in evil and falsehood are afraid of all others.
Such as have deprived themselves of charity, wander and flee: the societies which they
approach discover their quality and drive them away. The covetous seem to themselves to be
abiding in cells where their money is deposited, and these to be infested with mice. They
who place merit in good works seem to themselves to cut wood. “I asked such, if they
were not wearied? They replied, that they have not yet done work enough to merit
heaven.”

He delivers golden sayings which express with singular beauty the ethical laws; as when
he uttered that famed sentence, that “In heaven the angels are advancing continually
to the springtime of their youth, so that the oldest angel appears the youngest”:
“The more angels, the more room”: “The perfection of man is the love of
use”: “Man, in his perfect form, is heaven”: “What is from Him, is
Him”: “Ends always ascend as nature descends.” And the truly poetic account
of the writing in the inmost heaven, which, as it consists of inflexions according to the
form of heaven, can be read without instruction. He almost justifies his claim to
preternatural vision, by strange insights of the structure of the human body and mind.
“It is never permitted to any one, in heaven, to stand behind another and look at the
back of his head; for then the influx which is from the Lord is disturbed.” The
angels, from the sound of the voice, know a man’s love; from the articulation of the
sound, his wisdom; and from the sense of the words, his science.

In the “Conjugal Love,” he has unfolded the science of marriage. Of this book
one would say that with the highest elements it has failed of success. It came near to be
the Hymn of Love, which Plato attempted in the “Banquet”; the love, which, Dante
says, Casella (*25) sang among the angels in Paradise; and
which, as rightly celebrated, in its genesis, fruition and effect, might well entrance the
souls, as it would lay open the genesis of all institutions, customs and manners. The book
had been grand if the Hebraism had been omitted and the law stated without Gothicism, as
ethics, and with that scope for ascension of state which the nature of things requires. It
is a fine Platonic development of the science of marriage; teaching that sex is universal,
and not local; virility in the male qualifying every organ, act, and thought; and the
feminine in woman. Therefore in the real or spiritual world the nuptial union is not
momentary, but incessant and total; and chastity not a local, but a universal virtue;
unchastity being discovered as much in the trading, or planting, or speaking, or
philosophizing, as in generation; and that, though the virgins he saw in heaven were
beautiful, the wives were incomparably more beautiful, and went on increasing in beauty
evermore.

Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned his theory to a temporary form. He exaggerates
the circumstance of marriage; and though he finds false marriages on earth, fancies a
wiser choice in heaven. But of progressive souls, all loves and friendships are momentary.
Do you love me? means, Do you see the same truth? If you do, we are happy with the same
happiness: but presently one of us passes into the perception of new truth;- we are
divorced, and no tension in nature can hold us to each other. I know how delicious is this
cup of love,- I existing for you, you existing for me; but it is a child’s clinging to his
toy; an attempt to eternize the fireside and nuptial chamber; to keep the picture-alphabet
through which our first lessons are prettily conveyed. The Eden of God is bare and grand:
like the out-door landscape remembered from the evening fireside, it seems cold and
desolate whilst you cower over the coals, but once abroad again, we pity those who can
forego the magnificence of nature for candle-light and cards. Perhaps the true subject of
the “Conjugal Love” is Conversation, whose laws are profoundly set forth. It is
false, if literally applied to marriage. For God is the bride or bridegroom of the soul.
Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the communion of all souls. We meet, and dwell an
instant under the temple of one thought, and part, as though we parted not, to join
another thought in other fellowships of joy. So far from there being anything divine in
the low and proprietary sense of Do you love me? it is only when you leave and lose me by
casting yourself on a sentiment which is higher than both of us, that I draw near and find
myself at your side; and I am repelled if you fix your eye on me and demand love. In fact,
in the spiritual world we change sexes every moment. You love the worth in me; then I am
your husband: but it is not me, but the worth, that fixes the love; and that worth is a
drop of the ocean of worth that is beyond me. Meantime I adore the greater worth in
another, and so become his wife. He aspires to a higher worth in another spirit, and is
wife or receiver of that influence.

Whether from a self-inquisitorial habit that he grew into from jealousy of the sins to
which men of thought are liable, he has acquired, in disentangling and demonstrating that
particular form of moral disease, an acumen which no conscience can resist. I refer to his
feeling of the profanation of thinking to what is good, “from scientifics.”
“To reason about faith, is to doubt and deny.” He was painfully alive to the
difference between knowing and doing, and this sensibility is incessantly expressed.
Philosophers are, therefore, vipers, cockatrices, asps, hemorrhoids, presters, and flying
serpents; literary men are conjurors and charlatans.

But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that here we find the seat of his own pain.
Possibly Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted faculties. Success, or a fortunate
genius, seems to depend on a happy adjustment of heart and brain; on a due proportion,
hard to hit, of moral and mental power, which perhaps obeys the law of those chemical
ratios which make a proportion in volumes necessary to combination, as when gases will
combine in certain fixed rates, but not at any rate. It is hard to carry a full cup; and
this man, profusely endowed in heart and mind, early fell into dangerous discord with
himself. In his Animal Kingdom he surprised us by declaring that he loved analysis, and
not synthesis; and now, after his fiftieth year, he falls into jealousy of his intellect;
and though aware that truth is not solitary nor is goodness solitary, but both must ever
mix and marry, he makes war on his mind, takes the part of the conscience against it, and,
on all occasions, traduces and blasphemes it. The violence is instantly avenged. Beauty is
disgraced, love is unlovely, when truth, the half part of heaven, is denied, as much as
when a bitterness in men of talent leads to satire and destroys the judgment. He is wise,
but wise in his own despite. There is an air of infinite grief and the sound of wailing
all over and through this lurid universe. A vampyre sits in the seat of the prophet and
turns with gloomy appetite to the images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not more readily
weave its nest, or a mole bore into the ground, than this seer of the souls substructs a
new hell and pit, each more abominable than the last, round every new crew of offenders.
He was let down through a column that seemed of brass, but it was formed of angelic
spirits, that he might descend safely amongst the unhappy, and witness the vastation of
souls and hear there, for a long continuance, their lamentations: he saw their tormentors,
who increase and strain pangs to infinity; he saw the hell of the jugglers, the hell of
the assassins, the hell of the lascivious; the hell of robbers, who kill and boil men; the
infernal tun of the deceitful; the excrementitious hells; the hell of the revengeful,
whose faces resembled a round, broad cake, and their arms rotate like a wheel. Except
Rabelais and Dean Swift nobody ever had such science of filth and corruption.

These books should be used with caution. It is dangerous to sculpture these evanescing
images of thought. True in transition, they become false if fixed. It requires, for his
just apprehension, almost a genius equal to his own. But when his visions become the
stereotyped language of multitudes of persons of all degrees of age and capacity, they are
perverted. The wise people of the Greek race were accustomed to lead the most intelligent
and virtuous young men, as part of their education, through the Eleusinian mysteries,
wherein, with much pomp and graduation, the highest truths known to ancient wisdom were
taught. An ardent and contemplative young man, at eighteen or twenty years, might read
once these books of Swedenborg, these mysteries of love and conscience, and then throw
them aside for ever. Genius is ever haunted by similar dreams, when the hells and the
heavens are opened to it. But these pictures are to be held as mystical, that is, as a
quite arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth,- not as the truth. Any other symbol
would be as good; then this is safely seen.

Swedenborg’s system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is dynamic, not vital,
and lacks power to generate life. There is no individual in it. The universe is a gigantic
crystal, all whose atoms and laminae lie in uninterrupted order and with unbroken unity,
but cold and still. What seems an individual and a will, is none. There is an immense
chain of intermediation, extending from centre to extremes, which bereaves every agency of
all freedom and character. The universe, in his poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and
only reflects the mind of the magnetizer. Every thought comes into each mind by influence
from a society of spirits that surround it, and into these from a higher society, and so
on. All his types mean the same few things. All his figures speak one speech. All his
interlocutors Swedenborgize. Be they who they may, to this complexion must they come at
last. This Charon ferries them all over in his boat; kings, counsellors, cavaliers,
doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane, King George II, Mahomet, or whomsoever, and
all gather one grimness of hue and style. Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle seer
sticks a little at saying he talked with Cicero, and with a touch of human relenting
remarks, “one whom it was given me to believe was Cicero”; and when the soi
disant Roman opens his mouth, Rome and eloquence have ebbed away,- it is plain theologic
Swedenborg like the rest. His heavens and hells are dull; fault of want of individualism.
The thousand-fold relation of men is not there. The interest that attaches in nature to
each man, because he is right by his wrong, and wrong by his right; because he defies all
dogmatizing and classification, so many allowances and contingencies and futurities are to
be taken into account; strong by his vices, often paralyzed by his virtues;- sinks into
entire sympathy with his society. This want reacts to the centre of the system. Though the
agency of “the Lord” is in every line referred to by name, it never becomes
alive. There is no lustre in that eye which gazes from the centre and which should vivify
the immense dependency of beings.

The vice of Swedenborg’s mind is its theological determination. Nothing with him has
the liberality of universal wisdom, but we are always in a church. That Hebrew muse, which
taught the lore of right and wrong to men, had the same excess of influence for him it has
had for the nations. The mode, as well as the essence, was sacred. Palestine is ever the
more valuable as a chapter in universal history, and ever the less an available element in
education. The genius of Swedenborg, largest of all modern souls in this department of
thought, wasted itself in the endeavor to reanimate and conserve what had already arrived
at its natural term, and, in the great secular Providence, was retiring from its
prominence, before Western modes of thought and expression. Swedenborg and Behmen both
failed by attaching themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment,
which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities, in its bosom.

The excess of influence shows itself in. the incongruous importation of a foreign
rhetoric. “What have I to do,” asks the impatient reader, “with jasper and
sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony; what with arks and passovers, ephahs and ephods; what with
lepers and emerods; what with heave-offerings and unleavened bread, chariots of fire,
dragons crowned and horned, behemoth and unicorn? Good for Orientals, these are nothing to
me. The more learning you bring to explain them, the more glaring the impertinence. The
more coherent and elaborate the system, the less I like it. I say, with the Spartan, ‘Why
do you speak so much to the purpose, of that which is nothing to the purpose? (*26) My learning is such as God gave me in my birth and habit,
in the delight and study of my eyes and not of another man’s. Of all absurdities, this of
some foreigner proposing to take away my rhetoric and substitute his own, and amuse me
with pelican and stork, instead of thrush and robin; palm-trees and shittim-wood, instead
of sassafras and hickory,- seems the most needless.”

Locke said, “God, when he makes the prophet, does not unmake the man.”
Swedenborg’s history points the remark. The parish disputes in the Swedish church between
the friends and foes of Luther and Melancthon, concerning “faith alone” and
“works alone,” intrude themselves into his speculations upon the economy of the
universe, and of the celestial societies. The Lutheran bishop’s son, for whom the heavens
are opened, so that he sees with eyes and in the richest symbolic forms the awful truth of
things, and utters again in his books, as under a heavenly mandate, the indisputable
secrets of moral nature,- with all these grandeurs resting upon him, remains the Lutheran
bishop’s son; his judgments are those of a Swedish polemic, and his vast enlargements
purchased by adamantine limitations. He carries his controversial memory with him in his
visits to the souls. He is like Michael Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the cardinal who
had offended him to roast under a mountain of devils; or like Dante, who avenged, in
vindictive melodies, all his private wrongs; or perhaps still more like Montaigne’s parish
priest, who, if a hail-storm passes over the village, thinks the day of doom is come, and
the cannibals already have got the pip. Swedenborg confounds us not less with the pains of
Melancthon and Luther and Wolfius, and his own books, which he advertises among the
angels.

Under the same theologic cramp, many of his dogmas are bound. His cardinal position in
morals is that evils should be shunned as sins. But he does not know what evil is, or what
good is, who thinks any ground remains to be occupied, after saying that evil is to be
shunned as evil. I doubt not he was led by the desire to insert the element of personality
of Deity. But nothing is added. One man, you say, dreads erysipelas,- show him that this
dread is evil: or, one dreads hell,- show him that dread is evil. He who loves goodness,
harbors angels, reveres reverence and lives with God. The less we have to do with our sins
the better. No man can afford to waste his moments in compunctions. “That is active
duty,” say the Hindoos, “which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge, which
is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness.”

Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious theologic limitation, is his Inferno.
Swedenborg has devils. Evil, according to old philosophers, is good in the making. That
pure malignity can exist is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be
entertained by a rational agent; it is atheism; it is the last profanation. Euripides
rightly said,-

“Goodness and being in the gods are one;
He who imputes ill to them makes them none.”

To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology arrived, that Swedenborg admitted no
conversion for evil spirits! But the divine effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the
sun will convert itself to grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on
gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true. Burns, with the wild humor of his
apostrophe to poor “auld Nickie Ben,”

“O wad ye tak a thought, and mend!”

has the advantage of the vindictive theologian. Every thing is superficial and perishes
but love and truth only. The largest is always the truest sentiment, and we feel the more
generous spirit of the Indian Vishnu,- “I am the same to all mankind. There is not
one who is worthy of my love or hatred. They who serve me with adoration,- I am in them,
and they in me. If one whose ways are altogether evil serve me alone, he is as respectable
as the just man; he is altogether well employed; he soon becometh of a virtuous spirit and
obtaineth eternal happiness.”

For the anomalous pretension of Revelations of the other world,- only his probity and
genius can entitle it to any serious regard. His revelations destroy their credit by
running into detail. If a man say that the Holy Ghost has informed him that the Last
judgment (or the last of the judgments) took place in 1757; or that the Dutch, in the
other world, live in a heaven by themselves, and the English in a heaven by themselves; I
reply that the Spirit which is holy is reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws. The rumors
of ghosts and hobgoblins gossip and tell fortunes. The teachings of the high Spirit are
abstemious, and, in regard to particulars, negative. Socrates’s Genius did not advise him
to act or to find, but if he purposed to do somewhat not advantageous, it dissuaded him.
“What God is,” he said, “I know not; what he is not, I know.” The
Hindoos have denominated the Supreme Being, the “Internal Check.” The
illuminated Quakers explained their Light, not as somewhat which leads to any action, but
it appears as an obstruction to any thing unfit. But the right examples are private
experiences, which are absolutely at one on this point. Strictly speaking, Swedenborg’s
revelation is a confounding of planes,- a capital offence in so learned a categorist. This
is to carry the law of surface into the plane of substance, to carry individualism and its
fopperies into the realm of essences and generals,- which is dislocation and chaos.

The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever
dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the fears of mortals. We should
have listened on our knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his
thoughts into parallelism with the celestial currents and could hint to human ears the
scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul. But it is certain that it must tally
with what is best in nature. It must not be inferior in tone to the already known works of
the artist who sculptures the globes of the firmament and writes the moral law. It must be
fresher than rainbows, stabler than mountains, agreeing with flowers, with tides and the
rising and setting of autumnal stars. Melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads
when once the penetrating key-note of nature and spirit is sounded,- the earth-beat,
sea-beat, heart-beat, which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of
blood, and the sap of trees.

In this mood we hear the rumor that the seer has arrived, and his tale is told. But
there is no beauty, no heaven: for angels, goblins. The sad muse loves night and death and
the pit. His Inferno is mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the same relation to the
generosities and joys of truth of which human souls have already made us cognizant, as a
man’s bad dreams bear to his ideal life. It is indeed very like, in its endless power of
lurid pictures, to the phenomena of dreaming, which nightly turns many an honest
gentleman, benevolent but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulking like a dog about the outer
yards and kennels of creation. When he mounts into the heaven, I do not hear its language.
A man should not tell me that he has walked among the angels; his proof is that his
eloquence makes me one. Shall the archangels be less majestic and sweet than the figures
that have actually walked the earth? These angels that Swedenborg paints give us no very
high idea of their discipline and culture: they are all country parsons: their heaven is a
fete champetre, an evangelical picnic, or French distribution of prizes to virtuous
peasants. Strange, scholastic, didactic, passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes
of souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and visits doleful hells as a stratum of chalk
or hornblende! He has no sympathy. He goes up and down the world of men, a modern
Rhadamanthus in gold-headed cane and peruke, and with nonchalance and the air of a
referee, distributes souls. The warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled world is to him a
grammar of hieroglyphs, or an emblematic freemason’s procession. How different is Jacob
Behmen! he is tremulous with emotion and listens awe-struck, with the gentlest humanity,
to the Teacher whose lessons he conveys; and when he asserts that, “in some sort,
love is greater than God,” his heart beats so high that the thumping against his
leathern coat is audible across the centuries. ‘Tis a great difference. Behmen is
healthily and beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrowness and
incommunicableness. Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and with all his accumulated gifts,
paralyzes and repels.

It is the best sign of a great nature that it opens a foreground, and, like the breath
of morning landscapes, invites us onward. Swedenborg is retrospective, nor can we divest
him of his mattock and shroud. Some minds are for ever restrained from descending into
nature; others are for ever prevented from ascending out of it. With a force of many men,
he could never break the umbilical cord which held him to nature, and he did not rise to
the platform of pure genius.

It is remarkable that this man, who, by his perception of symbols, saw the poetic
construction of things and the primary relation of mind to matter, remained entirely
devoid of the whole apparatus of poetic expression, which that perception creates. He knew
the grammar and rudiments of the Mother-Tongue,- how could he not read off one strain into
music? Was he like Saadi, who, in his vision, designed to fill his lap with the celestial
flowers, as presents for his friends; but the fragrance of the roses so intoxicated him
that the skirt dropped from his hands? or is reporting a breach of the manners of that
heavenly society? or was it that he saw the vision intellectually, and hence that chiding
of the intellectual that pervades his books? Be it as it may, his books have no melody, no
emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate
imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre
landscape. No bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry
in so transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice in a beautiful
person, is a kind of warning. I think, sometimes, he will not be read longer. His great
name will turn a sentence. His books have become a monument. His laurel so largely mixed
with cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles with the temple incense, that boys and maids
will shun the spot.

Yet in this immolation of genius and fame at the shrine of conscience, is a merit
sublime beyond praise. He lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. He elected goodness as the
clue to which the soul must cling in all this labyrinth of nature. Many opinions conflict
as to the true centre. In the shipwreck, some cling to running rigging, some to cask and
barrel, some to spars, some to mast; the pilot chooses with science,- I plant myself here;
all will sink before this; “he comes to land who sails with me.” Do not rely on
heavenly favor, or on compassion to folly, or on prudence, on common sense, the old usage
and main chance of men: nothing can keep you,- not fate, nor health, nor admirable
intellect; none can keep you, but rectitude only, rectitude for ever and ever! And with a
tenacity that never swerved in all his studies, inventions, dreams, he adheres to this
brave choice. I think of him as of some transmigrating votary of Indian legend, who says
“Though I be dog, or jackal, or pismire, in the last rudiments of nature, under what
integument or ferocity, I cleave to right, as the sure ladder that leads up to man and to
God.”

Swedenborg has rendered a double service to mankind, which is now only beginning to be
known. By the science of experiment and use, he made his first steps: he observed and
published the laws of nature; and ascending by just degrees from events to their summits
and causes, he was fired with piety at the harmonies he felt, and abandoned himself to his
joy and worship. This was his first service. If the glory was too bright for his eyes to
bear, if he staggered under the trance of delight, the more excellent is the spectacle he
saw, the realities of being which beam and blaze through him, and which no infirmities of
the prophet are suffered to obscure; and he renders a second passive service to men, not
less than the first, perhaps, in the great circle of being,- and, in the retributions of
spiritual nature, not less glorious or less beautiful to himself.

