by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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There is no great and no small

To the Soul that maketh all:

And where it cometh, all things are;

And it cometh everywhere.

I am owner of the sphere,

Of the seven stars and the solar year,

Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,

Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is

an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once

admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole

estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt,

he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can

understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all

that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is

illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by

nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the

human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty,

every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate

events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts

of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by

circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but

one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The

creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece,

Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are

merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The

Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one

man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is

a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.

As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature,

as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of

miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of

centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed

by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal

mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties

consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a

light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his

life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought

in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man,

it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion,

and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the

problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something

in me to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must become

Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must

fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we

shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia

is as much an illustration of the mind's powers and depravations as

what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement has

meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, `Under

this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the

defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our

actions into perspective: and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the

balance, and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in

the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant

persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men

and things. Human life as containing this is mysterious and

inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws

derive hence their ultimate reason; all express more or less

distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence.

Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and

instinctively we at first hold to it with swords and laws, and wide

and complex combinations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is

the light of all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for

education, for justice, for charity, the foundation of friendship and

love, and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of

self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as

superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not

in their stateliest pictures -- in the sacerdotal, the imperial

palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius -- anywhere lose our

ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better

men; but rather is it true, that in their grandest strokes we feel

most at home. All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a

boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We

sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries,

the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; -- because

there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or

the blow was struck _for us_, as we ourselves in that place would

have done or applauded.

We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor

the rich, because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace

which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said

of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes

to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable

self. All literature writes the character of the wise man. Books,

monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds

the lineaments he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him

and accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by personal

allusions. A true aspirant, therefore, never needs look for

allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the

commendation, not of himself, but more sweet, of that character he

seeks, in every word that is said concerning character, yea, further,

in every fact and circumstance, -- in the running river and the

rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows from

mute nature, from the mountains and the lights of the firmament.

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us

use in broad day. The student is to read history actively and not

passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.

Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to

those who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that any

man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a

remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper

sense than what he is doing to-day.

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no

age or state of society or mode of action in history, to which there

is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a

wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to

him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person.

He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by

kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography

and all the government of the world; he must transfer the point of

view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and

London to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court,

and if England or Egypt have any thing to say to him, he will try the

case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He must attain and

maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and

poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose

of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations

of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of

facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact.

Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome, are passing

already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in

Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the

fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven

an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same

way. "What is History," said Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?"

This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England,

War, Colonization, Church, Court, and Commerce, as with so many

flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more

account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia,

Italy, Spain, and the Islands, -- the genius and creative principle

of each and of all eras in my own mind.

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in

our private experience, and verifying them here. All history becomes

subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only

biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, -- must

go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not

live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a

formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good

of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule.

Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that

loss by doing the work itself. Ferguson discovered many things in

astronomy which had long been known. The better for him.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the

state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must

in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, -- see how it

could and must be. So stand before every public and private work;

before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a

martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson,

before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches,

before a fanatic Revival, and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in

Providence. We assume that we under like influence should be alike

affected, and should achieve the like; and we aim to master

intellectually the steps, and reach the same height or the same

degradation, that our fellow, our proxy, has done.

All inquiry into antiquity, -- all curiosity respecting the

Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico,

Memphis, -- is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and

preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and

the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of

Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the

monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in

general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so

armed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself should also

have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives along the whole

line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all

with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are _now_.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us, and not done

by us. Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our man. But we

apply ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves

into the place and state of the builder. We remember the

forest-dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the first type,

and the decoration of it as the wealth of the nation increased; the

value which is given to wood by carving led to the carving over the

whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. When we have gone through

this process, and added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its

music, its processions, its Saints' days and image-worship, we have,

as it were, been the man that made the minster; we have seen how it

could and must be. We have the sufficient reason.

The difference between men is in their principle of

association. Some men classify objects by color and size and other

accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the

relation of cause and effect. The progress of the intellect is to

the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To

the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly

and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.

For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance.

Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth,

teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature,

soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard

pedants, and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of

time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and

genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them as a young child

plays with graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal

thought, and, far back in the womb of things, sees the rays parting

from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters.

Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the

metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through the fly, through

the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant

individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species; through

many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type;

through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity.

Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same. She

casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty

fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and toughness of

matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The

adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and, whilst I

look at it, its outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so

fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we

still trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of

servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness

and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the

imagination; but how changed, when as Isis in Egypt she meets

Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman, with nothing of the metamorphosis

left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows!

