Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
topic, but not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, _natura
naturans_, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven
snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and
multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus,[500] a
shepherd), and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in
creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation
on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate
results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is, a little
motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white, and deadly
cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes
pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of
boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the
secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures,
and exchange our Mosaic[501] and Ptolemaic schemes[502] for her large
style. We know nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn
what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed,
then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has
disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door
for the remote Flora,[503] Fauna,[504] Ceres,[505] and Pomona,[506] to
come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how
inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive,[507] and then race after
race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to
Plato,[508] and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all
must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.
7. Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second
secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be
written on the thumb-nail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling
bubble on the surface of a brook, admits us to the secret of the
mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A
little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the
simpler shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at
last at the most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature with all her
craft, that, from the beginning to the end of the universe, she has
but one stuff,--but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her
dream-like variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water,
tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties.
8. Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her
own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms
and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and,
at the same time, she arms and equips another animal to destroy it.
Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird
with a few feathers, she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction
is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials, and
begins again with the first elements on the most advanced stage:
otherwise, all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch
a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young of the world,
vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward toward
consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their
imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and
probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having
tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated:
the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt, when they come
to consciousness, they too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly
belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their
beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our day; now let the
children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors
with our ridiculous tenderness.
9. Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the
eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be
predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall
would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as
the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great
intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural
life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest
curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude
and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is
directly related, there amid essences and billets-doux, to Himalaya
mountain-chains[509] and the axis of the globe. If we consider how
much we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if
that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion
cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house. We may easily hear
too much of rural influences. The cool, disengaged air of natural
objects, makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures
with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they, if we camp
out and eat roots, but let us be men instead of wood-chucks, and the
oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of
ivory on carpets of silk.
10. This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts
of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in
his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought.
Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore
is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in
natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it
was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing
laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas,
crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its
own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment.
The common sense of Franklin,[510] Dalton,[511] Davy[512] and
Black,[513] is the same common sense which made the arrangements which
now it discovers.
11. If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs
also into organization. The astronomers said,[514] "Give us matter,
and a little motion, and we will construct the universe. It is not
enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse,
one shove to launch the mass, and generate the harmony of the
centrifugal and centripetal[515] forces. Once heave the ball from the
hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew." "A very
unreasonable postulate," said the metaphysicians, "and a plain begging
of the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of
projection, as well as the continuation of it?" Nature, meanwhile, had
not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the
impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push,
but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no
end of the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push
propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through
every atom of every ball, through all the races of creatures, and
through the history and performances of every individual. Exaggeration
is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the
world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the
planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every
creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper
path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight
generosity, a drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot,
and without this violence of direction which men and women have,
without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We
aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of
exaggeration in it. And when now and then comes along some sad,
sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to
play, but blabs the secret;--how then? is the bird flown? O no, the
wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths,
with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their
several aims; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in
which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl,
for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the
fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any
power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a
painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a ginger-bread dog,
individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every
new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this
day of continual petty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered
her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every
faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame,
by all these attitudes and exertions,--an end of the first importance,
which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This
glitter, this opaline luster plays round the top of every toy to his
eye, to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are
made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the Stoics[516] say
what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because
the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does
not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single
seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds,
that if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that
hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, at least,
one may replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated
profusion. The excess of fear with which the animal frame is hedged
round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or a sudden
noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from
some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private
felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in
his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the
race.
12. But the craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind
and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in
his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make
sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to
heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is
reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the
contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the
overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The
poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any
hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent
Luther[517] declares with an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that "God
himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen[518] and George
Fox[519] betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial
tracts, and James Naylor[520] once suffered himself to be worshiped as
the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his
thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may
discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them with the
people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A
similar experience is not infrequent in private life. Each young and
ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and
penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are, to
him, burning and fragrant: he reads them on his knees by midnight and by
the morning star; he wets them with his tears: they are sacred; too good
for the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is