[Notes from the Centenary Edition of Emerson’s Complete Works, edited by his son,
Edward Waldo Emerson:]

*(17) From Plato’s Meno, where, as also in the Phaedrus, the doctrines
of Reminiscence is brought forward, and here is reconciled with that of the Universal
Mind.

*(18) John Selden (1584-1654), jurist, antiquarian, orientalist,
author. His Table-Talk was published in 1681.

*(19) Marcello Malpighi of Bologna (1628-1694) is considered a founder
of microscopic anatomy.

*(20) Leucippus: in the 5th century B.C. Leucippus held an atomic
theory later expounded by Lucretius in his poem De Rerum Natura.

*(21) Swammerdam… Boerhaave: Swammerdam, a brilliant Dutch
naturalist of the 17th century, was especially noted for his minute studies of the viscera
and system of injection of vessels. Leuwenhoek, his countryman and contemporary, made
notable discoveries with regard to capillary circulation and the blood corpuscles of man
and animals… Winslow was a Dane, but worked in Paris, and wrote on purely descriptive
anatomy. Eustachius of Salerno was a brilliant investigator of human structure, especially
of the ear and viscera, though less reputed that the great Flemish anatomist Andreas
Vesalius, who was persecuted for daring to teach the real facts of human anatomy in face
of the mistaken authority of Galen. Heister was also an anatomist. Herman Boerhaave
(1688-1738), born in Holland and educated at the University of Leyden… He studied
philosophy and medicine and became a distinguished practitioner and writer mainly on
medical subjects.

*(22) Leibnitz: the maxim of the broad and high-minded Leibnitz
(1646-1715), “Everything is for the best in the best of possible worlds,” would
have recommended him.

*(23) The “flowing of nature” is the old doctrine of
Heracleitus. The answer of Amasis, King of Egypt, is related in “The Banquet” in
Plutarch’s Morals.

*(24) In the Timaeus it is told that Solon heard from Egyptian priests
this account of the great Athenians of the first State, which was destroyed by an
earthquake thousands of years earlier.

*(25) Casella: Dante’s friend, the beautiful singer, whom meeting, in
Purgatory, he besought to sing. Casella began “Amor che nella mente mi ragiona,”
and all the souls flocked to hear.

*(26) One of the examples of Laconic speech given by Plutarch in the
Life of Lycurgus.

* * *

Montaigne; or, the Skeptic (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882

Montaigne; or, the Skeptic
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Representative Men, 1850

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and on the other to morals. The game of
thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the
upper, to find the under side. Nothing so thin but has these two faces, and when the
observer has seen the obverse, he turns it over to see the reverse. Life is a pitching of
this penny,- heads or tails. We never tire of this game, because there is still a slight
shudder of astonishment at the exhibition of the other face, at the contrast of the two
faces. A man is flushed with success, and bethinks himself what this good luck signifies.
He drives his bargain in the street; but it occurs that he also is bought and sold. He
sees the beauty of a human face, and searches the cause of that beauty, which must be more
beautiful. He builds his fortunes, maintains the laws, cherishes his children; but he asks
himself, Why? and whereto? This head and this tail are called, in the language of
philosophy, Infinite and Finite; Relative and Absolute; Apparent and Real; and many fine
names beside.

Each man is born with a predisposition to one or the other of these sides of nature;
and it will easily happen that men will be found devoted to one or the other. One class
has the perception of difference, and is conversant with facts and surfaces, cities and
persons, and the bringing certain things to pass;- the men of talent and action. Another
class have the perception of identity, and are men of faith and philosophy, men of genius.

Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus believes only in philosophers; Fenelon,
in saints; Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the haughty language in which Plato and the
Platonists speak of all men who are not devoted to their own shining abstractions: other
men are rats and mice. The literary class is usually proud and exclusive. The
correspondence of Pope and Swift describes mankind around them as monsters; and that of
Goethe and Schiller, in our own time, is scarcely more kind.

It is easy to see how this arrogance comes. The genius is a genius by the first look he
casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he not rest in angles and colors, but
beholds the design?- he will presently undervalue the actual object. In powerful moments,
his thought has dissolved the works of art and nature into their causes, so that the works
appear heavy and faulty. He has a conception of beauty which the sculptor cannot embody.
Picture, statue, temple, railroad, steam-engine, existed first in an artist’s mind,
without flaw, mistake, or friction, which impair the executed models. So did the Church,
the State, college, court, social circle, and all the institutions. It is not strange that
these men, remembering what they have seen and hoped of ideas, should affirm disdainfully
the superiority of ideas. Having at some time seen that the happy soul will carry all the
arts in power, they say, Why cumber ourselves with superfluous realizations? and like
dreaming beggars they assume to speak and act as if these values were already
substantiated.

On the other part, the men of toil and trade and luxury,- the animal world, including
the animal in the philosopher and poet also, and the practical world, including the
painful drudgeries which are never excused to philosopher or poet any more than to the
rest,- weigh heavily on the other side. The trade in our streets believes in no
metaphysical causes, thinks nothing of the force which necessitated traders and a trading
planet to exist: no, but sticks to cotton, sugar, wool and salt. The ward meetings, on
election days, are not softened by any misgiving of the value of these ballotings. Hot
life is streaming in a single direction. To the men of this world, to the animal strength
and spirits, to the men of practical power, whilst immersed in it, the man of ideas
appears out of his reason. They alone have reason.

Things always bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence. No man acquires
property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also. In England, the richest
country that ever existed, property stands for more, compared with personal ability, than
in any other. After dinner, a man believes less, denies more: verities have lost some
charm. After dinner, arithmetic is the only science: ideas are disturbing, incendiary,
follies of young men, repudiated by the solid portion of society: and a man comes to be
valued by his athletic and animal qualities. Spence relates that Mr. Pope was with Sir
Godfrey Kneller one day, when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came in. “Nephew,”
said Sir Godfrey, “you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men in the
world.” “I don’t know how great men you may be,” said the Guinea man,
“but I don’t like your looks. I have often bought a man much better than both of you,
all muscles and bones, for ten guineas.” Thus the men of the senses revenge
themselves on the professors and repay scorn for scorn. The first had leaped to
conclusions not yet ripe, and say more than is true; the others make themselves merry with
the philosopher, and weigh man by the pound. They believe that mustard bites the tongue,
that pepper is hot, friction-matches incendiary, revolvers are to be avoided, and
suspenders hold up pantaloons; that there is much sentiment in a chest of tea; and a man
will be eloquent, if you give him good wine. Are you tender and scrupulous,- you must eat
more mince-pie. They hold that Luther had milk in him when he said,-

“Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weiber, Gesang,
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang”;-

and when he advised a young scholar, perplexed with fore-ordination and free-will, to
get well drunk. “The nerves,” says Cabanis, “they are the man.” My
neighbor, a jolly farmer, in the tavern bar-room, thinks that the use of money is sure and
speedy spending. For his part, he says, he puts his down his neck and gets the good of it.

The inconvenience of this way of thinking is that it runs into indifferentism and then
into disgust. Life is eating us up. We shall be fables presently. Keep cool: it will be
all one a hundred years hence. Life’s well enough, but we shall be glad to get out of it,
and they will all be glad to have us. Why should we fret and drudge? Our meat will taste
to-morrow as it did yesterday, and we may at last have had enough of it. “Ah,”
said my languid gentleman at Oxford, “there’s nothing new or true,- and no
matter.”

With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans; our life is like an ass led to market
by a bundle of hay being carried before him; he sees nothing but the bundle of hay.
“There is so much trouble in coming into the world,” said Lord Bolingbroke,
“and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that ’tis hardly
worthwhile to be here at all.” I knew a philosopher of this kidney who was accustomed
briefly to sum up his experience of human nature in saying, “Mankind is a damned
rascal”: (*27) and the natural corollary is pretty sure to
follow,- “The world lives by humbug, and so will I.”

The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the
scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the
middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in
extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. He will not go
beyond his card. He sees the one-sidedness of these men of the street; he will not be a
Gibeonite; he stands for the intellectual faculties, a cool head and whatever serves to
keep it cool; no unadvised industry, no unrewarded self-devotion, no loss of the brains in
toil. Am I an ox, or a dray?- You are both in extremes, he says. You that will have all
solid, and a world of pig-lead, deceive yourselves grossly. You believe yourselves rooted
and grounded on adamant; and yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowledge, you are
spinning like bubbles in a river, you know not whither or whence, and you are bottomed and
capped and wrapped in delusions. Neither will he be betrayed to a book and wrapped in a
gown. The studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their feet are
cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption,-
pallor, squalor, hunger and egotism. If you come near them and see what conceits they
entertain,- they are abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some
dream; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme, built on a truth, but
destitute of proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all
energy of will in the schemer to embody and vitalize it.

But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I know that human strength is not in
extremes, but in avoiding extremes. I, at least, will shun the weakness of philosophizing
beyond my depth. What is the use of pretending to powers we have not? What is the use of
pretending to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? Why exaggerate the power
of virtue? Why be an angel before your time? These strings, wound up too high, will snap.
If there is a wish for immortality, and no evidence, why not say just that? If there are
conflicting evidences, why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to
make up his mind, yea or nay,- why not suspend the judgment? I weary of these dogmatizers.
I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny the dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand
here to try the case. I am here to consider, skopein, to consider how it is. I will try to
keep the balance true. Of what use to take the chair and glibly rattle off theories of
society, religion and nature, when I know that practical objections lie in the way,
insurmountable by me and by my mates? Why so talkative in public, when each of my
neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute? Why pretend that life is so
simple a game, when we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus (*28)
is? Why think to shut up all things in your narrow coop, when we know there are not one or
two only, but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike? Why fancy that you have all the
truth in your keeping? There is much to say on all sides.

Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which
any thing more than an approximate solution can be had? Is not marriage an open question,
when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution
wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in? And the reply of Socrates, to him who
asked whether he should choose a wife, still remains reasonable, that “whether he
should choose one or not, he would repent it.” Is not the State a question? All
society is divided in opinion on the subject of the State. Nobody loves it; great numbers
dislike it and suffer conscientious scruples to allegiance; and the only defence set up,
is the fear of doing worse in disorganizing. Is it otherwise with the Church? Or, to put
any of the questions which touch mankind nearest,- shall the young man aim at a leading
part in law, in polities, in trade? It will not be pretended that a success in either of
these kinds is quite coincident with what is best and inmost in his mind. Shall he then,
cutting the stays that hold him fast to the social state, put out to sea with no guidance
but his genius? There is much to say on both sides. Remember the open question between the
present order of “competition” and the friends of “attractive and
associated labor.” The generous minds embrace the proposition of labor shared by all;
it is the only honesty; nothing else is safe. It is from the poor man’s hut alone that
strength and virtue come: and yet, on the other side, it is alleged that labor impairs the
form and breaks the spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, “We have no
thoughts.” Culture, how indispensable! I cannot forgive you the want of
accomplishments; and yet culture will instantly impair that chiefest beauty of
spontaneousness. Excellent is culture for a savage; but once let him read in the book, and
he is no longer able not to think of Plutarch’s heroes. In short, since true fortitude of
understanding consists “in not letting what we know be embarrassed by what we do not
know,” we ought to secure those advantages which we can command, and not risk them by
clutching after the airy and unattainable. Come, no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let us mix
in affairs; let us learn and get and have and climb. “Men are a sort of moving
plants, and, like trees, receive a great part of their nourishment from the air. If they
keep too much at home, they pine.” Let us have a robust, manly life; let us know what
we know, for certain; what we have, let it be solid and seasonable and our own. A world in
the hand is worth two in the bush. Let us have to do with real men and women, and not with
skipping ghosts.

This then is the right ground of the skeptic,- this of consideration, of
self-containing; not at all of unbelief; not at all of universal denying, nor of universal
doubting,- doubting even that he doubts; least of all of scoffing and profligate jeering
at all that is stable and good. These are no more his moods than are those of religion and
philosophy. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting stock, husbanding
his means, believing that a man has too many enemies than that he can afford to be his own
foe; that we cannot give ourselves too many advantages in this unequal conflict, with
powers so vast and unweariable ranged on one side, and this little conceited vulnerable
popinjay that a man is, bobbing up and down into every danger, on the other. It is a
position taken up for better defence, as of more safety, and one that can be maintained;
and it is one of more opportunity and range: as, when we build a house, the rule is to set
it not too high nor too low, under the wind, but out of the dirt.

The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. The Spartan and Stoic schemes
are too stark and stiff for our occasion. A theory of Saint John, and of non-resistance,
seems, on the other hand, too thin and aerial. We want some coat woven of elastic steel,
stout as the first and limber as the second. We want a ship in these billows we inhabit.
An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and splinters in this storm of many
elements. No, it must be tight, and fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell
must dictate the architecture of a house founded on the sea. The soul of man must be the
type of our scheme, just as the body of man is the type after which a dwelling-house is
built. Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature. We are golden averages, volitant
stabilities, compensated or periodic errors, houses founded on the sea. The wise skeptic
wishes to have a near view of the best game and the chief players; what is best in the
planet; art and nature, places and events; but mainly men. Every thing that is excellent
in mankind,- a form of grace, an arm of iron, lips of persuasion, a brain of resources,
every one skilful to play and win,- he will see and judge.

The terms of admission to this spectacle are, that he have a certain solid and
intelligible way of living of his own; some method of answering the inevitable needs of
human life; proof that he has played with skill and success; that he has evinced the
temper, stoutness and the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries and
countrymen, entitle him to fellowship and trust. For the secrets of life are not shown
except to sympathy and likeness. Men do not confide themselves to boys, or coxcombs, or
pedants, but to their peers. Some wise limitation, as the modern phrase is; some condition
between the extremes, and having, itself, a positive quality; some stark and sufficient
man, who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to the world to do justice to
Paris or London, and, at the same time, a vigorous and original thinker, whom cities can
not overawe, but who uses them,- is the fit person to occupy this ground of speculation.

These qualities meet in the character of Montaigne. And yet, since the personal regard
which I entertain for Montaigne may be unduly great, I will, under the shield of this
prince of egotists, offer, as an apology for electing him as the representative of
skepticism, a word or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.

A single odd volume of Cotton’s translation of the Essays remained to me from my
father’s library, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was
newly escaped from college, I read the book, and procured the remaining volumes. I
remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had
myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and
experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, I
came to a tomb of Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who,
said the monument, “lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays
of Montaigne.” Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished English
poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence, I found that, from a love of
Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his chateau, still standing near Castellan, in
Perigord, and, after two hundred and fifty years, had copied from the walls of his library
the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there. That Journal of Mr. Sterling’s,
published in the Westminster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in the Prolegomena to his
edition of the Essays. I heard with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs
of William Shakespeare was in a copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne. It is the only
book which we certainly know to have been in the poet’s library. And, oddly enough, the
duplicate copy of Florio, which the British Museum purchased with a view of protecting the
Shakespeare autograph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the autograph
of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord Byron, that Montaigne was the
only great writer of past times whom he read with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences,
not needful to be mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still new and immortal
for me.

In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, then thirty-eight years old, retired
from the practice of law at Bordeaux, and settled himself on his estate. Though he had
been a man of pleasure and sometimes a courtier, his studious habits now grew on him, and
he loved the compass, staidness and independence of the country gentleman’s life. He took
up his economy in good earnest, and made his farms yield the most. Downright and
plain-dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to deceive, he was esteemed in the country
for his sense and probity. In the civil wars of the League, which converted every house
into a fort, Montaigne kept his gates open and his house without defence. All parties
freely came and went, his courage and honor being universally esteemed. The neighboring
lords and gentry brought jewels and papers to him for safekeeping. Gibbon reckons, in
these bigoted times, but two men of liberality in France,- Henry IV and Montaigne.

Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French freedom runs into
grossness; but he has anticipated all censure by the bounty of his own confessions. In his
times, books were written to one sex only, and almost all were written in Latin; so that
in a humorist a certain nakedness of statement was permitted, which our manners, of a
literature addressed equally to both sexes, do not allow. But though a biblical plainness
coupled with a most uncanonical levity may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet
the offence is superficial. He parades it: he makes the most of it: nobody can think or
say worse of him than he does. He pretends to most of the vices; and, if there be any
virtue in him, he says, it got in by stealth. There is no man, in his opinion, who has not
deserved hanging five or six times; and he pretends no exception in his own behalf.
“Five or six as ridiculous stories,” too, he says, “can be told of me, as
of any man living.” But, with all this really superfluous frankness, the opinion of
an invincible probity grows into every reader’s mind. “When I the most strictly and
religiously confess myself, I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of
vice; and I, who am as sincere and perfect a lover of virtue of that stamp as any other
whatever, am afraid that Plato, in his purest virtue, if he had listened and laid his ear
close to himself, would have heard some jarring sound of human mixture; but faint and
remote and only to be perceived by himself.”

Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color or pretence of any kind. He has been
in courts so long as to have conceived a furious disgust at appearances; he will indulge
himself with a little cursing and swearing; he will talk with sailors and gipsies, use
flash and street ballads; he has stayed in-doors till he is deadly sick; he will to the
open air, though it rain bullets. He has seen too much of gentlemen of the long robe,
until he wishes for cannibals; and is so nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks the
more barbarous man is, the better he is. He likes his saddle. You may read theology, and
grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever you get here shall smack of the earth and of
real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging. He makes no hesitation to entertain you with the
records of his disease, and his journey to Italy is quite full of that matter. He took and
kept this position of equilibrium. Over his name he drew an emblematic pair of scales, and
wrote Que scais je? under it. As I look at his effigy opposite the title-page, I seem to
hear him say, “You may play old Poz, if you will; you may rail and exaggerate,- I
stand here for truth, and will not, for all the states and churches and revenues and
personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see it; I will rather mumble
and prose about what I certainly know,- my house and barns; my father, my wife and my
tenants; my old lean bald pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat and what drinks I
prefer, and a hundred straws just as ridiculous,- than I will write, with a fine
crow-quill, a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and winter weather. I am gray and
autumnal myself, and think an undress and old shoes that do not pinch my feet, and old
friends who do not constrain me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain myself and
pump my brains, the most suitable. Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough. One
cannot be sure of himself and his fortune an hour, but he may be whisked off into some
pitiable or ridiculous plight. Why should I vapor and play the philosopher, instead of
ballasting, the best I can, this dancing balloon? So, at least, I live within compass,
keep myself ready for action, and can shoot the gulf at last with decency. If there be
anything farcical in such a life, the blame is not mine; let it lie at fate’s and nature’s
door.”

The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random topic that comes
into his head; treating every thing without ceremony, yet with masculine sense. There have
been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of
thoughts: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care
for all that he cares for.

The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the
book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book.
Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same
pleasure in it that he feels in listening to the necessary speech of men about their work,
when any unusual circumstance gives momentary importance to the dialogue. For blacksmiths
and teamsters do not trip in their speech; it is a shower of bullets. It is Cambridge men
who correct themselves and begin again at every half sentence, and, moreover, will pun,
and refine too much, and swerve from the matter to the expression. Montaigne talks with
shrewdness, knows the world and books and himself, and uses the positive degree; never
shrieks, or protests, or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative: does not wish
to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time, but is stout and
solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain because it makes him feel himself and
realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he
rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the stones underneath. His writing
has no enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting and keeping the middle of
the road. There is but one exception,- in his love for Socrates. In speaking of him, for
once his cheek flushes and his style rises to passion.

Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty, in 1592. When he came to die he caused
the mass to be celebrated in his chamber. At the age of thirty-three, he had been married.
“But,” he says, “might I have had my own will, I would not have married
Wisdom herself, if she would have had me: but ’tis to much purpose to evade it, the common
custom and use of life will have it so. Most of my actions are guided by example, not
choice.” In the hour of death, he gave the same weight to custom. Que scais je? What
do I know?

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into all tongues and
printing seventy-five editions of it in Europe; and that, too, a circulation somewhat
chosen, namely among courtiers, soldiers, princes, men of the world and men of wit and
generosity.

Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, and given the right and permanent
expression of the human mind, on the conduct of life?

We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and effect, alone
interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things: all worlds are
strung on it, as beads; and men, and events, and life, come to us only because of that
thread: they pass and repass only that we may know the direction and continuity of that
line. A book or statement which goes to show that there is no line, but random and chaos,
a calamity out of nothing, a prosperity and no account of it, a hero born from a fool, a
fool from a hero,- dispirits us. Seen or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes
counterfeit ties; genius finds the real ones. We hearken to the man of science, because we
anticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which he uncovers. We love whatever affirms,
connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters or pulls down. One man appears whose nature
is to all men’s eyes conserving and constructive; his presence supposes a well-ordered
society, agriculture, trade, large institutions and empire. If these did not exist, they
would begin to exist through his endeavors. Therefore he cheers and comforts men, who feel
all this in him very readily. The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of
unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of
house or state of their own. Therefore, though the town and state and way of living, which
our counsellor contemplated, might be a very modest or musty prosperity, yet men rightly
go for him, and reject the reformer so long as he comes only with axe and crowbar.

But though we are natural conservers and causationists, and reject a sour, dumpish
unbelief, the skeptical class, which Montaigne represents, have reason, and every man, at
some time, belongs to it. Every superior mind will pass through this domain of
equilibration,- I should rather say, will know how to avail himself of the checks and
balances in nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and formalism of bigots
and blockheads.

Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the particulars which
society adores, but which he sees to be reverend only in their tendency and spirit. The
ground occupied by the skeptic is the vestibule of the temple. Society does not like to
have any breath of question blown on the existing order. But the interrogation of custom
at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind, and is the
evidence of its perception of the flowing power which remains itself in all changes.

The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of society and with
the projects that are offered to relieve them. The wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no
conservative, he sees the selfishness of property and the drowsiness of institutions. But
neither is he fit to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties
wish every one committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism. His politics are those
of the “Soul’s Errand” of Sir Walter Raleigh; or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat,
“There is none who is worthy of my love or hatred”; whilst he sentences law,
physic, divinity, commerce and custom. He is a reformer; yet he is no better member of the
philanthropic association. It turns out that he is not the champion of the operative, the
pauper, the prisoner, the slave. It stands in his mind that our life in this world is not
of quite so easy interpretation as churches and schoolbooks say. He does not wish to take
ground against these benevolences, to play the part of devil’s attorney, and blazon every
doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for him. But he says, There are doubts.

I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the calendar-day of our Saint Michel de
Montaigne, by counting and describing these doubts or negations. I wish to ferret them out
of their holes and sun them a little. We must do with them as the police do with old
rogues, who are shown up to the public at the marshal’s office. They will never be so
formidable when once they have been identified and registered. But I mean honestly by
them,- that justice shall be done to their terrors. I shall not take Sunday objections,
made up on purpose to be put down. I shall take the worst I can find, whether I can
dispose of them or they of me.

I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. I know the quadruped opinion will not
prevail. ‘Tis of no importance what bats and oxen think. The first dangerous symptom I
report is, the levity of intellect; as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much.
Knowledge is the knowing that we can not know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light
mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect kills it. Nay,
San Carlo, (*29) my subtle and admirable friend, one of the most
penetrating of men, finds that all direct ascension, even of lofty piety, leads to this
ghastly insight and sends back the votary orphaned. My astonishing San Carlo thought the
lawgivers and saints infected. They found the are empty; saw, and would not tell; and
tried to choke off their approaching followers, by saying, “Action, action, my dear
fellows, is for you!” Bad as was to me this detection by San Carlo, this-frost in
July, this blow from a bride, there was still a worse, namely the cloy or satiety of the
saints. In the mount of vision, ere they have yet risen from their knees, they say,
“We discover that this our homage and beatitude is partial and deformed: we must fly
for relief to the suspected and reviled Intellect, to the Understanding, the
Mephistopheles, to the gymnastics of talent.”

This is hobgoblin the first; and though it has been the subject of much elegy in our
nineteenth century, from Byron, Goethe and other poets of less fame, not to mention many
distinguished private observers,- I confess it is not very affecting to my imagination;
for it seems to concern the shattering of baby-houses and crockery-shops. What flutters
the Church of Rome, or of England, or of Geneva, or of Boston, may yet be very far from
touching any principle of faith. I think that the intellect and moral sentiment are
unanimous; and that though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet it supplies the natural
checks of vice, and polarity to the soul. I think that the wiser a man is, the more
stupendous he finds the natural and moral economy, and lifts himself to a more absolute
reliance.

There is the power of moods, each setting at nought all but its own tissue of facts and
beliefs. There is the power of complexions, obviously modifying the dispositions and
sentiments. The beliefs and unbeliefs appear to be structural; and as soon as each man
attains the poise and vivacity which allow the whole machinery to play, he will not need
extreme examples, but will rapidly alternate all opinions in his own life. Our life is
March weather, savage and serene in one hour. We go forth austere, dedicated, believing in
the iron links of Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save our life: but a book, or
a bust, or only the sound of a name, shoots a spark through the nerves, and we suddenly
believe in will: my finger-ring shall be the seal of Solomon; fate is for imbeciles; all
is possible to the resolved mind. Presently a new experience gives a new turn to our
thoughts: common sense resumes its tyranny; we say, “Well, the army, after all, is
the gate to fame, manners and poetry: and, look you,- on the whole, selfishness plants
best, prunes best, makes the best commerce and the best citizen.” Are the opinions of
a man on right and wrong, on fate and causation, at the mercy of a broken sleep or an
indigestion? Is his belief in God and Duty no deeper than a stomach evidence? And what
guaranty for the permanence of his opinions? I like not the French celerity,- a new Church
and State once a week. This is the second negation; and I shall let it pass for what it
will. As far as it asserts rotation of states of mind, I suppose it suggests its own
remedy, namely in the record of larger periods. What is the mean of many states; of all
the states? Does the general voice of ages affirm any principle, or is no community of
sentiment discoverable in distant times and places? And when it shows the power of
self-interest, I accept that as part of the divine law and must reconcile it with
aspiration the best I can.

The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense of mankind, in all ages, that the laws
of the world do not always befriend, but often hurt and crush us. Fate, in the shape of
Kinde or nature, grows over us like grass. We paint Time with a scythe; Love and Fortune,
blind; and Destiny, deaf. We have too little power of resistance against this ferocity
which champs us up. What front can we make against these unavoidable, victorious,
maleficent forces? What can I do against the influence of Race, in my history? What can I
do against hereditary and constitutional habits; against scrofula, lymph, impotence?
against climate, against barbarism, in my country? I can reason down or deny every thing,
except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

But the main resistance which the affirmative impulse finds, and one including all
others, is in the doctrine of the Illusionists. There is a painful rumor in circulation
that we have been practised upon in all the principal performances of life, and free
agency is the emptiest name. We have been sopped and drugged with the air, with food, with
woman, with children, with sciences, with events, which leave us exactly where they found
us. The mathematics, ’tis complained, leave the mind where they find it: so do all
sciences; and so do all events and actions. I find a man who has passed through all the
sciences, the churl he was; and, through all the offices, learned, civil and social, can
detect the child. We are not the less necessitated to dedicate life to them. In fact we
may come to accept it as the fixed rule and theory of our state of education, that God is
a substance, and his method is illusion. The Eastern sages owned the goddess Yoganidra,
the great illusory energy of Vishnu, by whom, as utter ignorance, the whole world is
beguiled.

Or shall I state it thus?- The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearance of
reconciliation between the theory and practice of life. Reason, the prized reality, the
Law, is apprehended, now and then, for a serene and profound moment amidst the hubbub of
cares and works which have no direct bearing on it;- is then lost for months or years, and
again found for an interval, to be lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in fifty
years, have half a dozen reasonable hours. But what are these cares and works the better?
A method in the world we do not see, but this parallelism of great and little, which never
react on each other, nor discover the smallest tendency to converge. Experiences,
fortunes, governings, readings, writings, are nothing to the purpose; as when a man comes
into the room it does not appear whether he has been fed on yams or buffalo,- he has
contrived to get so much bone and fibre as he wants, out of rice or out of snow. So vast
is the disproportion between the sky of law and the pismire of performance under it, that
whether he is a man of worth or a sot is not so great a matter as we say. Shall I add, as
one juggle of this enchantment, the stunning non-intercourse law which makes co-operation
impossible? The young spirit pants to enter society. But all the ways of culture and
greatness lead to solitary imprisonment. He has been often baulked. He did not expect a
sympathy, with his thought from the village, but he went with it to the chosen and
intelligent, and found no entertainment for it, but mere misapprehension, distaste and
scoffing. Men are strangely mistimed and misapplied; and the excellence of each is an
inflamed individualism which separates him more.

There are these, and more than these diseases of thought, which our ordinary teachers
do not attempt to remove. Now shall we, because a good nature inclines us to virtue’s
side, say, There are no doubts,- and lie for the right? Is life to be led in a brave or in
a cowardly manner? and is not the satisfaction of the doubts essential to all manliness?
Is the name of virtue to be a barrier to that which is virtue? Can you not believe that a
man of earnest and burly habit may find small good in tea, essays and catechism, and want
a rougher instruction, want men, labor, trade, farming, war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred,
doubt and terror to make things plain to him; and has he not a right to insist on being
convinced in his own way? When he is convinced, he will be worth the pains.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.
Some minds are incapable of skepticism. The doubts they profess to entertain are rather a
civility or accommodation to the common discourse of their company. They may well give
themselves leave to speculate, for they are secure of a return. Once admitted to the
heaven of thought, they see no relapse into night, but infinite invitation on the other
side. Heaven is within heaven, and sky over sky, and they are encompassed with divinities.
Others there are to whom the heaven is brass, and it shuts down to the surface of the
earth. It is a question of temperament, or of more or less immersion in nature. The last
class must needs have a reflex or parasite faith; not a sight of realities, but an
instinctive reliance on the seers and believers of realities. The manners and thoughts of
believers astonish them and convince them that these have seen something which is hid from
themselves. But their sensual habit would fix the believer to his last position, whilst he
as inevitably advances; and presently the unbeliever, for love of belief, burns the
believer.

Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and
really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a
series of skepticisms. Charitable souls come with their projects and ask his co-operation.
How can he hesitate? It is the rule of mere comity and courtesy to agree where you can,
and to turn your sentence with something auspicious, and not freezing and sinister. But he
is forced to say, “O, these things will be as they must be: what can you do? These
particular griefs and crimes are the foliage and fruit of such trees as we see growing. It
is vain to complain of the leaf or the berry; cut it off, it will bear another just as
bad. You must begin your cure lower down.” The generosities of the day prove an
intractable element for him. The people’s questions are not his; their methods are not
his; and against all the dictates of good nature he is driven to say he has no pleasure in
them.

Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of the divine Providence and of the
immortality of the soul, his neighbors can not put the statement so that he shall affirm
it. But he denies out of more faith, and not less. He denies out of honesty. He had rather
stand charged with the imbecility of skepticism, than with untruth. I believe, he says, in
the moral design of the universe; it exists hospitably for the weal of souls; but your
dogmas seem to me caricatures: why should I make believe them? Will any say, This is cold
and infidel? The wise and magnanimous will not say so. They will exult in his far-sighted
good-will that can abandon to the adversary all the ground of tradition and common belief,
without losing a jot of strength. It sees to the end of all transgression. George Fox saw
that there was “an ocean of darkness and death; but withal an infinite ocean of light
and love which flowed over that of darkness.”

The final solution in which skepticism is lost, is in the moral sentiment, which never
forfeits its supremacy. All moods may be safely tried, and their weight allowed to all
objections: the moral sentiment as easily outweighs them all, as any one. This is the drop
which balances the sea. I play with the miscellany of facts, and take those superficial
views which we call skepticism; but I know that they will presently appear to me in that
order which makes skepticism impossible. A man of thought must feel the thought that is
parent of the universe; that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.

This faith avails to the whole emergency of life and objects. The world is saturated
with deity and with law. He is content with just and unjust, with sots and fools, with the
triumph of folly and fraud. He can behold with serenity the yawning gulf between the
ambition of man and his power of performance, between the demand and supply of power,
which makes the tragedy of all souls.

Charles Fourier announced that “the attractions of man are proportioned to his
destinies”; in other words, that every desire predicts its own satisfaction. Yet all
experience exhibits the reverse of this; the incompetency of power is the universal grief
of young and ardent minds. They accuse the divine Providence of a certain parsimony. It
has shown the heaven and earth to every child and filled him with a desire for the whole;
a desire raging, infinite; a hunger, as of space to be filled with planets; a cry of
famine, as of devils for souls. Then for the satisfaction,- to each man is administered a
single drop, a bead of dew of vital power, per day,- a cup as large as space, and one drop
of the water of life in it. Each man woke in the morning with an appetite that could eat
the solar system like a cake; a spirit for action and passion without bounds; he could lay
his hand on the morning star; he could try conclusions with gravitation or chemistry; but,
on the first motion to prove his strength,- hands, feet, senses, gave way and would not
serve him. He was an emperor deserted by his states, and left to whistle by himself, or
thrust into a mob of emperors, all whistling: and still the sirens sang, “The
attractions are proportioned to the destinies.” In every house, in the heart of each
maiden and of each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found,- between
the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience.

The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man
helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson of life is practically to generalize;
to believe what the years and the centuries say, against the hours; to resist the
usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say one
thing, and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral; the result is moral. Things seem to
tend downward, to justify despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just; and by
knaves as by martyrs the just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every
political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set
of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is
changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies,- yet, general ends are
somehow answered. We see, now, events forced on which seem to retard or retrograde the
civility of ages. But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot
drown him. He snaps his finger at laws: and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect
low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys
and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to
bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence without losing his reverence;
let him learn that he is here, not to work but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss
open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal
Cause:-

“If my bark sink, ’tis to another sea.”

[Notes from the Centenary Edition of Emerson’s Complete Works, edited by his son,
Edward Waldo Emerson:]

*(27) I knew a philosopher… “Mankind is a damned rascal”:
this was the remark of Emerson’s neighbor, a laborer.

*(28) The Proteus: Mr. Emerson recognized Nature’s secret of Identity
through all fugitive forms in the fable of the sea-god Proteus, who, when caught sleeping
by a mortal, took shapes of beasts, of serpents, of fire, to disconcert his captor, yet,
if held fast in spite of all, must answer his questions.

*(29) San Carlo: the valued friend here alluded to, Mr. Charles K.
Newcomb, was of a sensitive and beautiful character, a mystic, but with the Hamlet
temperament to such an extent that he was paralyzed for all action by the tenderness of
his conscience and the power with which all sides of a question presented themselves to
him in turn. He was a member of the Brooks Farm Community, a welcome but rare visitor at
Mr. Emerson’s house, and when he came he brought his writings, which interested his host
greatly. I think they never came to publication, except a few papers in the Dial. His
sense of duty sent him to the war for the Union in the ranks. He remained a bachelor all
his life and in his last years lived much abroad.

* * *

Shakespeare; or, the Poet (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882

Shakespeare; or, the Poet
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Representative Men, 1850

Great men are more distinguished by range and tent than by originality. If we require
the originality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels;
in finding clay and making bricks and building the house; no great men are original. Nor
does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero is in the press of
knights and the thick of events; and seeing what men want and sharing their desire, he
adds the needful length of sight and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest
genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no rattle-brain, saying what comes uppermost,
and, because he says every thing, saying at last something good; but a heart in unison
with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but
sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions and pointed with the most
determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have any individual
great, except through the general. There is no choice to genius. A great man does not wake
up on some fine morning and say, “I am full of life, I will go to sea and find an
Antarctic continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany and find a new
food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power”:
no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the
ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one
way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The Church has
reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the advice which her music gave him,
and builds a cathedral needed by her chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it
educates him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of production to the
place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad. Every master has found his materials
collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people and in his love of the
materials he wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him thus far on his way.
The human race has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows and bridged the
rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into
their labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of the national
feeling and history, and he would have all to do for himself: his powers would be expended
in the first preparations. Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being
original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering
the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Shakespeare’s youth fell in a time when the English people were importunate for
dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily at political allusions and
attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a growing and energetic party, and the religious
among the Anglican church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,
houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs were the ready
theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not
hope to suppress newspapers now,- no, not by the strongest party,- neither then could
king, prelate, or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ which was ballad, epic,
newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch and library, at the same time. Probably king, prelate
and puritan, all found their own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national
interest,- by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of
treating it in an English history,- but not a whit less considerable because it was cheap
and of no account, like a baker’s-shop. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of
writers which suddenly broke into this field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman,
Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher.

The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the first importance to
the poet who works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments. Here is audience and
expectation prepared. In the case of Shakespeare there is much more. At the time when he
left Stratford and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays of all dates and writers
existed in manuscript and were in turn produced on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy,
which the audience will bear hearing some part of, every week; the Death of Julius Caesar,
and other stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of English
history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the royal Henries, which men hear
eagerly; and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales and Spanish voyages, which
all the London ‘prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or less skill, by
every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no
longer possible to say who wrote them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so
long, and so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a speech or a
whole scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer claim copyright in this work of
numbers. Happily, no man wishes to. They are not yet desired in that way. We have few
readers, many spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.

Shakespeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old plays waste stock,
in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had the prestige which hedges about a
modern tragedy existed, nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living
England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he wanted to his
airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may
work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to
the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice, and in furnishing so much work done to
his hand, leaves him at leisure and in full strength for the audacities of his
imagination. In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple.
Sculpture in Egypt and in Greece grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the
ornament of the temple wall: at first a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief
became bolder and a head or arm was projected from the wall; the groups being still
arranged with reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the figures;
and when at last the greatest freedom of style and treatment was reached, the prevailing
genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As
soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace,
the art began to decline: freak, extravagance and exhibition took the place of the old
temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous
irritability of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the
people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence which no single genius,
however extraordinary, could hope to create.

In point of fact it appears that Shakespeare did owe debts in all directions, and was
able to use whatever he found; and the amount of indebtedness may be inferred from
Malone’s laborious computations in regard to the First, Second and Third parts of Henry
VI, in which, “out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
Shakespeare, 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors, and 1899 were
entirely his own.” And the proceeding investigation hardly leaves a single drama of
his absolute invention. Malone’s sentence is an important piece of external history. In
Henry VIII I think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his own
finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful man, with a
vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their cadence. See Wolsey’s soliloquy,
and the following scene with Cromwell, where instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose
secret is that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best
bring out the rhythm,- here the lines are constructed on a given tune, and the verse has
even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play contains through all its length
unmistakable traits of Shakespeare’s hand, and some passages, as the account of the
coronation, are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the
bad rhythm.

Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any invention can. If he
lost any credit of design, he augmented his resources; and, at that day, our petulant
demand for originality was not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million.
The universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet who appears in
illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is any where radiating.
Every intellectual jewel, every flower of sentiment it is his fine office to bring to his
people; and he comes to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore
little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through translation,
whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant countries, whether by inspiration;
from whatever source, they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows
very near home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good many foolish
things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true
stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of
Homer perhaps; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are
librarians and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of
all the hundred tales of the world,-

           “Presenting Thebes’ and Pelops’ line
           And the tale of Troy divine.”

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our
early literature; and more recently not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to him,
but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily
traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a
huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, *(30) from
Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from
Dares Phrygius, Ovid and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio and the Provencal poets are his
benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation from William of Lorris
and John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox,
from the Lais of Marie: The House of Fame, from the French or Italian: and poor Gower he
uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry out of which to build his house. He
steals by this apology,- that what he takes has no worth where he finds it and the
greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature,
that a man having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth
to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can
entertain it and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use
of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them they become our
own.

Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The learned member of
the legislature, at Westminster or at Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us
the constituency, and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of
their wishes; the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or
conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes and estimates, and it will bereave
his fine attitude and resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel
and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau think, for thousands; and so there were
fountains all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew; friends, lovers,
books, traditions, proverbs,- all perished- which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder.
Did the bard speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion? The
appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delphi
whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and
to have answer, and to rely on that? All the debts which such a man could contract to
other wit would never disturb his consciousness of originality; for the ministrations of
books and of other minds are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he
has conversed.

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no
man’s work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the
same impulse. Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the
English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and
churches brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there was not some
translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of
the piety of ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic
church,- these collected, too, in long periods, from the prayers and meditations of every
saint and sacred writer all over the world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect to
the Lord’s Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already in use in
the time of Christ, in the Rabbinical forms. He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous
language of the Common Law, the impressive forms of our courts and the precision and
substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the
sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws govern.
The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being translation on translation. There
never was a time when there was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are
kept, and all others successively picked out and thrown away. Something like the same
process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books. The world takes
liberties with world-books. Vedas, Aesop’s Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad,
Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of
such works the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the
farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word; every
municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day; and the generic catholic genius who is
not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of all, stands with the
next age as the recorder and embodiment of his own.

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakespeare Society, for
ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries celebrated in churches and
by churchmen, and the final detachment from the church, and the completion of secular
plays, from Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton’s Needle, down to the possession of the
stage by the very pieces which Shakespeare altered, remodelled and finally made his own.
Elated with success and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no
book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to
decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy Shakespeare
poached or not, whether he held horses at the theatre door, whether he kept school, and
why he left in his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.

There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age mischooses the
object on which all candles shine and all eyes are turned; the care with which it
registers every trifle touching Queen Elizabeth and King James, and the Essexes,
Leicesters, Burleighs and Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the
founder of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be remembered,-
the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and on whose
thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds
to receive this and not another bias. A popular player;- nobody suspected he was the poet
of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men
as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human
understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained
his few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first
vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him
generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet of the two.

If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakespeare’s time should be
capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four years after Shakespeare, and
died twenty-three years after him; and I find, among his correspondents and acquaintances,
the following persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of
Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr.
Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta,
Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having
communicated, without enumerating many others whom doubtless he saw,- Shakespeare,
Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, the two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman and the rest.
Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there
was never any such society;- yet their genius failed them to find out the best head in the
universe. Our poet’s mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took a
century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did
any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the
history of Shakespeare till now; for he is the father of German literature: it was with
the introduction of Shakespeare into German, by Lessing, and the translation of his works
by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately
connected. It was not until the nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of
living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering readers. *(31) Now,
literature, philosophy and thought are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond
which, at present, we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge
and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our convictions with any adequate
fidelity: but there is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative
power and beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies the period.

The Shakespeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised the missing facts,
offered money for any information that will lead to proof,- and with what result? Beside
some important illustration of the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted,
they have gleaned a few facts touching the property, and dealings in regard to property,
of the poet. It appears that from year to year he owned a larger share in the Blackfriars’
Theatre: its wardrobe and other appurtenances were his: that he bought an estate in his
native village with his earnings as writer and shareholder; that he lived in the best
house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbors with their commissions in London, as of
borrowing money, and the like; that he was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was
writing Macbeth, he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five
shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different times; and in all respects
appears as a good husband, with no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a
good-natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in the theatre, not in any striking
manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit the importance of this
information. It was well worth the pains that have been taken to procure it.

But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these researches may have
rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite invention which is the concealed magnet
of his attraction for us. We are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of
parentage, birth, birth-place, schooling, school-mates, earning of money, marriage,
publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an end of this gossip, no
ray of relation appears between it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped
at random into the “Modern Plutarch,” and read any other life there, it would
have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow
daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past and refuse all history.
Malone, Warburton, Dyce and Collier have wasted their oil. The famed theatres, Covent
Garden, Drury Lane, the Park and Tremont have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble,
Kean and Macready dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey and
express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out
immortal from all this painted pedantry and sweetly torments us with invitations to its
own inaccessible homes. I remember I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the
pride of the English stage; and all I then heard and all I now remember of the tragedian
was that in which the tragedian had no part; simply Hamlet’s question to the ghost:-

           “What may this
mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon?”

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world’s dimension, crowds
it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of
the moon. These tricks of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the greenroom. Can any
biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night’s Dream admits me?
Did Shakespeare confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate in
Stratford, the genesis of that delicate creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of
Scone Castle, the moonlight of Portia’s villa, “the antres vast and desarts
idle” of Othello’s captivity,- where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the
chancellor’s file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one word of those
transcendent secrets? In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art,- in the
Cyclopean architecture of Egypt and India, in the Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters,
the Italian painting, the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,- the Genius draws up the ladder
after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new age, which sees
the works and asks in vain for a history.

Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can tell nothing, except
to the Shakespeare in us, that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He
cannot step from off his tripod and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the
antique documents extricated, analyzed and compared by the assiduous Dyce and Collier, and
now read one of these skyey sentences,- aerolites,- which seem to have fallen out of
heaven, and which not your experience but the man within the breast has accepted as words
of fate, and tell me if they match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or
which gives the most historical insight into the man.

Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet, with Shakespeare for biographer,
instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the information which is material; that which
describes character and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal
with him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions on those
questions which knock for answer at every heart,- on life and death, on love, on wealth
and poverty, on the prizes of life and the ways whereby we come at them; on the characters
of men, and the influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes; and on those
mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science and which yet interweave their
malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets
without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the
intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the most
susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of his
private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the
gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of
friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio the
merchant answer for his great heart. So far from Shakespeare’s being the least known, he
is the one person, in all modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of manners,
of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not
settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or
district of man’s work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma
taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he
not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the
rudeness of his behavior?

Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare valuable that does
not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher.
I think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He
was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking
vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less, we should have had to consider how
well he filled his place, how good a dramatist he was,- and he is the best in the world.
But it turns out that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw some attention
from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all
languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so
that the occasion which gave the saint’s meaning the form of a conversation, or of a
prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of its
application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of life. He wrote the airs
for all our modern music: he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew
the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America; he drew the man, and
described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of men and women, their
probity, and their second thought and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and the transitions
by which virtues and vices slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother’s part
from the father’s part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom
and of fate: he knew the laws of repression which make the police of nature: and all the
sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the
landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of
Drama or Epic, out of notice. ‘Tis like making a question concerning the paper on which a
king’s message is written.

Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the
crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort,
nestle into Plato’s brain and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare’s. We are still
out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No man can
imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual
self,- the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With
this wisdom of life is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed
the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments as if they were people who had lived
under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. And
they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him into an
ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanity co-ordinates all his
faculties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently
appear. He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental
prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part and starves that
other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But
Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no
curiosities; no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable
egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small subordinately. He is wise without emphasis
or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes
without effort and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well
to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy,
narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant that each reader is incredulous of the
perception of other readers.

This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of things into music and
verse, makes him the type of the poet and has added a new problem to metaphysics. This is
that which throws him into natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as
announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or
blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass, the tragic and the
comic indifferently and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution
into minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he
draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature’s, will bear the scrutiny of the solar
microscope.

In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of production, more or
fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make one picture. Daguerre
learned how to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine, and then proceeds at
leisure to etch a million. There are always objects; but there was never representation.
Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let the world of figures sit for their
portraits. No recipe can be given for the making of a Shakespeare; but the possibility of
the translation of things into song is demonstrated.

His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though their excellence
is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as inimitable as they; and it is not a merit of
lines, but a total merit of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person,
so is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now as a whole poem.

Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty which tempts the ear
to pause on them for their euphuism, yet the sentence is so loaded with meaning and so
linked with its foregoers and followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as
admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps himself to connect
some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is not reduced to dismount and walk
because his horses are running off with him in some distant direction: he always rides.

The finest poetry was first experience; but the thought has suffered a transformation
since it was an experience. Cultivated men often attain a good degree of skill in writing
verses; but it is easy to read, through their poems, their personal history: any one
acquainted with the parties can name every figure; this is Andrew and that is Rachel. The
sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In
the poet’s mind the fact has gone quite over into the new element of thought, and has lost
all that is exuvial. This generosity abides with Shakespeare. We say, from the truth and
closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart. Yet there is not a trace of
egotism.

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without
which no man can be a poet,- for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its
obligation but for its grace: he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely
light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the
universe. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such charms that a lover might forsake his
mistress to partake of them. And the true bards have been noted for their firm and
cheerful temper. Homer lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says,
“It was rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with
repentance?” Not less sovereign and cheerful,- much more sovereign and cheerful, is
the tone of Shakespeare. His name suggests joy and emancipation to the heart of men. If he
should appear in any company of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches
nothing that does not borrow health and longevity from his festal style.

And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and benefactor, when, in
solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we seek to strike the
balance? Solitude has austere lessons; it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and
it weighs Shakespeare also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection of
humanity.

Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that plays over the
visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for
meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a
second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all
their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life. Shakespeare employed them
as colors to compose his picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the step which
seemed inevitable to such genius, namely to explore the virtue which resides in these
symbols and imparts this power:- what is that which they themselves say? He converted the
elements which waited on his command, into entertainments. He was master of the revels to
mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through majestic powers of science, the comets
given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, and should draw them from their
orbits to glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all
towns, “Very superior pyrotechny this evening”? Are the agents of nature, and
the power to understand them, worth no more than a street serenade, or the breath of a
cigar? One remembers again the trumpet-text in the Koran,- “The heavens and the earth
and all that is between them, think ye we have created them in jest?” As long as the
question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But
when the question is, to life and its materials and its auxiliaries, how does he profit
me? What does it signify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer-Night’s Dream, or Winter
Evening’s Tale: what signifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of the
Shakespeare Societies comes to mind; that he was a jovial actor and manager. I can not
marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping
with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he been less, had he reached only
the common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave
the fact in the twilight of human fate: but that this man of men, he who gave to the
science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard
of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos,- that he should not be wise for himself;- it
must even go into the world’s history that the best poet led an obscure and profane life,
using his genius for the public amusement.

Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German and Swede, beheld the same
objects: they also saw through them that which was contained. And to what purpose? The
beauty straightway vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an
obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly,
joyless, a pilgrim’s progress, a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories of
Adam’s fall and curse behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires before us;
and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener sank in them.

It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The world still wants its
poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle, with Shakespeare the player, nor shall
grope in graves, with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with
equal inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than
private affection; and love is compatible with universal wisdom.

[Notes from the Centenary Edition of Emerson’s Complete Works, edited by his son,
Edward Waldo Emerson:]

*(30) The dates of Lydgate and Caxton show a mistake as to Emerson’s
use of them. Caxton, following Chaucer, when he introduced the printing press to England,
printed his poems and those of Lydgate, who was younger than Chaucer.

*(31) While writing this, Mr. Emerson was surrounded by persons
paralyzed for active life in the common world by the doubts of conscience or entangled in
over-fine-spun webs of their intellect.

* * *

Napoleon; or, the Man of the World (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882

Napoleon; or, the Man of the World
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Representative Men, 1850

Among the eminent persons of the nineteenth century, Bonaparte is far the best known
and the most powerful; and owes his predominance to the fidelity with which he expresses
the tone of thought and belief, the aims of the masses of active and cultivated men. It is
Swedenborg’s theory that every organ is made up of homogeneous particles; or as it is
sometimes expressed, every whole is made of similars; that is, the lungs are composed of
infinitely small lungs; the liver, of infinitely small livers; the kidney, of little
kidneys, etc. Following this analogy, if any man is found to carry with him the power and
affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because
the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.

In our society there is a standing antagonism between the conservative and the
democratic classes; between those who have made their fortunes, and the young and the poor
who have fortunes to make; between the interests of dead labor,- that is, the labor of
hands long ago still in the grave, which labor is now entombed in money stocks, or in land
and buildings owned by idle capitalists,- and the interests of living labor, which seeks
to possess itself of land and buildings and money stocks. The first class is timid,
selfish, illiberal, hating innovation, and continually losing numbers by death. The second
class is selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-relying, always outnumbering the other and
recruiting its numbers every hour by births. It desires to keep open every avenue to the
competition of all, and to multiply avenues: the class of business men in America, in
England, in France and throughout Europe; the class of industry and skill. Napoleon is its
representative. The instinct of active, brave, able men, throughout the middle class
everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate Democrat. He had their virtues and
their vices; above all, he had their spirit or aim. That tendency is material, pointing at
a sensual success and employing the richest and most various means to that end; conversant
with mechanical powers, highly intellectual, widely and accurately learned and skilful,
but subordinating all intellectual and spiritual forces into means to a material success.
To be the rich man, is the end. “God has granted,” says the Koran, “to
every people a prophet in its own tongue.” Paris and London and New York, the spirit
of commerce, of money and material power, were also to have their prophet; and Bonaparte
was qualified and sent.

Every one of the million readers of anecdotes or memoirs or lives of Napoleon, delights
in the page, because he studies in it his own history. Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and,
at the highest point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers. He is no
saint,- to use his own word, “no capuchin,” and he is no hero, in the high
sense. The man in the street finds in him the qualities and powers of other men in the
street. He finds him, like himself, by birth a citizen, who, by very intelligible merits,
arrived at such a commanding position that he could indulge all those tastes which the
common man possesses but is obliged to conceal and deny: good society, good books, fast
travelling, dress, dinners, servants without number, personal weight, the execution of his
ideas, the standing in the attitude of a benefactor to all persons about him, the refined
enjoyments of pictures, statues, music, palaces and conventional honors,- precisely what
is agreeable to the heart of every man in the nineteenth century, this powerful man
possessed.

It is true that a man of Napoleon’s truth of adaptation to the mind of the masses
around him, becomes not merely representative but actually a monopolizer and usurper of
other minds. Thus Mirabeau plagiarized every good thought, every good word that was spoken
in France. Dumont relates that he sat in the gallery of the Convention and heard Mirabeau
make a speech. It struck Dumont that he could fit it with a peroration, which he wrote in
pencil immediately, and showed it to Lord Elgin, who sat by him. Lord Elgin approved it,
and Dumont, in the evening, showed it to Mirabeau. Mirabeau read it, pronounced it
admirable, and declared he would incorporate it into his harangue to-morrow, to the
Assembly. “It is impossible,” said Dumont, “as, unfortunately, I have shown
it to Lord Elgin.” “If you have shown it to Lord Elgin and to fifty persons
beside, I shall still speak it to-morrow”: and he did speak it, with much effect, at
the next day’s session. For Mirabeau, with his overpowering personality, felt that these
things which his presence inspired were as much his own as if he had said them, and that
his adoption of them gave them their weight. Much more absolute and centralizing was the
successor to Mirabeau’s popularity and to much more than his predominance in France.
Indeed, a man of Napoleon’s stamp almost ceases to have a private speech and opinion. He
is so largely receptive, and is so placed, that he comes to be a bureau for all the
intelligence, wit and power of the age and country. He gains the battle; he makes the
code; he makes the system of weights and measures; he levels the Alps; he builds the road.
All distinguished engineers, savans, statists, report to him: so likewise do all good
heads in every kind: he adopts the best measures, sets his stamp on them, and not these
alone, but on every happy and memorable expression. Every sentence spoken by Napoleon and
every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

Bonaparte was the idol of common men because he had in transcendent degree the
qualities and powers of common men. There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the
lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy. Bonaparte wrought, in
common with that great class he represented, for power and wealth,- but Bonaparte,
specially, without any scruple as to the means. All the sentiments which embarrass men’s
pursuit of these objects, he set aside. The sentiments were for women and children.
Fontanes, in 1804, expressed Napoleon’s own sense, when in behalf of the Senate he
addressed him,- “Sire, the desire of perfection is the worst disease that ever
afflicted the human mind.” The advocates of liberty and of progress are
“ideologists”;- a word of contempt often in his mouth;- “Necker is an
ideologist”: “Lafayette is an ideologist.”

An Italian proverb, too well known, declares that “if you would succeed, you must
not be too good.” It is an advantage, within certain limits, to have renounced the
dominion of the sentiments of piety, gratitude and generosity; since what was an
impassable bar to us, and still is to others, becomes a convenient weapon for our
purposes; just as the river which was a formidable barrier, winter transforms into the
smoothest of roads.

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, and would help himself
with his hands and his head. With him is no miracle and no magic. He is a worker in brass,
in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money and in troops, and a very
consistent and wise master-workman. He is never weak and literary, but acts with the
solidity and the precision of natural agents. He has not lost his native sense and
sympathy with things. Men give way before such a man, as before natural events. To be sure
there are men enough who are immersed in things, as farmers, smiths, sailors and mechanics
generally; and we know how real and solid such men appear in the presence of scholars and
grammarians: but these men ordinarily lack the power of arrangement, and are like hands
without a head. But Bonaparte superadded to this mineral and animal force, insight and
generalization, so that men saw in him combined the natural and the intellectual power, as
if the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher. Therefore the land and sea seem
to presuppose him. He came unto his own and they received him. This ciphering operative
knows what he is working with and what is the product. He knew the properties of gold and
iron, of wheels and ships, of troops and diplomatists, and required that each should do
after its kind.

The art of war was the game in which he exerted his arithmetic. It consisted, according
to him, in having always more forces than the enemy, on the point where the enemy is
attacked, or where he attacks: and his whole talent is strained by endless manoeuvre and
evolution, to march always on the enemy at an angle, and destroy his forces in detail. It
is obvious that a very small force, skilfully and rapidly manoeuvring so as always to
bring two men against one at the point of engagement, will be an overmatch for a much
larger body of men.

The times, his constitution and his early circumstances combined to develop this
pattern democrat. He had the virtues of his class and the conditions for their activity.
That common-sense which no sooner respects any end than it finds the means to effect it;
the delight in the use of means; in the choice, simplification and combining of means; the
directness and thoroughness of his work; the prudence with which all was seen and the
energy with which all was done, make him the natural organ and head of what I may almost
call, from its extent, the modern party.