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity

equally obvious. There is at the surface infinite variety of things;

at the centre there is simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of

one man in which we recognize the same character! Observe the

sources of our information in respect to the Greek genius. We have

the _civil history_ of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides,

Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account of

what manner of persons they were, and what they did. We have the

same national mind expressed for us again in their _literature_, in

epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete form.

Then we have it once more in their _architecture_, a beauty as of

temperance itself, limited to the straight line and the square, -- a

builded geometry. Then we have it once again in _sculpture_, the

"tongue on the balance of expression," a multitude of forms in the

utmost freedom of action, and never transgressing the ideal serenity;

like votaries performing some religious dance before the gods, and,

though in convulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the

figure and decorum of their dance. Thus, of the genius of one

remarkable people, we have a fourfold representation: and to the

senses what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the

peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion?

Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any

resembling feature, make a like impression on the beholder. A

particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same

train of images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild

mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise obvious to the

senses, but is occult and out of the reach of the understanding.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws.

She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her

works; and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most

unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the

forest, which at once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and

the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are

men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and

awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of

the earliest Greek art. And there are compositions of the same

strain to be found in the books of all ages. What is Guido's

Rospigliosi Aurora but a morning thought, as the horses in it are

only a morning cloud. If any one will but take pains to observe the

variety of actions to which he is equally inclined in certain moods

of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will see how deep is the

chain of affinity.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some

sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its

form merely, -- but, by watching for a time his motions and plays,

the painter enters into his nature, and can then draw him at will in

every attitude. So Roos "entered into the inmost nature of a sheep."

I knew a draughtsman employed in a public survey, who found that he

could not sketch the rocks until their geological structure was first

explained to him. In a certain state of thought is the common origin

of very diverse works. It is the spirit and not the fact that is

identical. By a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful

acquisition of many manual skills, the artist attains the power of

awakening other souls to a given activity.

It has been said, that "common souls pay with what they do;

nobler souls with that which they are." And why? Because a profound

nature awakens in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and

manners, the same power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture, or of

pictures, addresses.

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of

literature, must be explained from individual history, or must remain

words. There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not

interest us, -- kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe, the

roots of all things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St.

Peter's are lame copies after a divine model. Strasburg Cathedral is

a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true

poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the

man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last

flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the

sea-shell preexist in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of

heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall

pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility

could ever add.

The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some

old prediction to us, and converting into things the words and signs

which we had heard and seen without heed. A lady, with whom I was

riding in the forest, said to me, that the woods always seemed to her

_to wait_, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds

until the wayfarer has passed onward: a thought which poetry has

celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the

approach of human feet. The man who has seen the rising moon break

out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at

the creation of light and of the world. I remember one summer day,

in the fields, my companion pointed out to me a broad cloud, which

might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite

accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over churches, -- a

round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes and

mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched symmetrical wings.

What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often, and it was

undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament. I have seen in

the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed to me that

the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in the

hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the sides of the stone

wall which obviously gave the idea of the common architectural scroll

to abut a tower.

By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances, we

invent anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see

how each people merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric

temple preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the

Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The

Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and subterranean

houses of their forefathers. "The custom of making houses and tombs

in the living rock," says Heeren, in his Researches on the

Ethiopians, "determined very naturally the principal character of the

Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal form which it assumed.

In these caverns, already prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed

to dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that, when art came to the

assistance of nature, it could not move on a small scale without

degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size, or neat

porches and wings, have been, associated with those gigantic halls

before which only Colossi could sit as watchmen, or lean on the

pillars of the interior?"

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of

the forest trees with all their boughs to a festal or solemn arcade,

as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes

that tied them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods,

without being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove,

especially in winter, when the bareness of all other trees shows the

low arch of the Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon one will

see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which the

Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen

through the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor can any

lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English

cathedrals, without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of

the builder, and that his chisel, his saw, and plane still reproduced

its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir,

and spruce.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the

insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms

into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish, as

well as the aerial proportions and perspective, of vegetable beauty.

In like manner, all public facts are to be individualized, all

private facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes

fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime. As the Persian

imitated in the slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the

stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in its

magnificent era never gave over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes,

but travelled from Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa in

summer, and to Babylon for the winter.

