Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
thirst for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of
nature is love; yet if I have a friend I am tormented by my
imperfections. The love of me accuses the other party. If he were high
enough[700] to slight me, then could I love him, and rise by my
affection to new heights. A man's growth is seen in the successive
choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he
gains a better. I thought as I walked in the woods and mused on any
friends, why should I play with them this game of idolatry? I know and
see too well, when not voluntarily blind, the speedy limits of persons
called high and worthy. Rich, noble and great they are by the
liberality of our speech, but truth is sad. O blessed Spirit, whom I
forsake for these, they are not thee! Every personal consideration
that we allow costs us heavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels
for a short and turbulent pleasure.
How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to interest us when we
find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you
once come up with a man's limitations, it is all over with him. Has
he talents? has he enterprises? has he knowledge? It boots not.
Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great
hope, a sea to swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a
pond, and you care not if you never see it again.
Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly
discordant facts, as expressions of one law. Aristotle and Plato[701]
are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see
that Aristotle platonizes. By going one step farther back in thought,
discordant opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of
one principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still
higher vision.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then
all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out
in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.
There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow;
there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names
of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man,
the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and
morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization.
Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind.
Hence the thrill that attends it.
Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot
have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you
will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past
apprehension of truth, and his alert acceptance of it from whatever
quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to
society, his Christianity, his world, may at any time be superseded
and decease.
There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it
academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday
of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and
fragments. Then, its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see
that it must be true. It now shows itself ethical and practical. We
learn that God is; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows
of him. The idealism of Berkeley[702] is only a crude statement of the
idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact
that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and
organizing itself. Much more obviously is history and the state of the
world at any one time directly dependent on the intellectual
classification then existing in the minds of men. The things which are
dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have
emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of
things, as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would
instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.
Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the
_termini_[703] which bound the common of silence on every side. The
parties are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even
express under this Pentecost.[704] To-morrow they will have receded
from this high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping
under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst
it glows on our walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light,
emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker to oppress us
with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields
us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men.
O, what truths profound and executable only in ages and orbs, are
supposed in the announcement of every truth! In common hours, society
sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty,--knowing,
possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are
not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god and
converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns
up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very
furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is
manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of
yesterday,--property, climate, breeding, personal beauty and the like,
have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned settled
shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions,
leave their foundations and dance before our eyes. And yet here again
see the swift circumscription! Good as is discourse, silence is
better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the
distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were
at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary
thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.
Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal[705] circle through
which a new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford
us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a
purchase by which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient
learning, install ourselves the best we can in Greek, in Punic,[706]
in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier see French, English and
American houses and modes of living. In like manner[707] we see
literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of
affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from
within the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth's
orbit as a base to find the parallax of any star.
Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is
not in the encyclopædia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body
of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline
to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the
power of change and reform. But some Petrarch[708] or Ariosto,[709]
filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a
brisk romance, full of daring thought and action. He smites and
arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits,
and I open my eye on my own possibilities. He claps wings to the sides
of all the solid old lumber of the world, and I am capable once more
of choosing a straight path in theory and practice.
We have the same need to command a view of the religion of the world.
We can never see Christianity from the catechism:--from the pastures,
from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we
possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the
sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may chance to
cast a right glance back upon biography. Christianity is rightly dear
to the best of mankind; yet was there never a young philosopher whose
breeding had fallen into the Christian church by whom that brave text
of Paul's was not specially prized, "Then shall also the Son be
subject unto Him who put all things under him, that God may be all in
all."[710] Let the claims and virtues of persons be never so great and
welcome, the instinct of man presses eagerly onward to the impersonal
and illimitable, and gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of
bigots with this generous word out of the book itself.
The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric
circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations
which apprize us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed,
but sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities,[711] this chemistry
and vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to stand there
for their own sake, are means and methods only, are words of God, and
as fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned his
craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective
affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is
only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to
like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need
not be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate
also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not through subtle
subterranean channels need friend and fact be drawn to their
counterpart, but, rightly considered, these things proceed from the
eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one
fact.
The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the
virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man
will not be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so
much deduction from his grandeur. But it behooves each to see, when he
sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and
pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can
well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead.
Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may
be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril.
In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to
me that with every precaution you take against such an evil you put
yourself into the power of the evil. I suppose that the highest
prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a rushing from
the centre to the verge of our orbit? Think how many times we shall
fall back into pitiful calculations before we take up our rest in the
great sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides,
your bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and
the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as
well as you. "Blessed be nothing" and "The worse things are, the
better they are" are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of
common life.
One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's
ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly; as one beholds the same
objects from a higher point of view. One man thinks justice consists
in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who
is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But
that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself
which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the
poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius
to nature? For you, O broker, there is no other principle but
arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth
of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I
detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my
forces mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you
shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will
liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a
man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be