Nature must have far the greatest share in every success, and so in his. Such a man was
wanted, and such a man was born; a man of stone and iron, capable of sitting on horseback
sixteen or seventeen hours, of going many days together without rest or food except by
snatches, and with the speed and spring of a tiger in action; a man not embarrassed by any
scruples; compact, instant, selfish, prudent, and of a perception which did not suffer
itself to be baulked or misled by any pretences of others, or any superstition or any heat
or haste of his own. “My hand of iron,” he said, “was not at the extremity
of my arm, it was immediately connected with my head.” He respected the power of
nature and fortune, and ascribed to it his superiority, instead of valuing himself, like
inferior men, on his opinionativeness, and waging war with nature. His favorite rhetoric
lay in allusion to his star; and he pleased himself, as well as the people, when he styled
himself the “Child of Destiny.” “They charge me,” he said, “with
the commission of great crimes: men of my stamp do not commit crimes. Nothing has been
more simple than my elevation, ’tis in vain to ascribe it to intrigue or crime; it was
owing to the peculiarity of the times and to my reputation of having fought well against
the enemies of my country. I have always marched with the opinion of great masses and with
events. Of what use then would crimes be to me?” Again he said, speaking of his son,
“My son can not replace me; I could not replace myself. I am the creature of
circumstances.”

He had a directness of action never before combined with so much comprehension. He is a
realist, terrific to all talkers and confused truth-obscuring persons. He sees where the
matter hinges, throws himself on the precise point of resistance, and slights all other
considerations. He is strong in the right manner, namely by insight. He never blundered
into victory, but won his battles in his head before he won them on the field. His
principal means are in himself. He asks counsel of no other. In 1796 he writes to the
Directory: “I have conducted the campaign without consulting any one. I should have
done no good if I had been under the necessity of conforming to the notions of another
person. I have gained some advantages over superior forces and when totally destitute of
every thing, because, in the persuasion that your confidence was reposed in me, my actions
were as prompt as my thoughts.”

History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and governors. They are a
class of persons much to be pitied, for they know not what they should do. The weavers
strike for bread, and the king and his ministers, knowing not what to do, meet them with
bayonets. But Napoleon understood his business. Here was a man who in each moment and
emergency knew what to do next. It is an immense comfort and refreshment to the spirits,
not only of kings, but of citizens. Few men have any next; they live from hand to mouth,
without plan, and are ever at the end of their line, and after each action wait for an
impulse from abroad. Napoleon had been the first man of the world, if his ends had been
purely public. As he is, he inspires confidence and vigor by the extraordinary unity of
his action. He is firm, sure, self-denying, self-postponing, sacrificing every thing,-
money, troops, generals, and his own safety also, to his aim; not misled, like common
adventurers, by the splendor of his own means. “Incidents ought not to govern
policy,” he said, “but policy, incidents.” “To be hurried away by
every event is to have no political system at all.” His victories were only so many
doors, and he never for a moment lost sight of his way onward, in the dazzle and uproar of
the present circumstance. He knew what to do, and he flew to his mark. He would shorten a
straight line to come at his object. Horrible anecdotes may no doubt be collected from his
history, of the price at which he bought his successes; but he must not therefore be set
down as cruel, but only as one who knew no impediment to his will; not bloodthirsty, not
cruel,- but woe to what thing or person stood in his way! Not bloodthirsty, but not
sparing of blood,- and pitiless. He saw only the object: the obstacle must give way.
“Sire, General Clarke can not combine with General Junot, for the dreadful fire of
the Austrian battery.”- “Let him carry the battery.”- “Sire, every
regiment that approaches the heavy artillery is sacrificed: Sire, what orders?”-
“Forward, forward!” Seruzier, a colonel of artillery, gives, in his Military Memoirs, the following sketch of a scene after the battle of
Austerlitz.- “At the moment in which the Russian army was making its retreat,
painfully, but in good order, on the ice of the lake, the Emperor Napoleon came riding at
full speed toward the artillery. ‘You are losing time,’ he cried; ‘fire upon those masses;
they must be engulfed: fire upon the ice!’ The order remained unexecuted for ten minutes.
In vain several officers and myself were placed on the slope of a hill to produce the
effect: their balls and mine rolled upon the ice without breaking it up. Seeing that, I
tried a simple method of elevating light howitzers. The almost perpendicular fall of the
heavy projectiles produced the desired effect. My method was immediately followed by the
adjoining batteries, and in less than no time we buried” some “thousands of
Russians and Austrians under the waters of the lake.”

In the plenitude of his resources, every obstacle seemed to vanish. “There shall
be no Alps,” he said; and he built his perfect roads, climbing by graded galleries
their steepest precipices, until Italy was as open to Paris as any town in France. He laid
his bones to, and wrought for his crown. Having decided what was to be done, he did that
with might and main. He put out all his strength. He risked every thing and spared
nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor himself.

We like to see every thing do its office after its kind, whether it be a milch-cow or a
rattlesnake; and if fighting be the best mode of adjusting national differences, (as large
majorities of men seem to agree,) certainly Bonaparte was right in making it thorough. The
grand principle of war, he said, was that an army ought always to be ready, by day and by
night and at all hours, to make all the resistance it is capable of making. He never
economized his ammunition, but, on a hostile position, rained a torrent of iron,- shells,
balls, grape-shot,- to annihilate all defence. On any point of resistance he concentrated
squadron on squadron in overwhelming numbers until it was swept out of existence. To a
regiment of horse-chasseurs at Lobenstein, two days before the battle of Jena, Napoleon
said, “My lads, you must not fear death; when soldiers brave death, they drive him
into the enemy’s ranks.” In the fury of assault, he no more spared himself. He went
to the edge of his possibility. It is plain that in Italy he did what he could, and all
that he could. He came, several times, within an inch of ruin; and his own person was all
but lost. He was flung into the marsh at Arcola. The Austrians were between him and his
troops, in the melee, and he was brought off with desperate efforts. At Lonato, and at
other places, he was on the point of being taken prisoner. He fought sixty battles. He had
never enough. Each victory was a new weapon. “My power would fall, were I not to
support it by new achievements. Conquest has made me what I am, and conquest must maintain
me.” He felt, with every wise man, that as much life is needed for conservation as
for creation. We are always in peril, always in a bad plight, just on the edge of
destruction and only to be saved by invention and courage.

This vigor was guarded and tempered by the coldest prudence and punctuality. A
thunderbolt in the attack, he was found invulnerable in his intrenchments. His very attack
was never the inspiration of courage, but the result of calculation. His idea of the best
defence consists in being still the attacking party. “My ambition,” he says,
“was great, but was of a cold nature.” In one of his conversations with Las
Cases, he remarked, “As to moral courage, I have rarely met with the
two-o’clock-in-the-morning kind: I mean unprepared courage; that which is necessary on an
unexpected occasion, and which, in spite of the most unforeseen events, leaves full
freedom of judgment and decision”: and he did not hesitate to declare that he was
himself eminently endowed with this two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, and that he had
met with few persons equal to himself in this respect.

Every thing depended on the nicety of his combinations, and the stars were not more
punctual than his arithmetic. His personal attention descended to the smallest
particulars. “At Montebello, I ordered Kellermann to attack with eight hundred horse,
and with these he separated the six thousand Hungarian grenadiers, before the very eyes of
the Austrian cavalry. This cavalry was half a league off and required a quarter of an hour
to arrive on the field of action, and I have observed that it is always these quarters of
an hour that decide the fate of a battle.” “Before he fought a battle, Bonaparte
thought little about what he should do in case of success, but a great deal about what he
should do in case of a reverse of fortune.” The same prudence and good sense mark all
his behavior. His instructions to his secretary at the Tuileries are worth remembering.
“During the night, enter my chamber as seldom as possible. Do not awake me when you
have any good news to communicate; with that there is no hurry. But when you bring bad
news, rouse me instantly, for then there is not a moment to be lost.” It was a
whimsical economy of the same kind which dictated his practice, when general in Italy, in
regard to his burdensome correspondence. He directed Bourrienne to leave all letters
unopened for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how large a part of the
correspondence had thus disposed of itself and no longer required an answer. His
achievement of business was immense, and enlarges the known powers of man. There have been
many working kings, from Ulysses to William of Orange, but none who accomplished a tithe
of this man’s performance.

To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the advantage of having been born to a private
and humble fortune. In his later days he had the weakness of wishing to add to his crowns
and badges the prescription of aristocracy; but he knew his debt to his austere education,
and made no secret of his contempt for the born kings, and for “the hereditary
asses,” as he coarsely styled the Bourbons. He said that “in their exile they
had learned nothing, and forgot nothing.” Bonaparte had passed through all the
degrees of military service, but also was citizen before he was emperor, and so has the
key to citizenship. His remarks and estimates discover the information and justness of
measurement of the middle class. Those who had to deal with him found that he was not to
be imposed upon, but could cipher as well as another man. This appears in all parts of his
Memoirs, dictated at St. Helena. When the expenses of the empress, of his household, of
his palaces, had accumulated great debts, Napoleon examined the bills of the creditors
himself, detected overcharges and errors, and reduced the claims by considerable sums.

His grand weapon, namely the millions whom he directed, he owed to the representative
character which clothed him. He interests us as he stands for France and for Europe; and
he exists as captain and king only as far as the Revolution, or the interest of the
industrious masses, found an organ and a leader in him. In the social interests, he knew
the meaning and value of labor, and threw himself naturally on that side. I like an
incident mentioned by one of his biographers at St. Helena. “When walking with Mrs.
Balcombe, some servants, carrying heavy boxes, passed by on the road, and Mrs. Balcombe
desired them, in rather an angry tone, to keep back. Napoleon interfered, saying ‘Respect
the burden, Madam.'” In the time of the empire he directed attention to the
improvement and embellishment of the markets of the capital. “The market-place,”
he said, “is the Louvre of the common people.” The principal works that have
survived him are his magnificent roads. He filled the troops with his spirit, and a sort
of freedom and companionship grew up between him and them, which the forms of his court
never permitted between the officers and himself. They performed, under his eye, that
which no others could do. The best document of his relation to his troops is the order of
the day on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon promises the troops
that he will keep his person out of reach of fire. This declaration, which is the reverse
of that ordinarily made by generals and sovereigns on the eve of a battle, sufficiently
explains the devotion of the army to their leader.

But though there is in particulars this identity between Napoleon and the mass of the
people, his real strength lay in their conviction that he was their representative in his
genius and aims, not only when he courted, but when he controlled, and even when he
decimated them by his conscriptions. He knew, as well as any Jacobin in France, how to
philosophize on liberty and equality; and when allusion was made to the precious blood of
centuries, which was spilled by the killing of the Duc d’Enghien, he suggested,
“Neither is my blood ditchwater.” The people felt that no longer the throne was
occupied and the land sucked of its nourishment, by a small class of legitimates, secluded
from all community with the children of the soil, and holding the ideas and superstitions
of a long-forgotten state of society. Instead of that vampyre, a man of themselves held,
in the Tuileries, knowledge and ideas like their own, opening of course to them and their
children all places of power and trust. The day of sleepy, selfish policy, ever narrowing
the means and opportunities of young men, was ended, and a day of expansion and demand was
come. A market for all the powers and productions of man was opened; brilliant prizes
glittered in the eyes of youth and talent. The old, iron-bound, feudal France was changed
into a young Ohio or New York; and those who smarted under the immediate rigors of the new
monarch, pardoned them as the necessary severities of the military system which had driven
out the oppressor. And even when the majority of the people had begun to ask whether they
had really gained any thing under the exhausting levies of men and money of the new
master, the whole talent of the country, in every rank and kindred, took his part and
defended him as its natural patron. In 1814, when advised to rely on the higher classes,
Napoleon said to those around him, “Gentlemen, in the situation in which I stand, my
only nobility is the rabble of the Faubourgs.”

Napoleon met this natural expectation. The necessity of his position required a
hospitality to every sort of talent, and its appointment to trusts; and his feeling went
along with this policy. Like every superior person, he undoubtedly felt a desire for men
and compeers, and a wish to measure his power with other masters, and an impatience of
fools and underlings. In Italy, he sought for men and found none. “Good God!” he
said, “how rare men are! There are eighteen millions in Italy, and I have with
difficulty found two,- Dandolo and Melzi.” In later years, with larger experience,
his respect for mankind was not increased. In a moment of bitterness he said to one of his
oldest friends, “Men deserve the contempt with which they inspire me. I have only to
put some gold-lace on the coat of my virtuous republicans and they immediately become just
what I wish them.” This impatience at levity was, however, an oblique tribute of
respect to those able persons who commanded his regard not only when he found them friends
and coadjutors but also when they resisted his will. He could not confound Fox and Pitt,
Carnot, Lafayette and Bernadotte, with the danglers of his court; and in spite of the
detraction which his systematic egotism dictated toward the great captains who conquered
with and for him, ample acknowledgments are made by him to Lannes, Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix,
Massena, Murat, Ney and Augereau. If he felt himself their patron and the founder of their
fortunes, as when he said, “I made my generals out of mud,”- he could not hide
his satisfaction in receiving from them a seconding and support commensurate with the
grandeur of his enterprise. In the Russian campaign he was so much impressed by the
courage and resources of Marshal Ney, that he said, “I have two hundred millions in
my coffers, and I would give them all for Ney.” The characters which he has drawn of
several of his marshals are discriminating, and though they did not content the insatiable
vanity of French officers, are no doubt substantially just. And in fact every species of
merit was sought and advanced under his government. “I know,” he said, “the
depth and draught of water of every one of my generals.” Natural power was sure to be
well received at his court. Seventeen men in his time were raised from common soldiers to
the rank of king, marshal, duke, or general; and the crosses of his Legion of Honor were
given to personal valor, and not to family connexion. “When soldiers have been
baptized in the fire of a battlefield, they have all one rank in my eyes.”

When a natural king becomes a titular king, every body is pleased and satisfied. The
Revolution entitled the strong populace of the Faubourg St. Antoine, and every horse-boy
and powder-monkey in the army, to look on Napoleon as flesh of his flesh and the creature
of his party: but there is something in the success of grand talent which enlists an
universal sympathy. For in the prevalence of sense and spirit over stupidity and
malversation, all reasonable men have an interest; and as intellectual beings we feel the
air purified by the electric shock, when material force is overthrown by intellectual
energies. As soon as we are removed out of the reach of local and accidental partialities,
Man feels that Napoleon fights for him; these are honest victories; this strong
steam-engine does our work. Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the
ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages us and liberates us. This
capacious head, revolving and disposing sovereignly trains of affairs, and animating such
multitudes of agents; this eye, which looked through Europe; this prompt invention; this
inexhaustible resource:- what events! what romantic pictures! what strange situations!-
when spying the Alps, by a sunset in the Sicilian sea; drawing up his army for battle in
sight of the Pyramids, and saying to his troops, “From the tops of those pyramids,
forty centuries look down on you”; fording the Red Sea; wading in the gulf of the
Isthmus of Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais, gigantic projects agitated him. “Had Acre
fallen, I should have changed the face of the world.” His army, on the night of the
battle of Austerlitz, which was the anniversary of his inauguration as Emperor, presented
him with a bouquet of forty standards taken in the fight. Perhaps it is a little puerile,
the pleasure he took in making these contrasts glaring; as when he pleased himself with
making kings wait in his antechambers, at Tilsit, at Paris and at Erfurt.

We can not, in the universal imbecility, indecision and indolence of men, sufficiently
congratulate ourselves on this strong and ready actor, who took occasion by the beard, and
showed us how much may be accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all men
possess in less degrees; namely, by punctuality, by personal attention, by courage and
thoroughness. “The Austrians,” he said, “do not know the value of
time.” I should cite him, in his earlier years, as a model of prudence. His power
does not consist in any wild or extravagant force; in any enthusiasm like Mahomet’s, or
singular power of persuasion; but in the exercise of common-sense on each emergency,
instead of abiding by rules and customs. The lesson he teaches is that which vigor always
teaches;- that there is always room for it. To what heaps of cowardly doubts is not that
man’s life an answer. When he appeared it was the belief of all military men that there
could be nothing new in war; as it is the belief of men to-day that nothing new can be
undertaken in politics, or in church, or in letters, or in trade, or in farming, or in our
social manners and customs; and as it is at all times the belief of society that the world
is used up. But Bonaparte knew better than society; and moreover knew that he knew better.
I think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend
are go-carts and baubles; but they dare not trust their presentiments. Bonaparte relied on
his own sense, and did not care a bean for other people’s. The world treated his novelties
just as it treats everybody’s novelties,- made infinite objection, mustered all the
impediments; but he snapped his finger at their objections. “What creates great
difficulty,” he remarks, “in the profession of the land-commander, is the
necessity of feeding so many men and animals. If he allows himself to be guided by the
commissaries he will never stir, and all his expeditions will fail.” An example of
his common-sense is what he says of the passage of the Alps in winter, which all writers,
one repeating after the other, had described as impracticable. “The winter,”
says Napoleon, “is not the most unfavorable season for the passage of lofty
mountains. The snow is then firm, the weather settled, and there is nothing to fear from
avalanches, the real and only danger to be apprehended in the Alps. On these high
mountains there are often very fine days in December, of a dry cold, with extreme calmness
in the air.” Read his account, too, of the way in which battles are gained. “In
all battles a moment occurs when the bravest troops, after having made the greatest
efforts, feel inclined to run. That terror proceeds from a want of confidence in their own
courage, and it only requires a slight opportunity, a pretence, to restore confidence to
them. The art is, to give rise to the opportunity and to invent the pretence. At Arcola I
won the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized that moment of lassitude, gave every
man a trumpet, and gained the day with this handful. You see that two armies are two
bodies which meet and endeavor to frighten each other; a moment of panic occurs, and that
moment must be turned to advantage. When a man has been present in many actions, he
distinguishes that moment without difficulty: it is as easy as casting up an
addition.”

This deputy of the nineteenth century added to his gifts a capacity for speculation on
general topics. He delighted in running through the range of practical, of literary and of
abstract questions. His opinion is always original and to the purpose. On the voyage to
Egypt he liked, after dinner, to fix on three or four persons to support a proposition,
and as many to oppose it. He gave a subject, and the discussions turned on questions of
religion, the different kinds of government, and the art of war. One day he asked whether
the planets were inhabited? On another, what was the age of the world? Then he proposed to
consider the probability of the destruction of the globe, either by water or by fire: at
another time, the truth or fallacy of presentiments, and the interpretation of dreams. He
was very fond of talking of religion. In 1806 he conversed with Fournier, bishop of
Montpellier, on matters of theology. There were two points on which they could not agree,
viz. that of hell, and that of salvation out of the pale of the church. The Emperor told
Josephine that he disputed like a devil on these two points, on which the bishop was
inexorable. To the philosophers he readily yielded all that was proved against religion as
the work of men and time, but he would not hear of materialism. One fine night, on deck,
amid a clatter of materialism, Bonaparte pointed to the stars, and said, “You may
talk as long as you please, gentlemen, but who made all that?” He delighted in the
conversation of men of science, particularly of Monge and Berthollet; but the men of
letters he slighted; they were “manufacturers of phrases.” Of medicine too he
was fond of talking, and with those of its practitioners whom he most esteemed,- with
Corvisart at Paris, and with Antonomarchi at St. Helena. “Believe me,” he said
to the last, “we had better leave off all these remedies: life is a fortress which
neither you nor I know any thing about. Why throw obstacles in the way of its defence? Its
own means are superior to all the apparatus of your laboratories. Corvisart candidly
agreed with me that all your filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medicine is a
collection of uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken collectively, are more
fatal than useful to mankind. Water, air and cleanliness are the chief articles in my
pharmacopoeia.”

His memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon and General Gourgaud at St. Helena, have great
value, after all the deduction that it seems is to be made from them on account of his
known disingenuousness. He has the good-nature of strength and conscious superiority. I
admire his simple, clear narrative of his battles;- good as Caesar’s; his good-natured and
sufficiently respectful account of Marshal Wurmser and his other antagonists; and his own
equality as a writer to his varying subject. The most agreeable portion is the Campaign in
Egypt.