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and

Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The geography of Asia and

of Africa necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads were the

terror of all those whom the soil, or the advantages of a market, had

induced to build towns. Agriculture, therefore, was a religious

injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism. And in

these late and civil countries of England and America, these

propensities still fight out the old battle in the nation and in the

individual. The nomads of Africa were constrained to wander by the

attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the cattle mad, and so compels

the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season, and to drive off the

cattle to the higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia follow the

pasturage from month to month. In America and Europe, the nomadism

is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gad-fly of

Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay. Sacred cities,

to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent

laws and customs, tending to invigorate the national bond, were the

check on the old rovers; and the cumulative values of long residence

are the restraints on the itineracy of the present day. The

antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in individuals,

as the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to

predominate. A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the

faculty of rapid domestication, lives in his wagon, and roams through

all latitudes as easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in

the snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite, and

associates as happily, as beside his own chimneys. Or perhaps his

facility is deeper seated, in the increased range of his faculties of

observation, which yield him points of interest wherever fresh

objects meet his eyes. The pastoral nations were needy and hungry to

desperation; and this intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts

the mind, through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of

objects. The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, is that continence

or content which finds all the elements of life in its own soil; and

which has its own perils of monotony and deterioration, if not

stimulated by foreign infusions.

Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to his

states of mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible to him, as

his onward thinking leads him into the truth to which that fact or

series belongs.

The primeval world, -- the Fore-World, as the Germans say, -- I

can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with researching

fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of

ruined villas.

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek

history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the

Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and

Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every

man passes personally through a Grecian period. The Grecian state is

the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses, -- of the

spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. In it

existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models

of Hercules, Ph;oebus, and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the

streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of

features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined, and symmetrical

features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it would be impossible

for such eyes to squint, and take furtive glances on this side and on

that, but they must turn the whole head. The manners of that period

are plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for personal

qualities, courage, address, self-command, justice, strength,

swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance are not

known. A sparse population and want make every man his own valet,

cook, butcher, and soldier, and the habit of supplying his own needs

educates the body to wonderful performances. Such are the Agamemnon

and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is the picture Xenophon

gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten

Thousand. "After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia,

there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground

covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and, taking an axe, began

to split wood; whereupon others rose and did the like." Throughout

his army exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel for

plunder, they wrangle with the generals on each new order, and

Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as any, and sharper-tongued than most,

and so gives as good as he gets. Who does not see that this is a

gang of great boys, with such a code of honor and such lax discipline

as great boys have?

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the

old literature, is, that the persons speak simply, -- speak as

persons who have great good sense without knowing it, before yet the

reflective habit has become the predominant habit of the mind. Our

admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the

natural. The Greeks are not reflective, but perfect in their senses

and in their health, with the finest physical organization in the

world. Adults acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They

made vases, tragedies, and statues, such as healthy senses

should,---- that is, in good taste. Such things have continued to be

made in all ages, and are now, wherever a healthy physique exists;

but, as a class, from their superior organization, they have

surpassed all. They combine the energy of manhood with the engaging

unconsciousness of childhood. The attraction of these manners is

that they belong to man, and are known to every man in virtue of his

being once a child; besides that there are always individuals who

retain these characteristics. A person of childlike genius and

inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the Muse of

Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. In reading

those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains, and

waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the

eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The Greek had, it

seems, the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon, water and

fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted

distinction between Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic

schools, seems superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Plato

becomes a thought to me, -- when a truth that fired the soul of

Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in

a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and

do, as it were, run into one, why should I measure degrees of

latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of

chivalry, and the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by

quite parallel miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred

history of the world, he has the same key. When the voice of a

prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a

sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to

the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature

of institutions.

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose

to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to

time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart

and soul of the commonest hearer. Hence, evidently, the tripod, the

priest, the priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot

unite him to history, or reconcile him with themselves. As they come

to revere their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety

explains every fact, every word.

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu,

of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any

antiquity in them. They are mine as much as theirs.

I have seen the first monks and anchorets without crossing seas

or centuries. More than once some individual has appeared to me with

such negligence of labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty

beneficiary, begging in the name of God, as made good to the

nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first

Capuchins.

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin,

Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual's private life. The

cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing

his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that

without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even

much sympathy with the tyranny, -- is a familiar fact explained to

the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of

his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words

and forms, of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth.

The fact teaches him how Belus was worshipped, and how the Pyramids

were built, better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of

all the workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the

Mounds of Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the courses.

Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes

against the superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the

part of old reformers, and in the search after truth finds like them

new perils to virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed to

supply the girdle of a superstition. A great licentiousness treads

on the heels of a reformation. How many times in the history of the

world has the Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in

his own household! "Doctor," said his wife to Martin Luther, one

day, "how is it that, whilst subject to papacy, we prayed so often

and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and

very seldom?"

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in

literature, -- in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that

the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible

situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true

for one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines

wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One

after another he comes up in his private adventures with every fable

of Aesop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and

verifies them with his own head and hands.

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of

the imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities. What a

range of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of

Prometheus! Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the

history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling authentic facts, the

invention of the mechanic arts, and the migration of colonies,) it

gives the history of religion with some closeness to the faith of

later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the

friend of man; stands between the unjust "justice" of the Eternal

Father and the race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on

their account. But where it departs from the Calvinistic

Christianity, and exhibits him as the defier of Jove, it represents a

state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine of Theism

is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems the

self-defence of man against this untruth, namely, a discontent with

the believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the

obligation of reverence is onerous. It would steal, if it could, the

fire of the Creator, and live apart from him, and independent of him.

The Prometheus Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less true

to all time are the details of that stately apologue. Apollo kept

the flocks of Admetus, said the poets. When the gods come among men,

they are not known. Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not.

Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but every time he

touched his mother earth, his strength was renewed. Man is the

broken giant, and, in all his weakness, both his body and his mind

are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature. The power of

music, the power of poetry to unfix, and, as it were, clap wings to

solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. The philosophical

perception of identity through endless mutations of form makes him

know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who

slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran? And

what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus? I can

symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any fact,

because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is but a

name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking

the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within

sight of the soul. The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would

it were; but men and women are only half human. Every animal of the

barn-yard, the field, and the forest, of the earth and of the waters

that are under the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave

the print of its features and form in some one or other of these

upright, heaven-facing speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy

soul, -- ebbing downward into the forms into whose habits thou hast

now for many years slid. As near and proper to us is also that old

fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-side and put

riddles to every passenger. If the man could not answer, she

swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was

slain. What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or

events! In splendid variety these changes come, all putting

questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a

superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts

encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine the

men of _sense_, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished

every spark of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man

is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the

dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race, remains fast

by the soul and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and

supple into their places; they know their master, and the meanest of

them glorifies him.

See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that every word should

be a thing. These figures, he would say, these Chirons, Griffins,

Phorkyas, Helen, and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a specific

influence on the mind. So far then are they eternal entities, as

real to-day as in the first Olympiad. Much revolving them, he writes

out freely his humor, and gives them body tohis own imagination. And

although that poem be as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it

much more attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of the

same author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful relief to

the mind from the routine of customary images, -- awakens the

reader's invention and fancy by the wild freedom of the design, and

by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise.

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the

bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he

seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact

allegory. Hence Plato said that "poets utter great and wise things

which they do not themselves understand." All the fictions of the

Middle Age explain themselves as a masked or frolic expression of

that which in grave earnest the mind of that period toiled to

achieve. Magic, and all that is ascribed to it, is a deep

presentiment of the powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the

sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of using the

secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are

the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction. The

preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and

the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit "to bend the

shows of things to the desires of the mind."

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul, a garland and a rose bloom

on the head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the

inconstant. In the story of the Boy and the Mantle, even a mature

reader may be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the

triumph of the gentle Genelas; and, indeed, all the postulates of

elfin annals, -- that the fairies do not like to be named; that their

gifts are capricious and not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure

must not speak; and the like, -- I find true in Concord, however they

might be in Cornwall or Bretagne.

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the Bride of

Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a mask for a vulgar temptation,

Ravenswood Castle a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign

mission of state only a Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We may

all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by

fighting down the unjust and sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name

for fidelity, which is always beautiful and always liable to calamity

in this world.

-----------

But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man,

another history goes daily forward, -- that of the external world, --

in which he is not less strictly implicated. He is the compend of

time; he is also the correlative of nature. His power consists in

the multitude of his affinities, in the fact that his life is

intertwined with the whole chain of organic and inorganic being. In

old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north,

south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire,

making each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the

soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were,

highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under

the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of

roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer

to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the

fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle

in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world. Put

Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties find no men to act

on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he would beat the air

and appear stupid. Transport him to large countries, dense

population, complex interests, and antagonist power, and you shall

see that the man Napoleon, bounded, that is, by such a profile and

outline, is not the virtual Napoleon. This is but Talbot's shadow;

"His substance is not here:

For what you see is but the smallest part

And least proportion of humanity;

But were the whole frame here,

It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch,

Your roof were not sufficient to contain it."

