Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The drover, the sailor, buffets it all day, and his health renews
itself at as vigorous a pulse under the sleet as under the sun of
June.
In the occurrence of unpleasant things among neighbors, fear comes
readily to heart and magnifies the consequence of the other party; but
it is a bad counsellor. Every man is actually weak and apparently
strong. To himself he seems weak; to others formidable. You are afraid
of Grim; but Grim also is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the
good will of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill will. But the
sturdiest offender of your peace and of the neighborhood, if you rip
up _his_ claims, is as thin and timid as any; and the peace of society
is often kept, because, as children say, one is afraid and the other
dares not. Far off, men swell, bully and threaten: bring them hand to
hand, and they are a feeble folk.
It is a proverb that "courtesy costs nothing"; but calculation might
come to value love for its profit. Love is fabled to be blind, but
kindness is necessary to perception; love is not a hood, but an
eye-water. If you meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never
recognize the dividing lines, but meet on what common ground
remains,--if only that the sun shines and the rain rains for
both,--the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it, the
boundary mountains on which the eye had fastened have melted into air.
If he set out to contend,[686] almost St. Paul will lie, almost St.
John will hate. What low, poor, paltry, hypocritical people an
argument on religion will make of the pure and chosen souls. Shuffle
they will and crow, crook and hide, feign to confess here, only that
they may brag and conquer there, and not a thought has enriched either
party, and not an emotion of bravery, modesty, or hope. So neither
should you put yourself in a false position to your contemporaries by
indulging a vein of hostility and bitterness. Though your views are in
straight antagonism[687] to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment,
assume that you are saying precisely that which all think, and in the
flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not
the infirmity of a doubt. So at least shall you get an adequate
deliverance. The natural emotions of the soul are so much better than
the voluntary ones that you will never do yourself justice in dispute.
The thought is not then taken hold of by the right handle, does not
show itself proportioned and in its true bearings, but bears extorted,
hoarse, and half witness. But assume a consent and it shall presently
be granted, since really and underneath their all external
diversities, all men are of one heart and mind.
Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an unfriendly
footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited
for some better sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence and when?
To-morrow will be like to-day. Life wastes itself whilst we are
preparing to live. Our friends and fellow-workers die off from us.
Scarcely can we say we see new men, new women, approaching us. We are
too old to regard fashion, too old to expect patronage of any greater
or more powerful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and
consuetudes[688] that grow near us. These old shoes are easy to the
feet. Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults in our company, can easily
whisper names prouder and that tickle the fancy more. Every man's
imagination hath its friends; and pleasant would life be with such
companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms, you
cannot have them. If not the Deity but our ambition hews and shapes
the new relations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their
flavor in garden beds.
Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility, and all the virtues
range themselves on the side of prudence, or the art of securing a
present well-being. I do not know if all matter will be found to be
made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world of
manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and begin where we
will[689] we are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten
commandments.
CIRCLES.[690]
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second;
and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It
is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine[691]
described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere
and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the
copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already
deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every
human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action
admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth
that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in
nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another
dawn risen on mid-noon,[692] and under every deep a lower deep opens.
This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable,
the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at
once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently
serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every
department.
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.
Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a
transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and
holds its fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which
draws after it all this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise
into another idea; they will disappear. The Greek sculpture[693] is
all melted away, as if it had been statues of ice: here and there a
solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of
snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts in June and July. For the
genius that created it creates now somewhat else. The Greek
letters[694] last a little longer, but are already passing under the
same sentence and tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation
of new thought opens for all that is old. The new continents are built
out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the
decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old.[695] See the
investment of capital in aqueducts, made useless by hydraulics;
fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by
steam; steam, by electricity.
You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many
ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which
builds is better than that which is built. The hand that built can
topple it down much faster. Better than the hand and nimbler was the
invisible thought which wrought through it; and thus ever, behind the
coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself
the effect of a finer cause. Everything looks permanent until its
secret is known. A rich estate appears to women and children a firm
and lasting fact; to a merchant, one easily created out of any
materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, good grounds,
seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a
large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop. Nature
looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the
rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so
immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable?
Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons are no
more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look,
he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his
facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea
which commands his own. The life of man is a self-evolving circle,[696]
which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to
new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this
generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the
force or truth of the individual soul. For it is the inert effort of
each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance,
as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious
rite, to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify and hem in the life.
But if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that boundary on all
sides and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up
into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart
refuses to be imprisoned;[697] in its first and narrowest pulses it
already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable
expansions.
Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general
law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to
disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no
circumference to us. The man finishes his story,--how good! how final!
how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo, on the
other side rises also a man and draws a circle around the circle we
had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our
first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is
forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do by
themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be
escaped will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that
seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a
bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to
upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the
nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet
depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a
suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next
age.
Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder; the steps are actions,
the new prospect is power. Every several result is threatened and
judged by that which follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by
the new; it is only limited by the new. The new statement is always
hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an
abyss of scepticism. But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye
and it are effects of one cause; then its innocency and benefit
appear, and presently, all its energy spent, it pales and dwindles
before the revelation of the new hour.
Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass[698] and
material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not;
it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just as much.
There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man
supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth
in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can
be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was
never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That
is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.
Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts
and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the
same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write,
whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but
yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see
so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was
that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this
will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature;
I am a weed by the wall.
The continual effort to raise himself above himself,[699] to work a
pitch above his last height, betrays itself in a man's relations. We