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In intervals of leisure, either in the camp or the
palace, Napoleon appears as a man of genius directing on abstract questions the native
appetite for truth and the impatience of words he was wont to show in war. He could enjoy
every play of invention, a romance, a bon mot, as well as a strategem in a campaign. He
delighted to fascinate Josephine and her ladies, in a dim-lighted apartment, by the
terrors of a fiction to which his voice and dramatic power lent every addition.

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society; of the
throng who fill the markets, shops, counting-houses, manufactories, ships, of the modern
world, aiming to be rich. He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal
improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors and
markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse. Of course the rich and aristocratic did not
like him. England, the centre of capital, and Rome and Austria, centres of tradition and
genealogy, opposed him. The consternation of the dull and conservative classes, the terror
of the foolish old men and old women of the Roman conclave, who in their despair took hold
of any thing, and would cling to red-hot iron,- the vain attempts of statists to amuse and
deceive him, of the emperor of Austria to bribe him; and the instinct of the young, ardent
and active men every where, which pointed him out as the giant of the middle class, make
his history bright and commanding. He had the virtues of the masses of his constituents:
he had also their vices. I am sorry that the brilliant picture has its reverse. But that
is the fatal quality which we discover in our pursuit of wealth, that it is treacherous,
and is bought by the breaking or weakening of the sentiments; and it is inevitable that we
should find the same fact in the history of this champion, who proposed to himself simply
a brilliant career, without any stipulation or scruple concerning the means.

Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments. The highest-placed
individual in the most cultivated age and population of the world,- he has not the merit
of common truth and honesty. He is unjust to his generals; egotistic and monopolizing;
meanly stealing the credit of their great actions from Kellermann, from Bernadotte;
intriguing to involve his faithful Junot in hopeless bankruptcy, in order to drive him to
a distance from Paris, because the familiarity of his manners offends the new pride of his
throne. He is a boundless liar. The official paper, his “Moniteur,” and all his
bulletins, are proverbs for saying what he wished to be believed; and worse,- he sat, in
his premature old age, in his lonely island, coldly falsifying facts and dates and
characters, and giving to history a theatrical eclat. Like all Frenchmen he has a passion
for stage effect. Every action that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this
calculation. His star, his love of glory, his doctrine of the immortality of the soul, are
all French. “I must dazzle and astonish. If I were to give the liberty of the press,
my power could not last three days.” To make a great noise is his favorite design.
“A great reputation is a great noise: the more there is made, the farther off it is
heard. Laws, institutions, monuments, nations, all fall; but the noise continues, and
resounds in after ages.” His doctrine of immortality is simply fame. His theory of
influence is not flattering. “There are two levers for moving men,- interest and
fear. Love is a silly infatuation, depend upon it. Friendship is but a name. I love
nobody. I do not even love my brothers: perhaps Joseph a little, from habit, and because
he is my elder; and Duroc, I love him too; but why?- because his character pleases me: he
is stern and resolute, and I believe the fellow never shed a tear. For my part I know very
well that I have no true friends. As long as I continue to be what I am, I may have as
many pretended friends as I please. Leave sensibility to women; but men should be firm in
heart and purpose, or they should have nothing to do with war and government.” He was
thoroughly unscrupulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown and poison, as his
interest dictated. He had no generosity, but mere vulgar hatred; he was intensely selfish;
he was perfidious; he cheated at cards; he was a prodigious gossip, and opened letters,
and delighted in his infamous police, and rubbed his hands with joy when he had
intercepted some morsel of intelligence concerning the men and women about him, boasting
that “he knew every thing”; and interfered with the cutting the dresses of the
women; and listened after the hurrahs and the compliments of the street, incognito. His
manners were coarse. He treated women with low familiarity. He had the habit of pulling
their ears and pinching their cheeks when he was in good humor, and of pulling the ears
and whiskers of men, and of striking and horse-play with them, to his last days. It does
not appear that he listened at key-holes, or at least that he was caught at it. In short,
when you have penetrated through all the circles of power and splendor, you were not
dealing with a gentleman, at last; but with an impostor and a rogue; and he fully deserves
the epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.

In describing the two parties into which modern society divides itself,- the democrat
and the conservative,- I said, Bonaparte represents the democrat, or the party of men of
business, against the stationary or conservative party. I omitted then to say, what is
material to the statement, namely that these two parties differ only as young and old. The
democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is
the democrat ripe and gone to seed;- because both parties stand on the one ground of the
supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep. Bonaparte
may be said to represent the whole history of this party, its youth and its age; yes, and
with poetic justice its fate, in his own. The counter-revolution, the counter-party, still
waits for its organ and representative, in a lover and a man of truly public and universal
aims.

Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the powers of intellect
without conscience. Never was such a leader so endowed and so weaponed; never leader found
such aids and followers. And what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these
immense armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of men, of this
demoralized Europe? It came to no result. All passed away like the smoke of his artillery,
and left no trace. He left France smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the
whole contest for freedom was to be begun again. The attempt was in principle suicidal.
France served him with life and limb and estate, as long as it could identify its interest
with him; but when men saw that after victory was another war; after the destruction of
armies, new conscriptions; and they who had toiled so desperately were never nearer to the
reward,- they could not spend what they had earned, nor repose on their down-beds, nor
strut in their chateaux,- they deserted him. Men found that his absorbing egotism was
deadly to all other men. It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks
on any one who takes hold of it, producing spasms which contract the muscles of the hand,
so that the man can not open his fingers; and the animal inflicts new and more violent
shocks, until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So this exorbitant egotist narrowed,
impoverished and absorbed the power and existence of those who served him; and the
universal cry of France and of Europe in 1814 was, “Enough of him”; “assez
de Bonaparte.”

It was not Bonaparte’s fault. He did all that in him lay to live and thrive without
moral principle. It was the nature of things, the eternal law of man and of the world
which baulked and ruined him; and the result, in a million experiments, will be the same.
Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim,
will fail. The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the pernicious Napoleon. As long
as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will
be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our
laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with
all doors open, and which serves all men.

* * *

Goethe; or, the Writer (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882

Goethe; or, the Writer
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Representative Men, 1850

I find a provision in the constitution of the world for the writer, or secretary, who
is to report the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that everywhere throbs and works.
His office is a reception of the facts into the mind, and then a selection of the eminent
and characteristic experiences.

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet,
the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the
mountain; the river its channel in the soil; the animal its bones in the stratum; the fern
and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the
sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints, in
characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself
in the memories of his fellows and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds;
the sky, of tokens; the round is all memoranda and signatures, and every object covered
over with hints which speak to the intelligent.

In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the
seal. It neither exceeds nor comes short of the fact. But nature strives upward; and, in
man, the report is something more than print of the seal. It is a new and finer form of
the original. The record is alive, as that which it recorded is alive. In man, the memory
is a kind of looking-glass, which, having received the images of surrounding objects, is
touched with life, and disposes them in a new order. The facts do not lie in it inert; but
some subside and others shine; so that we soon have a new picture, composed of the eminent
experiences. The man cooperates. He loves to communicate; and that which is for him to say
lies as a load on his heart until it is delivered. But, besides the universal joy of
conversation, some men are born with exalted powers for this second creation. Men are born
to write. The gardener saves every slip and seed and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a
planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or
experiences, comes to him as a model and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense
that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be
thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.
Nothing so broad, so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore commended to his pen, and he
will write. In his eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the
possibility of being reported. In conversation, in calamity, he finds new materials; as
our German poet said, “Some god gave me the power to paint what I suffer.” He
draws his rents from rage and pain. By acting rashly, he buys the power of talking wisely.
Vexations and a tempest of passion only fill his sail; as the good Luther writes,
“When I am angry, I can pray well and preach well”: and, if we knew the genesis
of fine strokes of eloquence, they might recall the complaisance of Sultan Amurath, who
struck off some Persian heads, that his physician, Vesalius, might see the spasms in the
muscles of the neck. His failures are the preparation of his victories. A new thought or a
crisis of passion apprises him that all that he has yet learned and written is exoteric,-
is not the fact, but some rumor of the fact. What then? Does he throw away the pen? No; he
begins again to describe in the new light which has shined on him,- if, by some means, he
may yet save some true word. Nature conspires. Whatever can be thought can be spoken, and
still rises for utterance, though to rude and stammering organs. If they can not compass
it, it waits and works, until at last it moulds them to its perfect will and is
articulated.

This striving after imitative expression, which one meets every where, is significant
of the aim of nature, but is mere stenography. There are higher degrees, and nature has
more splendid endowments for those whom she elects to a superior office; for the class of
scholars or writers, who see connection where the multitude see fragments, and who are
impelled to exhibit the facts in order, and so to supply the axis on which the frame of
things turns. Nature has dearly at heart the formation of the speculative man, or scholar.
It is an end never lost sight of, and is prepared in the original casting of things. He is
no permissive or accidental appearance, but an organic agent, one of the estates of the
realm, provided and prepared from of old and from everlasting, in the knitting and
contexture of things. Presentiments, impulses, cheer him. There is a certain heat in the
breast which attends the perception of a primary truth, which is the shining of the
spiritual sun down into the shaft of the mine. Every thought which dawns on the mine, in
the moment of its emergence announces its own rank,- whether it is some whimsy, or whether
it is a power.

If he have his incitements, there is, on the other side, invitation and need enough of
his gift. Society has, at all times, the same want, namely of one sane man with adequate
powers of expression to hold up each object of monomania in its right relations. The
ambitious and mercenary bring their last new mumbo-jumbo, whether tariff, Texas, railroad,
Romanism, mesmerism, or California; and, by detaching the object from its relations,
easily succeed in making it seen in a glare; and a multitude go mad about it, and they are
not to be reproved or cured by the opposite multitude who are kept from this particular
insanity by an equal frenzy on another crotchet. But let one man have the comprehensive
eye that can replace this isolated prodigy in its right neighborhood and bearings,- the
illusion vanishes, and the returning reason of the community thanks the reason of the
monitor.

The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must also wish with other men to stand well
with his contemporaries. But there is a certain ridicule, among superficial people, thrown
on the scholars or clerisy, which is of no import unless the scholar heed it. In this
country, the emphasis of conversation and of public opinion commends the practical man;
and the solid portion of the community is named with significant respect in every circle.
Our people are of Bonaparte’s opinion concerning ideologists. Ideas are subversive of
social order and comfort, and at last make a fool of the possessor. It is believed, the
ordering a cargo of goods from New York to Smyrna, or the running up and down to procure a
company of subscribers to set a-going five or ten thousand spindles, or the negotiations
of a caucus and the practising on the prejudices and facility of country-people to secure
their votes in November,- is practical and commendable.

If I were to compare action of a much higher strain with a life of contemplation, I
should not venture to pronounce with much confidence in favor of the former. Mankind have
such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or
monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer. A certain partiality, a headiness and
loss of balance, is the tax which all action must pay. Act, if you like,- but you do it at
your peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has
not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them
to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament.
The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his
friends cleave to the form and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism,
the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and although each prates of
spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual. But where are his new
things of to-day? In actions of enthusiasm this drawback appears, but in those lower
activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly;
in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative
from the practical faculty and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else
but drawback and negation. The Hindoos write in their sacred books, “Children only,
and not the learned, speak of the speculative and the practical faculties as two. They are
but one, for both obtain the selfsame end, and the place which is gained by the followers
of the one is gained by the followers of the other. That man seeth, who seeth that the
speculative and the practical doctrines are one.” For great action must draw on the
spiritual nature. The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The
greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.

This disparagement will not come from the leaders, but from inferior persons. The
robust gentlemen who stand at the head of the practical class, share the ideas of the
time, and have too much sympathy with the speculative class. It is not from men excellent
in any kind that disparagement of any other is to be looked for. With such, Talleyrand’s
question is ever the main one; not, is he rich? is he committed? is he well-meaning? has
he this or that faculty? is he of the movement? is he of the establishment?- but, Is he
anybody? does he stand for something? He must be good of his kind. That is all that
Talleyrand, all that State-street, all that the common-sense of mankind asks. Be real and
admirable, not as we know, but as you know. Able men do not care in what kind a man is
able, so only that he is able. A master likes a master, and does not stipulate whether it
be orator, artist, craftsman, or king.

Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class. And it
is not to be denied that men are cordial in their recognition and welcome of intellectual
accomplishments. Still the writer does not stand with us on any commanding ground. I think
this to be his own fault. A pound passes for a pound. There have been times when he was a
sacred person: he wrote Bibles, the first hymns, the codes, the epics, tragic songs,
Sibylline verses, Chaldean oracles, Laconian sentences, inscribed on temple walls. Every
word was true, and woke the nations to new life. He wrote without levity and without
choice. Every word was carved before his eyes into the earth and the sky; and the sun and
stars were only letters of the same purport and of no more necessity. But how can he be
honored when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in a crowd; when he is no
longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public;
when he must sustain with shameless advocacy some bad government, or must bark, all the
year round, in opposition; or write conventional criticism, or profligate novels, or at
any rate write without thought, and without recurrence by day and by night to the sources
of inspiration?

Some reply to these questions may be furnished by looking over the list of men of
literary genius in our age. Among these no more instructive name occurs than that of
Goethe to represent the powers and duties of the scholar or writer.

I described Bonaparte as a representative of the popular external life and aims of the
nineteenth century. Its other half, its poet, is Goethe, a man quite domesticated in the
century, breathing its air, enjoying its fruits, impossible at any earlier time, and
taking away, by his colossal parts, the reproach of weakness which but for him would lie
on the intellectual works of the period. He appears at a time when a general culture has
spread itself and has smoothed down all sharp individual traits; when, in the absence of
heroic characters, a social comfort and cooperation have come in. There is no poet, but
scores of poetic writers; no Columbus, but hundreds of post-captains, with
transit-telescope, barometer and concentrated soup and pemmican; no Demosthenes, no
Chatham, but any number of clever parliamentary and forensic debaters; no prophet or
saint, but colleges of divinity; no learned man, but learned societies, a cheap press,
reading-rooms and book-clubs without number. There was never such a miscellany of facts.
The world extends itself like American trade. We conceive Greek or Roman life, life in the
Middle Ages, to be a simple and comprehensible affair; but modern life to respect a
multitude of things, which is distracting.

Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity; hundred-handed, Argus-eyed, able and
happy to cope with this rolling miscellany of facts and sciences, and by his own
versatility to dispose of them with ease; a manly mind, unembarrassed by the variety of
coats of convention with which life had got encrusted, easily able by his subtlety to
pierce these and to draw his strength from nature, with which he lived in full communion.
What is strange too, he lived in a small town, in a petty state, in a defeated state, and
in a time when Germany played no such leading part in the world’s affairs as to swell the
bosom of her sons with any metropolitan pride, such as might have cheered a French, or
English, or once, a Roman or Attic genius. Yet there is no trace of provincial limitation
in his muse. He is not a debtor to his position, but was born with a free and controlling
genius.

The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a philosophy of literature set in poetry;
the work of one who found himself the master of histories, mythologies, philosophies,
sciences and national literatures, in the encyclopaedical manner in which modern
erudition, with its international intercourse of the whole earth’s population, researches
into Indian, Etruscan and all Cyclopean arts; geology, chemistry, astronomy; and every one
of these kingdoms assuming a certain aerial and poetic character, by reason of the
multitude. One looks at a king with reverence; but if one should chance to be at a
congress of kings, the eye would take liberties with the peculiarities of each. These are
not wild miraculous songs, but elaborate forms to which the poet has confided the results
of eighty years of observation. This reflective and critical wisdom makes the poem more
truly the flower of this time. It dates itself. Still, he is a poet,- poet of a prouder
laurel than any contemporary, and, under this plague of microscopes (for he seems to see
out of every pore of his skin), strikes the harp with a hero’s strength and grace.

The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. In the menstruum of this man’s
wit, the past and the present ages, and their religions, politics and modes of thinking,
are dissolved into archetypes and ideas. What new mythologies sail through his head! The
Greeks said that Alexander went as far as Chaos; Goethe went, only the other day, as far;
and one step farther he hazarded, and brought himself safe back.

There is a heart-cheering freedom in his speculation. The immense horizon which
journeys with us lends its majesty to trifles and to matters of convenience and necessity,
as to solemn and festal performances. He was the soul of his century. If that was learned,
and had become, by population, compact organization and drill of parts, one great
Exploring Expedition, accumulating a glut of facts and fruits too fast for any
hitherto-existing savans to classify,- this man’s mind had ample chambers for the
distribution of all. He had a power to unite the detached atoms again by their own law. He
has clothed our modern existence with poetry. Amid littleness and detail, he detected the
Genius of life, the old cunning Proteus, nestling close beside us, and showed that the
dulness and prose we ascribe to the age was only another of his masks:-

“His very flight is presence in disguise” (*32)

-that he had put off a gay uniform for a fatigue dress, and was not a whit less
vivacious or rich in Liverpool or the Hague than once in Rome or Antioch. He sought him in
public squares and main streets, in boulevards and hotels; and, in the solidest kingdom of
routine and the senses, he showed the lurking daemonic power; that, in actions of routine,
a thread of mythology and fable spins itself: and this, by tracing the pedigree of every
usage and practice, every institution, utensil and means, home to its origin in the
structure of man. He had an extreme impatience of conjecture and of rhetoric. “I have
guesses enough of my own; if a man write a book, let him set down only what he
knows.” He writes in the plainest and lowest tone, omitting a great deal more than he
writes, and putting ever a thing for a word. He has explained the distinction between the
antique and the modern spirit and art. He has defined art, its scope and laws. He has said
the best things about nature that ever were said. He treats nature as the old
philosophers, as the seven wise masters did,- and, with whatever loss of French tabulation
and dissection, poetry and humanity remain to us; and they have some doctoral skill. Eyes
are better on the whole than telescopes or microscopes. He has contributed a key to many
parts of nature, through the rare turn for unity and simplicity in his mind. Thus Goethe
suggested the leading idea of modern botany, that a leaf or the eye of a leaf is the unit
of botany, and that every part of a plant is only a transformed leaf to meet a new
condition; and, by varying the conditions, a leaf may be converted into any other organ,
and any other organ into a leaf. In like manner, in osteology, he assumed that one
vertebra of the spine might be considered as the unit of the skeleton: the head was only
the uttermost vertebrae transformed. “The plant goes from knot to knot, closing at
last with the flower and the seed. So the tape-worm, the caterpillar, goes from knot to
knot and closes with the head. Man and the higher animals are built up through the
vertebrae, the powers being concentrated in the head.” In optics again he rejected
the artificial theory of seven colors, and considered that every color was the mixture of
light and darkness in new proportions. It is really of very little consequence what topic
he writes upon. He sees at every pore, and has a certain gravitation towards truth. He
will realize what you say. He hates to be trifled with and to be made to say over again
some old wife’s fable that has had possession of men’s faith these thousand years. He may
as well see if it is true as another. He sifts it. I am here, he would say, to be the
measure and judge of these things. Why should I take them on trust? And therefore what he
says of religion, of passion, of marriage, of manners, of property, of paper-money, of
periods of belief, of omens, of luck, or whatever else, refuses to be forgotten.