_Henry VI._

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. Newton and

Laplace need myriads of ages and thick-strewn celestial areas. One

may say a gravitating solar system is already prophesied in the

nature of Newton's mind. Not less does the brain of Davy or of

Gay-Lussac, from childhood exploring the affinities and repulsions of

particles, anticipate the laws of organization. Does not the eye of

the human embryo predict the light? the ear of Handel predict the

witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do not the constructive fingers of

Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and

temperable texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and

wood? Do not the lovely attributes of the maiden child predict the

refinements and decorations of civil society? Here also we are

reminded of the action of man on man. A mind might ponder its

thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion

of love shall teach it in a day. Who knows himself before he has

been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an

eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in a national

exultation or alarm? No man can antedate his experience, or guess

what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock, any more than he

can draw to-day the face of a person whom he shall see to-morrow for

the first time.

I will not now go behind the general statement to explore the

reason of this correspondency. Let it suffice that in the light of

these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its

correlative, history is to be read and written.

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce its

treasures for each pupil. He, too, shall pass through the whole

cycle of experience. He shall collect into a focus the rays of

nature. History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk

incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by

languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You

shall make me feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the

Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the poets have described that

goddess, in a robe painted all over with wonderful events and

experiences; -- his own form and features by their exalted

intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I shall find in him the

Foreworld; in his childhood the Age of Gold; the Apples of Knowledge;

the Argonautic Expedition; the calling of Abraham; the building of

the Temple; the Advent of Christ; Dark Ages; the Revival of Letters;

the Reformation; the discovery of new lands; the opening of new

sciences, and new regions in man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and

bring with him into humble cottages the blessing of the morning stars

and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth.

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all

I have written, for what is the use of pretending to know what we

know not? But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot

strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold

our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the

lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log.

What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of

life? As old as the Caucasian man, -- perhaps older, -- these

creatures have kept their counsel beside him, and there is no record

of any word or sign that has passed from one to the other. What

connection do the books show between the fifty or sixty chemical

elements, and the historical eras? Nay, what does history yet record

of the metaphysical annals of man? What light does it shed on those

mysteries which we hide under the names Death and Immortality? Yet

every history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range

of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I am ashamed to

see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many

times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does

Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to

these neighbouring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or

succour have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in

his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, -- from an ethical

reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative

conscience, -- if we would trulier express our central and

wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness

and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day

exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science

and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian,

the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by

which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

"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.

Society 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 sensation.

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 tastes 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.

The wings of Time are black and white,

Pied with morning and with night.

Mountain tall and ocean deep

Trembling balance duly keep.

In changing moon, in tidal wave,

Glows the feud of Want and Have.

Gauge of more and less through space

Electric star and pencil plays.

The lonely Earth amid the balls

That hurry through the eternal halls,

A makeweight flying to the void,

Supplemental asteroid,

Or compensatory spark,

Shoots across the neutral Dark.

Man's the elm, and Wealth the vine;

Stanch and strong the tendrils twine:

Though the frail ringlets thee deceive,

None from its stock that vine can reave.

Fear not, then, thou child infirm,

There's no god dare wrong a worm.

Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,

And power to him who power exerts;

Hast not thy share? On winged feet,

Lo! it rushes thee to meet;

And all that Nature made thy own,

Floating in air or pent in stone,

Will rive the hills and swim the sea,

And, like thy shadow, follow thee.

Ever since I was a boy, I have wished to write a discourse on

Compensation: for it seemed to me when very young, that on this

subject life was ahead of theology, and the people knew more than the

preachers taught. The documents, too, from which the doctrine is to

be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always

before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the

bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm, and

the dwelling-house, greetings, relations, debts and credits, the

influence of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It

seemed to me, also, that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity,

the present action of the soul of this world, clean from all vestige

of tradition, and so the heart of man might be bathed by an

inundation of eternal love, conversing with that which he knows was

always and always must be, because it really is now. It appeared,

moreover, that if this doctrine could be stated in terms with any

resemblance to those bright intuitions in which this truth is

sometimes revealed to us, it would be a star in many dark hours and

crooked passages in our journey that would not suffer us to lose our

way.

