Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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![229] 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,--anything 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.[230] 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,[231] in Fletcher's
Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate,
replies,--
"His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
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,[232] "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."[233] 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,[234] a Lavoisier,[235] a Hutton,[236] a Betham,[237] a
Fourier,[238] 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,[239] Quakerism,[240] Swedenborgism.[241] The pupil takes the
same delight in subordinating everything 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 Traveling,
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 traveler; 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,[242] travels away from himself, and
grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes,[243] in
Palmyra,[244] his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as
they. He carries ruins to ruins.
Traveling 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.[245] I seek the Vatican,[246] 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 traveling 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 traveling 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[247] or the
Gothic[248] 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.[249] 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
Shakespeare?[250] Where is the master who could have instructed
Franklin,[251] or Washington, or Bacon,[252] or Newton?[253] Every great
man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio[254] is precisely that part he
could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of
Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned to 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,[255] or
trowel of the Egyptians,[256] or the pen of Moses,[257] or Dante,[258]
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[259] 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 everything 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,[260] 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 traveler tell us truly, strike the
savage with a broad ax, 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[261] watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the
hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac[262] 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[263] 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 notebooks 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 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[264] heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in
time is the race progressive. Phocion,[265] Socrates, Anaxagoras,[266]
Diogenes,[267] 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