Take the most remarkable example that could occur of this tendency to verify every term
in popular use. The Devil had played an important part in mythology in all times. Goethe
would have no word that does not cover a thing. The same measure will still serve: “I
have never heard of any crime which I might not have committed.” So he flies at the
throat of this imp. He shall be real; he shall be modern; he shall be European; he shall
dress like a gentleman, and accept the manners, and walk in the streets, and be well
initiated in the life of Vienna and of Heidelberg in 1820,- or he shall not exist.
Accordingly, he stripped him of mythologic gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon tail,
brimstone and blue-fire, and instead of looking in books and pictures, looked for him in
his own mind, in every shade of coldness, selfishness and unbelief that, in crowds or in
solitude, darkens over the human thought,- and found that the portrait gained reality and
terror by every thing he added and by every thing he took away. He found that the essence
of this hobgoblin which had hovered in shadow about the habitations of men ever since
there were men, was pure intellect, applied,- as always there is a tendency,- to the
service of the senses: and he flung into literature, in his Mephistopheles, the first
organic figure that has been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the
Prometheus.

I have no design to enter into any analysis of his numerous works. They consist of
translations, criticism, dramas, lyric and every other description of poems, literary
journals and portraits of distinguished men. Yet I cannot omit to specify the Wilhelm
Meister.

Wilhelm Meister is a novel in every sense, the first of its kind, called by its
admirers the only delineation of modern society,- as if other novels, those of Scott for
example, dealt with costume and condition, this with the spirit of life. It is a book over
which some veil is still drawn. It is read by very intelligent persons with wonder and
delight. It is preferred by some such to Hamlet, as a work of genius. I suppose no book of
this century can compare with it in its delicious sweetness, so new, so provoking to the
mind, gratifying it with so many and so solid thoughts, just insights into life and
manners and characters; so many good hints for the conduct of life, so many unexpected
glimpses into a higher sphere, and never a trace of rhetoric or dulness. A very provoking
book to the curiosity of young men of genius, but a very unsatisfactory one. Lovers of
light reading, those who look in it for the entertainment they find in a romance, are
disappointed. On the other hand, those who begin it with the higher hope to read in it a
worthy history of genius, and the just award of the laurel to its toils and denials, have
also reason to complain. We had an English romance here, not long ago, professing to
embody the hope of a new age and to unfold the political hope of the party called
“Young England,”- in which the only reward of virtue is a seat in Parliament and
a peerage. Goethe’s romance has a conclusion as lame and immoral. George Sand, in Consuelo
and its continuation, has sketched a truer and more dignified picture. In the progress of
the story, the characters of the hero and heroine expand at a rate that shivers the
porcelain chess-table of aristocratic convention: they quit the society and habits of
their rank, they lose their wealth, they become the servants of great ideas and of the
most generous social ends; until at last the hero, who is the centre and fountain of an
association for the rendering of the noblest benefits to the human race, no longer answers
to his own titled name; it sounds foreign and remote in his ear. “I am only
man,” he says; “I breathe and work for man”; and this in poverty and
extreme sacrifices. Goethe’s hero, on the contrary, has so many weaknesses and impurities
and keeps such bad company, that the sober English public, when the book was translated,
were disgusted. And yet it is so crammed with wisdom, with knowledge of the world and with
knowledge of laws; the persons so truly and subtly drawn, and with such few strokes, and
not a word too much,- the book remains ever so new and unexhausted, that we must even let
it go its way and be willing to get what good from it we can, assured that it has only
begun its office and has millions of readers yet to serve.

The argument is the passage of a democrat to the aristocracy, using both words in their
best sense. And this passage is not made in any mean or creeping way, but through the hall
door. Nature and character assist, and the rank is made real by sense and probity in the
nobles. No generous youth can escape this charm of reality in the book, so that it is
highly stimulating to intellect and courage.

The ardent and holy Novalis characterized the book as “thoroughly modern and
prosaic; the romantic is completely levelled in it; so is the poetry of nature; the
wonderful. The book treats only of the ordinary affairs of men: it is a poeticized civic
and domestic story. The wonderful in it is expressly treated as fiction and enthusiastic
dreaming”:- and yet, what is also characteristic, Novalis soon returned to this book,
and it remained his favorite reading to the end of his life.

What distinguishes Goethe for French and English readers is a property which he shares
with his nation,- a habitual reference to interior truth. In England and in America there
is a respect for talent; and, if it is exerted in support of any ascertained or
intelligible interest or party, or in regular opposition to any, the public is satisfied.
In France there is even a greater delight in intellectual brilliancy for its own sake. And
in all these countries, men of talent write from talent. It is enough if the understanding
is occupied, the taste propitiated,- so many columns, so many hours, filled in a lively
and creditable way. The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine
practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain
probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A
German public asks for a controlling sincerity. Here is activity of thought; but what is
it for? What does the man mean? Whence, whence all these thoughts?

Talent alone can not make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality
which by birth and quality is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists
to see and state things so, and not otherwise; holding things because they are things. If
he can not rightly express himself to-day, the same things subsist and will open
themselves to-morrow. There lies the burden on his mind,- the burden of truth to be
declared,- more or less understood; and it constitutes his business and calling in the
world to see those facts through, and to make them known. What signifies that he trips and
stammers; that his voice is harsh or hissing; that his method or his tropes are
inadequate? That message will find method and imagery, articulation and melody. Though he
were dumb it would speak. If not,- if there be no such God’s word in the man,- what care
we how adroit, how fluent, how brilliant he is?

It makes a great difference to the force of any sentence whether there be a man behind
it or no. In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only
some irresponsible shadow; oftener some moneyed corporation, or some dangler who hopes, in
the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause and
part of speech of a right book I meet the eyes of the most determined of men; his force
and terror inundate every word; the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is
athletic and nimble,- can go far and live long.

In England and America, one may be an adept in the writings of a Greek or Latin poet,
without any poetic taste or fire. That a man has spent years on Plato and Proclus, does
not afford a presumption that he holds heroic opinions, or under-values the fashions of
his town. But the German nation have the most ridiculous good faith on these subjects: the
student, out of the lecture-room, still broods on the lessons; and the professor can not
divest himself of the fancy that the truths of philosophy have some application to Berlin
and Munich. This earnestness enables them to outsee men of much more talent. Hence almost
all the valuable distinctions which are current in higher conversation have been derived
to us from Germany. But whilst men distinguished for wit and learning, in England and
France, adopt their study and their side with a certain levity, and are not understood to
be very deeply engaged, from grounds of character, to the topic or the part they espouse,-
Goethe, the head and body of the German nation, does not speak from talent, but the truth
shines through: he is very wise, though his talent often veils his wisdom. However
excellent his sentence is, he has somewhat better in view. It awakens my curiosity. He has
the formidable independence which converse with truth gives: hear you, or forbear, his
fact abides; and your interest in the writer is not confined to his story and he dismissed
from memory when he has performed his task creditably, as a baker when he has left his
loaf; but his work is the least part of him. The old Eternal Genius who built the world
has confided himself more to this man than to any other.

I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which genius has
spoken. He has not worshipped the highest unity; he is incapable of a self-surrender to
the moral sentiment. There are nobler strains in poetry than any he has sounded. There are
writers poorer in talent, whose tone is purer, and more touches the heart. Goethe can
never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth; but to truth for the
sake of culture. He has no aims less large than the conquest of universal nature, of
universal truth, to be his portion: a man not to be bribed, nor deceived, nor overawed; of
a stoical self-command and self-denial, and having one test for all men,- What can you
teach me? All possessions are valued by him for that only; rank, privileges, health, time,
Being itself.

He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts and sciences and events; artistic,
but not artist; spiritual, but not spiritualist. There is nothing he had not right to
know: there is no weapon in the armory of universal genius he did not take into his hand,
but with peremptory heed that he should not be for a moment prejudiced by his instruments.
He lays a ray of light under every fact, and between himself and his dearest property.
From him nothing was hid, nothing withholden. The lurking daemons sat to him, and the
saint who saw the daemons; and the metaphysical elements took form. “Piety itself is
no aim, but only a means whereby through purest inward peace we may attain to highest
culture.” And his penetration of every secret of the fine arts will make Goethe still
more statuesque. His affections help him, like women employed by Cicero to worm out the
secret of conspirators. Enmities he has none. Enemy of him you may be,- if so you shall
teach him aught which your good-will can not, were it only what experience will accrue
from your ruin. Enemy and welcome, but enemy on high terms. He can not hate anybody; his
time is worth too much. Temperamental antagonisms may be suffered, but like feuds of
emperors, who fight dignifiedly across kingdoms.

His autobiography, under the title of Poetry and Truth out of my Life, is the
expression of the idea- now familiar to the world through the German mind, but a novelty
to England, Old and New, when that book appeared- that a man exists for culture; not for
what he can accomplish, but for what can be accomplished in him. The reaction of things on
the man is the only noteworthy result. An intellectual man can see himself as a third
person; therefore his faults and delusions interest him equally with his successes. Though
he wishes to prosper in affairs, he wishes more to know the history and destiny of man;
whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him are only interested in a low success.

This idea reigns in the Dichtung und Wahrheit and directs the selection of the
incidents; and nowise the external importance of events, the rank of the personages, or
the bulk of incomes. Of course the book affords slender materials for what would be
reckoned with us a Life of Goethe;- few dates, no correspondence, no details of offices or
employments, no light on his marriage; and a period of ten years, that should be the most
active in his life, after his settlement at Weimar, is sunk in silence. Meantime certain
love affairs that came to nothing, as people say, have the strangest importance: he crowds
us with details:- certain whimsical opinions, cosmogonies and religions of his own
invention, and especially his relations to remarkable minds and to critical epochs of
thought:- these he magnifies. His Daily and Yearly Journal, his Italian Travels, his
Campaign in France and the historical part of his Theory of Colors, have the same
interest. In the last, he rapidly notices Kepler, Roger Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Voltaire,
etc.; and the charm of this portion of the book consists in the simplest statement of the
relation betwixt these grandees of European scientific history and himself; the mere
drawing of the lines from Goethe to Kepler, from Goethe to Bacon, from Goethe to Newton.
The drawing of the line is, for the time and person, a solution of the formidable problem,
and gives pleasure when Iphigenia and Faust do not, without any cost of invention
comparable to that of Iphigenia and Faust.

This lawgiver of art is not an artist. Was it that he knew too much, that his sight was
microscopic and interfered with the just perspective, the seeing of the whole? He is
fragmentary; a writer of occasional poems and of an encyclopaedia of sentences. When he
sits down to write a drama or a tale, he collects and sorts his observations from a
hundred sides, and combines them into the body as fitly as he can. A great deal refuses to
incorporate: this he adds loosely as letters of the parties, leaves from their journals,
or the like. A great deal still is left that will not find any place. This the bookbinder
alone can give any cohesion to; and hence, notwithstanding the looseness of many of his
works, we have volumes of detached paragraphs, aphorisms, xenien, (*33)
etc.

I suppose the worldly tone of his tales grew out of the calculations of self-culture.
It was the infirmity of an admirable scholar, who loved the world out of gratitude; who
knew where libraries, galleries, architecture, laboratories, savans and leisure were to be
had, and who did not quite trust the compensations of poverty and nakedness. Socrates
loved Athens; Montaigne, Paris; and Madame de Stael said she was only vulnerable on that
side (namely, of Paris). It has its favorable aspect. All the geniuses are usually so
ill-assorted and sickly that one is ever wishing them somewhere else. We seldom see
anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live. There is a slight blush of shame on the cheek
of good men and aspiring men, and a spice of caricature. But this man was entirely at home
and happy in his century and the world. None was so fit to live, or more heartily enjoyed
the game. In this aim of culture, which is the genius of his works, is their power. The
idea of absolute, eternal truth, without reference to my own enlargement by it, is higher.
The surrender to the torrent of poetic inspiration is higher; but compared with any
motives on which books are written in England and America, this is very truth, and has the
power to inspire which belongs to truth. Thus has he brought back to a book some of its
ancient might and dignity.

Goethe, coming into an over-civilized time and country, when original talent was
oppressed under the load of books and mechanical auxiliaries and the distracting variety
of claims, taught men how to dispose of this mountainous miscellany and make it
subservient. I join Napoleon with him, as being both representatives of the impatience and
reaction of nature against the morgue of conventions,- two stern realists, who, with their
scholars, have severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for this
time and for all time. This cheerful laborer, with no external popularity or provocation,
drawing his motive and his plan from his own breast, tasked himself with stints for a
giant, and without relaxation or rest, except by alternating his pursuits, worked on for
eighty years with the steadiness of his first zeal.

It is the last lesson of modern science that the highest simplicity of structure is
produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity. Man is the most composite of
all creatures; the wheel-insect, volvox globator, is at the other extreme. We shall learn
to draw rents and revenues from the immense patrimony of the old and the recent ages.
Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence of all times; that the disadvantages of any
epoch exist only to the faint-hearted. Genius hovers with his sunshine and music close by
the darkest and deafest eras. No mortgage, no attainder, will hold on men or hours. The
world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles,
to unite again the heavens and the earthly world. The secret of genius is to suffer no
fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern
life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality and a purpose;
and first, last, midst and without end, to honor every truth by use.

[Notes from the Centenary Edition of Emerson’s Complete Works, edited by his son,
Edward Waldo Emerson:]

*(32) This line is probably a translation from some Arabic or Persian
source, from the connection in which it appears in Emerson’s notebook.

*(33) Xenien: from the Greek, was used by Goethe and Schiller to
denote epigrams.

* * *

The World-Soul (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882

The World-Soul
 by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thanks to the morning light,
Thanks to the foaming sea,
To the uplands of New Hampshire,
To the green-haired forest free;
Thanks to each man of courage,
To the maids of holy mind,
To the boy with his games undaunted
Who never looks behind.

Cities of proud hotels,
Houses of rich and great,
Vice nestles in your chambers,
Beneath your roofs of slate.
It cannot conquer folly,–
Time-and-space-conquering steam,–
And the light-outspeeding telegraph
Bears nothing on its beam.

The politics are base;
The letters do not cheer;
And ‘t is far in the deeps of history,
The voice that speaketh clear.
Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.

Yet there in the parlor sits
Some figure of noble guise,–
Our angel, in a stranger’s form,
Or woman’s pleading eyes;
Or only a flashing sunbeam
In at the window-pane;
Or Music pours on mortals
Its beautiful disdain.

The inevitable morning
Finds them who in cellars be;
And be sure the all-loving Nature
Will smile in a factory.
Yon ridge of purple landscape,
Yon sky between the walls,
Hold all the hidden wonders
In scanty intervals.

Alas! the Sprite that haunts us
Deceives our rash desire;
It whispers of the glorious gods,
And leaves us in the mire.
We cannot learn the cipher
That’s writ upon our cell;
Stars taunt us by a mystery
Which we could never spell.

If but one hero knew it,
The world would blush in flame;
The sage, till he hit the secret,
Would hang his head for-shame.
Our brothers have not read it,
Not one has found the key;
And henceforth we are comforted,–
We are but such as they.

Still, still the secret presses;
The nearing clouds draw down;
The crimson morning flames into
The fopperies of the town.
Within, without the idle earth,
Stars weave eternal rings;
The sun himself shines heartily,
And shares the joy he brings.

And what if Trade sow cities
Like shells along the shore,
And thatch with towns the prairie broad
With railways ironed o’er?–
They are but sailing foam-bells
Along Thought’s causing stream,
And take their shape and sun-color
From him that sends the dream.

For Destiny never swerves
Nor yields to men the helm;
He shoots his thought, by hidden nerves,
Throughout the solid realm.
The patient Daemon sits,
With roses and a shroud;
He has his way, and deals his gifts,–
But ours is not allowed.

He is no churl nor trifler,
And his viceroy is none,–
Love-without-weakness,–
Of Genius sire and son.
And his will is not thwarted;
The seeds of land and sea
Are the atoms of his body bright,
And his behest obey.

He serveth the servant,
The brave he loves amain;
He kills the cripple and the sick,
And straight begins again;

For gods delight in gods,
And thrust the weak aside;
To him who scorns their charities
Their arms fly open wide.

When the old world is sterile
And the ages are effete,
He will from wrecks and sediment
The fairer world complete.
He forbids to despair;
His cheeks mantle with mirth;
And the unimagined good of men
Is yeaning at the birth.

Spring still makes spring in the mind
When sixty years are told;
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,
And we are never old;
Over the winter glaciers
I see the summer glow,
And through the wild-piled snow-drift
The warm rosebuds below.



* * *

Self-Reliance (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson



SELF-RELIANCE
 From Emerson’s Essays: First Series (1841)


        “Ne te quaesiveris extra.”


        “Man is his own star; and the soul that can
        Render an honest and a perfect man,
        Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
        Nothing to him falls early or too late.
        Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
        Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”
        [Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune]

 
        Cast the bantling on the rocks,
        Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat;
        Wintered with the hawk and fox,
        Power and speed be hands and feet.

 

        I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter
which were original and not conventional.  The soul always hears an
admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may.  The
sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may
contain.  To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true
for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.
Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense;
for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—- and our first
thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we
ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books
and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought.  A man
should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes
across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of
bards and sages.  Yet he dismisses without notice his thought,
because it is his.  In every work of genius we recognize our own
rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated
majesty.  Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us
than this.  They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with
good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is
on the other side.  Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly
good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and
we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

        There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he
must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though
the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can
come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground
which is given to him to till.  The power which resides in him is new
in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor
does he know until he has tried.  Not for nothing one face, one
character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.
This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony.
The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify
of that particular ray.  We but half express ourselves, and are
ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.  It may be
safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be
faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by
cowards.  A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into
his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise,
shall give him no peace.  It is a deliverance which does not deliver.
In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no
invention, no hope.

        Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society
of your contemporaries, the connection of events.  Great men have
always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of
their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy
was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating
in all their being.  And we are now men, and must accept in the
highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and
invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a
revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the
Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

        What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face
and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes!  That divided and
rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has
computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have
not.  Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and
when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted.  Infancy conforms
to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or
five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.  So God has armed
youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and
charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put
by, if it will stand by itself.  Do not think the youth has no force,
because he cannot speak to you and me.  Hark! in the next room his
voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic.  It seems he knows how to
speak to his contemporaries.  Bashful or bold, then, he will know how
to make us seniors very unnecessary.

        The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would
disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is
the healthy attitude of human nature.  A boy is in the parlour what
the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out
from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and
sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as
good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome.  He cumbers
himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an
independent, genuine verdict.  You must court him: he does not court
you.  But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his
consciousness.  As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he
is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of
hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account.  There is
no Lethe for this.  Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality!
Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again
from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted
innocence, must always be formidable.  He would utter opinions on all
passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary,
would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear.

        These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow
faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.  Society everywhere
is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
Societ
y is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the
better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the
liberty and culture of the eater.  The virtue in most request is
conformity.  Self-reliance is its aversion.  It loves not realities
and creators, but names and customs.

        Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.  He who would
gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness,
but must explore if it be goodness.  Nothing is at last sacred but
the integrity of your own mind.  Absolve you to yourself, and you
shall have the suffrage of the world.  I remember an answer which
when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was
wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church.  On
my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I
live wholly from within? my friend suggested, — “But these impulses
may be from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to
me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from
the Devil.” No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.  Good
and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the
only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is
against it.  A man is to carry himself in the presence of all
opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he.  I
am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to
large societies and dead institutions.  Every decent and well-spoken
individual affects and sways me more than is right.  I ought to go
upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.  If malice
and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass?  If an
angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to
me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him,
`Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and
modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable
ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand
miles off.  Thy love afar is spite at home.’ Rough and graceless
would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation
of love.  Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is
none.  The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction
of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines.  I shun father
and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.  I would
write on the lintels of the door-post, _Whim_.  I hope it is somewhat
better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.
Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.
Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my
obligation to put all poor men in good situations.  Are they _my_
poor?  I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the
dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me
and to whom I do not belong.  There is a class of persons to whom by
all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to
prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the
education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the
vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold
Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb
and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall
have the manhood to withhold.

        Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than
the rule.  There is the man _and_ his virtues.  Men do what is called
a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they
would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade.
Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in
the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board.  Their
virtues are penances.  I do not wish to expiate, but to live.  My
life is for itself and not for a spectacle.  I much prefer that it
should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it
should be glittering and unsteady.  I wish it to be sound and sweet,
and not to need diet and bleeding.  I ask primary evidence that you
are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions.  I
know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear
those actions which are reckoned excellent.  I cannot consent to pay
for a privilege where I have intrinsic right.  Few and mean as my
gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or
the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

        What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people
think.  This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual
life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and
meanness.  It is the harder, because you will always find those who
think they know what is your duty better than you know it.  It is
easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in
solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the
midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of
solitude.

        The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to
you is, that it scatters your force.  It loses your time and blurs
the impression of your character.  If you maintain a dead church,
contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either
for the government or against it, spread your table like base
housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect
the precise man you are.  And, of course, so much force is withdrawn
from your proper life.  But do your work, and I shall know you.  Do
your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.  A man must consider
what a blindman’s-buff is this game of conformity.  If I know your
sect, I anticipate your argument.  I hear a preacher announce for his
text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his
church.  Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new
and spontaneous word?  Do I not know that, with all this ostentation
of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such
thing?  Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but
at one side, — the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish
minister?  He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are
the emptiest affectation.  Well, most men have bound their eyes with
one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of
these communities of opinion.  This conformity makes them not false
in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all
particulars.  Their every truth is not quite true.  Their two is not
the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they
say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.
Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the
party to which we adhere.  We come to wear one cut of face and
figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.
There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail
to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the foolish face
of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company where we do
not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest
us.  The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low
usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with
the most disagreeable sensat
ion.

        For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.
And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face.  The
by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the
friend’s parlour.  If this aversation had its origin in contempt and
resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad
countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet
faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows
and a newspaper directs.  Yet is the discontent of the multitude more
formidable than that of the senate and the college.  It is easy
enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the
cultivated classes.  Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are
timid as being very vulnerable themselves.  But when to their
feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the
ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force
that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs
the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle
of no concernment.

        The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our
consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes
of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past
acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

        But why should you keep your head over your shoulder?  Why drag
about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you
have stated in this or that public place?  Suppose you should
contradict yourself; what then?  It seems to be a rule of wisdom
never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure
memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed
present, and live ever in a new day.  In your metaphysics you have
denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the
soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe
God with shape and color.  Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in
the hand of the harlot, and flee.

        A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored
by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.  With consistency a
great soul has simply nothing to do.  He may as well concern himself
with his shadow on the wall.  Speak what you think now in hard words,
and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though
it contradict every thing you said to-day.  — `Ah, so you shall be
sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be
misunderstood?  Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and
Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every
pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.  To be great is to be
misunderstood.

        I suppose no man can violate his nature.  All the sallies of
his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities
of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere.
Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him.  A character is like an
acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; — read it forward, backward, or
across, it still spells the same thing.  In this pleasing, contrite
wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest
thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will
be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not.  My book
should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.  The
swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he
carries in his bill into my web also.  We pass for what we are.
Character teaches above our wills.  Men imagine that they communicate
their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that
virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

        There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so
they be each honest and natural in their hour.  For of one will, the
actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem.  These
varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height
of thought.  One tendency unites them all.  The voyage of the best
ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.  See the line from a
sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average
tendency.  Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain
your other genuine actions.  Your conformity explains nothing.  Act
singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.
Greatness appeals to the future.  If I can be firm enough to-day to
do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to
defend me now.  Be it how it will, do right now.  Always scorn
appearances, and you always may.  The force of character is
cumulative.  All the foregone days of virtue work their health into
this.  What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the
field, which so fills the imagination?  The consciousness of a train
of great days and victories behind.  They shed an united light on the
advancing actor.  He is attended as by a visible escort of angels.
That is it which throws thunder into Chatham’s voice, and dignity
into Washington’s port, and America into Adams’s eye.  Honor is
venerable to us because it is no ephemeris.  It is always ancient
virtue.  We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day.  We love
it and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and
homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old
immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.


        I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and
consistency.  Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the
Spartan fife.  Let us never bow and apologize more.  A great man is
coming to eat at my house.  I do not wish to please him; I wish that
he should wish to please me.  I will stand here for humanity, and
though I would make it kind, I would make it true.  Let us affront
and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the
times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the
fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great
responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a
true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of
things.  Where he is, there is nature.  He measures you, and all men,
and all events.  Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of
somewhat else, or of some other person.  Character, reality, reminds
you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation.  The man
must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent.
Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite
spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; — and
posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.  A man
Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire.  Christ is
born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he
is confounded with virtue and the possible of man.  An institution is
the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit
Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of
Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson.  Scipio, Milton called “the height of
Rome”; and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography
of a few stout and earnest persons.


        Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet.
Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a
charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists
for him.  But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself
which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a
marble god, feels poor when he looks on these.  To him a palace, a
statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like
a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, `Who are you, Sir?’ Yet
they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his
faculties that they will come out and take possession.  The picture
waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its
claims to praise.  That popular fable of the sot who was picked up
dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and
dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with
all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been
insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well
the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then
wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.

        Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic.  In history, our
imagination plays us false.  Kingdom and lordship, power and estate,
are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small
house and common day’s work; but the things of life are the same to
both; the sum total of both is the same.  Why all this deference to
Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus?  Suppose they were virtuous;
did they wear out virtue?  As great a stake depends on your private
act to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps.  When
private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be
transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

        The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so
magnetized the eyes of nations.  It has been taught by this colossal
symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man.  The joyful
loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble,
or the great proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make
his own scale of men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits
not with money but with honor, and represent the law in his person,
was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their
consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every
man.

        The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained
when we inquire the reason of self-trust.  Who is the Trustee?  What
is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be
grounded?  What is the nature and power of that science-baffling
star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a
ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark
of independence appear?  The inquiry leads us to that source, at once
the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call
Spontaneity or Instinct.  We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition,
whilst all later teachings are tuitions.  In that deep force, the
last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their
common origin.  For, the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we
know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space,
from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds
obviously from the same source whence their life and being also
proceed.  We first share the life by which things exist, and
afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have
shared their cause.  Here is the fountain of action and of thought.
Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and
which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism.  We lie in the
lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth
and organs of its activity.  When we discern justice, when we discern
truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.
If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that
causes, all philosophy is at fault.  Its presence or its absence is
all we can affirm.  Every man discriminates between the voluntary
acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to
his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due.  He may err in
the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like
day and night, not to be disputed.  My wilful actions and
acquisitions are but roving; — the idlest reverie, the faintest
native emotion, command my curiosity and respect.  Thoughtless people
contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or
rather much more readily; for, they do not distinguish between
perception and notion.  They fancy that I choose to see this or that
thing.  But perception is not whimsical, but fatal.  If I see a
trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time, all
mankind, — although it may chance that no one has seen it before me.
For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.

        The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure,
that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.  It must be that when
God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things;
should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light,
nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new
date and new create the whole.  Whenever a mind is simple, and
receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, — means, teachers,
texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into
the present hour.  All things are made sacred by relation to it, —
one as much as another.  All things are dissolved to their centre by
their cause, and, in the universal miracle, petty and particular
miracles disappear.  If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak of
God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old
mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him
not.  Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and
completion?  Is the parent better than the child into whom he has
cast his ripened being?  Whence, then, this worship of the past?  The
centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the
soul.  Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye
makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is
night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any
thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and
becoming.

        Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares
not say `I think,’ `I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage.  He is
ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose.  These roses
under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones;
they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.  There is no
time to them.  There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every
moment of its existence.  Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life
acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root
there is no less.  Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature,
in all moments alike.  But man postpones or remembers; he does not
live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or,
heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee
the future.
  He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with
nature in the present, above time.

        This should be plain enough.  Yet see what strong intellects
dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I
know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul.  We shall not always set
so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives.  We are like
children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors,
and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they
chance to see, — painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke;
afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who
uttered these sayings, they understand them, and are willing to let
the words go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when
occasion comes.  If we live truly, we shall see truly.  It is as easy
for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak.
When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of
its hoarded treasures as old rubbish.  When a man lives with God, his
voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of
the corn.

        And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains
unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off
remembering of the intuition.  That thought, by what I can now
nearest approach to say it, is this.  When good is near you, when you
have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you
shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the
face of man; you shall not hear any name;—- the way, the thought,
the good, shall be wholly strange and new.  It shall exclude example
and experience.  You take the way from man, not to man.  All persons
that ever existed are its forgotten ministers.  Fear and hope are
alike beneath it.  There is somewhat low even in hope.  In the hour
of vision, there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor
properly joy.  The soul raised over passion beholds identity and
eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right,
and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.  Vast spaces
of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea, — long intervals of
time, years, centuries, — are of no account.  This which I think and
feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances, as it
does underlie my present, and what is called life, and what is called
death.

        Life only avails, not the having lived.  Power ceases in the
instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past
to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an
aim.  This one fact the world hates, that the soul _becomes_; for
that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all
reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves
Jesus and Judas equally aside.  Why, then, do we prate of
self-reliance?  Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power
not confident but agent.  To talk of reliance is a poor external way
of speaking.  Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and
is.  Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not
raise his finger.  Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of
spirits.  We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue.  We
do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of
men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must
overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who
are not.

        This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as
on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE.
Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it
constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into
all lower forms.  All things real are so by so much virtue as they
contain.  Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence,
personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of
its presence and impure action.  I see the same law working in nature
for conservation and growth.  Power is in nature the essential
measure of right.  Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms
which cannot help itself.  The genesis and maturation of a planet,
its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the
strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are
demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying
soul.

        Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with
the cause.  Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and
books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact.
Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here
within.  Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own
law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native
riches.

        But now we are a mob.  Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is
his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication
with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of
the urns of other men.  We must go alone.  I like the silent church
before the service begins, better than any preaching.  How far off,
how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a
precinct or sanctuary!  So let us always sit.  Why should we assume
the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they
sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?  All men
have my blood, and I have all men’s.  Not for that will I adopt their
petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it.  But
your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must
be elevation.  At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to
importune you with emphatic trifles.  Friend, client, child,
sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door,
and say, — `Come out unto us.’ But keep thy state; come not into
their confusion.  The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a
weak curiosity.  No man can come near me but through my act.  “What
we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the
love.”

        If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and
faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the
state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our
Saxon breasts.  This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking
the truth.  Check this lying hospitality and lying affection.  Live
no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people
with whom we converse.  Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O
brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto.
Henceforward I am the truth’s.  Be it known unto you that
henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law.  I will have no
covenants but proximities.  I shall endeavour to nourish my parents,
to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife, — but
these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way.  I
appeal from your customs.  I must be myself.  I cannot break myself
any longer for you, or you.  If you can love me for what I am, we
shall be the happier.  If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve
that you should.  I will not hide my tas
tes or aversions.  I will so
trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the
sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints.  If
you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you
and myself by hypocritical attentions.  If you are true, but not in
the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my
own.  I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly.  It is alike
your interest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in
lies, to live in truth.  Does this sound harsh to-day?  You will soon
love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and, if we
follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last.  — But so you
may give these friends pain.  Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and
my power, to save their sensibility.  Besides, all persons have their
moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute
truth; then will they justify me, and do the same thing.

        The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is
a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold
sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes.  But
the law of consciousness abides.  There are two confessionals, in one
or the other of which we must be shriven.  You may fulfil your round
of duties by clearing yourself in the _direct_, or in the _reflex_
way.  Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father,
mother, cousin, neighbour, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these
can upbraid you.  But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and
absolve me to myself.  I have my own stern claims and perfect circle.
It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties.
But if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the
popular code.  If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep
its commandment one day.

        And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off
the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for
a taskmaster.  High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,
that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself,
that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to
others!

        If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by
distinction _society_, he will see the need of these ethics.  The
sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become
timorous, desponding whimperers.  We are afraid of truth, afraid of
fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.  Our age yields
no great and perfect persons.  We want men and women who shall
renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are
insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of
all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and
night continually.  Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our
occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but
society has chosen for us.  We are parlour soldiers.  We shun the
rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.

        If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose
all heart.  If the young merchant fails, men say he is _ruined_.  If
the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not
installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or
suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself
that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest
of his life.  A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn
tries all the professions, who _teams it_, _farms it_, _peddles_,
keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a
township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat,
falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.  He walks
abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not `studying a
profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.
He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.  Let a Stoic open the
resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can
and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new
powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed
healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion,
and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the
books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no
more, but thank and revere him, — and that teacher shall restore the
life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.

        It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a
revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their
religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of
living; their association; in their property; in their speculative
views.

        1. In what prayers do men allow themselves!  That which they
call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly.  Prayer looks
abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some
foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and
supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous.  Prayer that craves a
particular commodity, — any thing less than all good, — is vicious.
Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest
point of view.  It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul.
It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good.  But prayer as a
means to effect a private end is meanness and theft.  It supposes
dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness.  As soon as the
man is at one with God, he will not beg.  He will then see prayer in
all action.  The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed
it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are
true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends.
Caratach, in Fletcher’s Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind
of the god Audate, replies, —

                 “His hidden meaning lies in our endeavours;
                 Our valors are our best gods.”

        Another sort of false prayers are our regrets.  Discontent is
the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.  Regret
calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your
own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired.  Our sympathy
is just as base.  We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down
and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in
rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with
their own reason.  The secret of fortune is joy in our hands.
Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man.  For him
all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown,
all eyes follow with desire.  Our love goes out to him and embraces
him, because he did not need it.  We solicitously and apologetically
caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our
disapprobation.  The gods love him because men hated him.  “To the
persevering mortal,” said Zoroaster, “the blessed Immortals are
swift.”

        As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds
a disease of the intellect.  They say with those foolish Israelites,
`Let not God speak to us, lest we die.  Speak thou, speak any man
with us, and we will obey.’ Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God
in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites
fables merely of his brother’s, or his brother’s brother’s God.
Every new mind is a new classification.  If it prove a mind of
uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a
Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, and
lo! a new system.  In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so
to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of
the pupil, is his complacency.  But chiefly is this apparent in
creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some powerful
mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man’s relation to
the Highest.  Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism.  The pupil
takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new
terminology, as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new
earth and new seasons thereby.  It will happen for a time, that the
pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his
master’s mind.  But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is
idolized, passes for the end, and not for a speedily exhaustible
means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the
remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of
heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built.  They cannot
imagine how you aliens have any right to see, — how you can see; `It
must be somehow that you stole the light from us.’ They do not yet
perceive, that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any
cabin, even into theirs.  Let them chirp awhile and call it their
own.  If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new
pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot
and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful,
million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the
first morning.

        2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of
Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its
fascination for all educated Americans.  They who made England,
Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast
where they were, like an axis of the earth.  In manly hours, we feel
that duty is our place.  The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays
at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call
him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and
shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he
goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men
like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

        I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the
globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that
the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of
finding somewhat greater than he knows.  He who travels to be amused,
or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from
himself, and grows old even in youth among old things.  In Thebes, in
Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they.
He carries ruins to ruins.

        Travelling is a fool’s paradise.  Our first journeys discover
to us the indifference of places.  At home I dream that at Naples, at
Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness.  I pack
my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up
in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self,
unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.  I seek the Vatican, and
the palaces.  I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions,
but I am not intoxicated.  My giant goes with me wherever I go.

        3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper
unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action.  The intellect
is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness.  Our
minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home.  We imitate;
and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?  Our houses are
built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign
ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow
the Past and the Distant.  The soul created the arts wherever they
have flourished.  It was in his own mind that the artist sought his
model.  It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be
done and the conditions to be observed.  And why need we copy the
Doric or the Gothic model?  Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought,
and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the
American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be
done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the
day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government,
he will create a house in which all these will find themselves
fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

        Insist on yourself; never imitate.  Your own gift you can
present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s
cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an
extemporaneous, half possession.  That which each can do best, none
but his Maker can teach him.  No man yet knows what it is, nor can,
till that person has exhibited it.  Where is the master who could
have taught Shakspeare?  Where is the master who could have
instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton?  Every great
man is a unique.  The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he
could not borrow.  Shakspeare will never be made by the study of
Shakspeare.  Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too
much or dare too much.  There is at this moment for you an utterance
brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel
of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from
all these.  Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with
thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear
what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same
pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one
nature.  Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy
heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.

        4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does
our spirit of society.  All men plume themselves on the improvement
of society, and no man improves.

        Society never advances.  It recedes as fast on one side as it
gains on the other.  It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous,
it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific;
but this change is not amelioration.  For every thing that is given,
something is taken.  Society acquires new arts, and loses old
instincts.  What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing,
thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in
his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a
spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under!
But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the
white man has lost his aboriginal strength.  If the traveller tell us
truly, strike the
savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the
flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch,
and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

        The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of
his feet.  He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of
muscle.  He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to
tell the hour by the sun.  A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and
so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the
street does not know a star in the sky.  The solstice he does not
observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright
calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind.  His note-books
impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the
insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a
question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not
lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in
establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.  For every Stoic
was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

        There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the
standard of height or bulk.  No greater men are now than ever were.
A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the
first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion,
and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men
than Plutarch’s heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago.  Not
in time is the race progressive.  Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras,
Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class.  He who is really
of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own
man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect.  The arts and
inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate
men.  The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good.
Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in their fishing-boats, as to
astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the resources
of science and art.  Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more
splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since.  Columbus
found the New World in an undecked boat.  It is curious to see the
periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery, which were
introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before.  The
great genius returns to essential man.  We reckoned the improvements
of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon
conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on
naked valor, and disencumbering it of all aids.  The Emperor held it
impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Casas, “without
abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages, until,
in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his
supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread
himself.”

        Society is a wave.  The wave moves onward, but the water of
which it is composed does not.  The same particle does not rise from
the valley to the ridge.  Its unity is only phenomenal.  The persons
who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with
them.

        And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on
governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.  Men have
looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have
come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as
guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because
they feel them to be assaults on property.  They measure their esteem
of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.  But a
cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect
for his nature.  Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it
is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then
he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no
root in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no
robber takes it away.  But that which a man is does always by
necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property,
which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or
fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself
wherever the man breathes.  “Thy lot or portion of life,” said the
Caliph Ali, “is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking
after it.” Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our
slavish respect for numbers.  The political parties meet in numerous
conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each new uproar of
announcement, The delegation from Essex!  The Democrats from New
Hampshire!  The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself
stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms.  In like
manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in
multitude.  Not so, O friends! will the God deign to enter and
inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse.  It is only as a
man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to
be strong and to prevail.  He is weaker by every recruit to his
banner.  Is not a man better than a town?  Ask nothing of men, and in
the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the
upholder of all that surrounds thee.  He who knows that power is
inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and
elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his
thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position,
commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his
feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.

        So use all that is called Fortune.  Most men gamble with her,
and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls.  But do thou leave as
unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the
chancellors of God.  In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast
chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from
her rotations.  A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of
your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other
favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are
preparing for you.  Do not believe it.  Nothing can bring you peace
but yourself.  Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of
principles.