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at

church. The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in

the ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed,

that judgment is not executed in this world; that the wicked are

successful; that the good are miserable; and then urged from reason

and from Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties in the

next life. No offence appeared to be taken by the congregation at

this doctrine. As far as I could observe, when the meeting broke up,

they separated without remark on the sermon.

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the

preacher mean by saying that the good are miserable in the present

life? Was it that houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress,

luxury, are had by unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and

despised; and that a compensation is to be made to these last

hereafter, by giving them the like gratifications another day, --

bank-stock and doubloons, venison and champagne? This must be the

compensation intended; for what else? Is it that they are to have

leave to pray and praise? to love and serve men? Why, that they can

do now. The legitimate inference the disciple would draw was, -- `We

are to have _such_ a good time as the sinners have now'; -- or, to

push it to its extreme import, -- `You sin now; we shall sin by and

by; we would sin now, if we could; not being successful, we expect

our revenge to-morrow.'

The fallacy lay in the immense concession, that the bad are

successful; that justice is not done now. The blindness of the

preacher consisted in deferring to the base estimate of the market of

what constitutes a manly success, instead of confronting and

convicting the world from the truth; announcing the presence of the

soul; the omnipotence of the will: and so establishing the standard

of good and ill, of success and falsehood.

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of

the day, and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men when

occasionally they treat the related topics. I think that our popular

theology has gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the

superstitions it has displaced. But men are better than this

theology. Their daily life gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and

aspiring soul leaves the doctrine behind him in his own experience;

and all men feel sometimes the falsehood which they cannot

demonstrate. For men are wiser than they know. That which they hear

in schools and pulpits without after-thought, if said in

conversation, would probably be questioned in silence. If a man

dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, he is

answered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer the

dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own

statement.

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record

some facts that indicate the path of the law of Compensation; happy

beyond my expectation, if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this

circle.

POLARITY, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of

nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow

of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of

plants and animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the

fluids of the animal body; in the systole and diastole of the heart;

in the undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and

centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical

affinity. Superinduce magnetism at one end of a needle; the opposite

magnetism takes place at the other end. If the south attracts, the

north repels. To empty here, you must condense there. An inevitable

dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests

another thing to make it whole; as, spirit, matter; man, woman; odd,

even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest;

yea, nay.

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts.

The entire system of things gets represented in every particle.

There is somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and

night, man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of

corn, in each individual of every animal tribe. The reaction, so

grand in the elements, is repeated within these small boundaries.

For example, in the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed that

no creatures are favorites, but a certain compensation balances every

gift and every defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of

a reduction from another part of the same creature. If the head and

neck are enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut short.

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we

gain in power is lost in time; and the converse. The periodic or

compensating errors of the planets is another instance. The

influences of climate and soil in political history are another. The

cold climate invigorates. The barren soil does not breed fevers,

crocodiles, tigers, or scorpions.

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man.

Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet

hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a

receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to

answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit

there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have

gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose

something. If riches increase, they are increased that use them. If

the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she

puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature

hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more

speedily seek a level from their loftiest tossing, than the varieties

of condition tend to equalize themselves. There is always some

levelling circumstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong,

the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all

others. Is a man too strong and fierce for society, and by temper

and position a bad citizen, -- a morose ruffian, with a dash of the

pirate in him;---- nature sends him a troop of pretty sons and

daughters, who are getting along in the dame's classes at the village

school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to

courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar,

takes the boar out and puts the lamb in, and keeps her balance true.

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the

President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost

him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve

for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is

content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind

the throne. Or, do men desire the more substantial and permanent

grandeur of genius? Neither has this an immunity. He who by force

of will or of thought is great, and overlooks thousands, has the

charges of that eminence. With every influx of light comes new

danger. Has he light? he must bear witness to the light, and always

outrun that sympathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by his

fidelity to new revelations of the incessant soul. He must hate

father and mother, wife and child. Has he all that the world loves

and admires and covets? -- he must cast behind him their admiration,

and afflict them by faithfulness to his truth, and become a byword

and a hissing.

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain

to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be

mismanaged long. _Res nolunt diu male administrari_. Though no

checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If

the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax

too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal

code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law is too mild,

private vengeance comes in. If the government is a terrific

democracy, the pressure is resisted by an overcharge of energy in the

citizen, and life glows with a fiercer flame. The true life and

satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost rigors or felicities of

condition, and to establish themselves with great indifferency under

all varieties of circumstances. Under all governments the influen