Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
injustice? Owes he no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be
postponed to a landlord's or a banker's?
There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of
society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery
that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed
such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,
Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.[712]
It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our
contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by
day; but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost
time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what
remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a
sort of omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing of duration,
but sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to
be done, without time.
And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have
arrived at a fine pyrrhonism,[713] at an equivalence and indifferency
of all actions, and would fain teach us that _if we are true_,
forsooth, our crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall
construct the temple of the true God.
I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened[714] by
seeing the predominance of the saccharine principle throughout
vegetable nature, and not less by beholding in morals that
unrestrained inundation of the principle of good into every chink and
hole that selfishness has left open, yea into selfishness and sin
itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself without its extreme
satisfactions. But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head
and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an
experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least
discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as
true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none
are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my
back.
Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake
could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of
fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of
circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central life is
somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and
contains all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life and
thought as large and excellent as itself; but in vain; for that which
is made instructs how to make a better.
Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things
renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into
the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only
disease: all others run into this one. We call it by many
names,--fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime: they are
all forms of old age: they are rest, conservatism, appropriation,
inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see
no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not
grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with
religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons
itself to the instruction flowing from all sides. But the man and
woman of seventy assume to know all; throw up their hope; renounce
aspiration; accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the
young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be
lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their
wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power. This
old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is
new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is
sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.
No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher
love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light
of new thoughts. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are
unsettled is there any hope for them.
Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the
pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being.
Of lower states,--of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat,
but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements
of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth
is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess,
for _so to be_ is the sole inlet of _so to know_. The new position of
the advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new.
It carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is itself an
exhalation of the morning. I cast away in this new moment all my once
hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now for the first time seem I
to know any thing rightly. The simplest words,--we do not know what
they mean except when we love and aspire.
The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the
old and trodden round, and power and courage to make a new road to new
and better goals. Character makes an overpowering present, a cheerful,
determined hour, which fortifies all the company by making them see
that much is possible and excellent that was not thought of. Character
dulls the impression of particular events. When we see the conqueror
we do not think much of any one battle or success. We see that we had
exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him. The great man is not
convulsible or tormentable. He is so much that events pass over him
without much impression. People say sometimes, "See what I have
overcome; see how cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed
over these black events." Not if they still remind me of the black
event,--they have not yet conquered. Is it conquest to be a gay and
decorated sepulchre, or a half-crazed widow, hysterically laughing?
True conquest is the causing the black event to fade and disappear as
an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and
advancing.
The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget
ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our
sempiternal[715] memory and to do something without knowing how or
why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved
without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful. It is by
abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities of
performance through the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and
religion. "A man," said Oliver Cromwell,[716] "never rises so high as
when he knows not whither he is going." Dreams and drunkenness, the
use of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this
oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For the
like reason they ask the aid of wild passions, as in the gaming and
war, ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the heart.
NOTES
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
[Footnote 1: Games of strength. The public games of Greece were
athletic and intellectual contests of various kinds. There were four
of importance: the Olympic, held every four years; the Pythian, held
every third Olympic year; and the Nemean and Isthmian, held alternate
years between the Olympic periods. These great national festivals
exercised a strong influence in Greece. They were a secure bond of
union between the numerous independent states and did much to help the
nation to repel its foreign invaders. In Greece the accomplished
athlete was reverenced almost as a god, and cases have been recorded
where altars were erected and sacrifices made in his honor. The
extreme care and cultivation of the body induced by this national
spirit is one of the most significant features of Greek culture, and
one which might wisely be imitated in the modern world.]
[Footnote 2: Troubadours. In southern France during the eleventh
century, wandering poets went from castle to castle reciting or
singing love-songs, composed in the old Provençal dialect, a sort of
vulgarized Latin. The life in the great feudal chateaux was so dull
that the lords and ladies seized with avidity any amusement which
promised to while away an idle hour. The troubadours were made much of
and became a strong element in the development of the Southern spirit.
So-called Courts of Love were formed where questions of an amorous
nature were discussed in all their bearings; learned opinions were
expressed on the most trivial matters, and offenses were tried.
Some of the Provençal poetry is of the highest artistic significance,
though the mass of it is worthless high-flown trash.]
[Footnote 3: At the time this oration was delivered (1837), many of
the authors who have since given America a place in the world's
literature were young men writing their first books. "We were," says
James Russell Lowell, "still socially and intellectually moored to
English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at
the dangers and glories of blue water."]
[Footnote 4: Pole-star. Polaris is now the nearest conspicuous star to
the north pole of the celestial equator. Owing to the motion of the
pole of the celestial equator around that of the ecliptic, this star
will in course of time recede from its proud position, and the
brilliant star Vega in the constellation Harp will become the
pole-star.]
[Footnote 5: It is now a well-recognized fact in the development of
animal life that as any part of the body falls into disuse it in time
disappears. Good examples of this are the disappearance of powerful
fangs from the mouth of man, the loss of power in the wings of
barnyard fowls; and, _vice versa_, as new uses for a member arise, its
structure changes to meet the new needs. An example of this is the
transformation from the hoof of a horse through the cloven hoofs of
the cow to the eventual development of highly expert fingers in the
monkey and man. Emerson assumed the doctrine of evolution to be
sufficiently established by the anatomical evidence of gradual
development. In his own words: "Man is no up-start in the creation.
His limbs are only a more exquisite organization--say rather the
finish--of the rudimental forms that have been already sweeping the
sea and creeping in the mud. The brother of his hand is even now
cleaving the arctic sea in the fin of the whale, and innumerable ages
since was pawing the marsh in the flipper of the saurian." A view
afterwards condensed into his memorable couplet:
"Striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form."
]
[Footnote 6: Stint. A prescribed or allotted task, a share of labor.]
[Footnote 7: Ridden. Here used in the sense of dominated.]
[Footnote 8: Monitory pictures. Instructive warning pictures.]
[Footnote 9: The Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus is the author of
this saying, not "the old oracle." It occurs in the Encheiridion, or
manual, a work put together by a pupil of Epictetus. The original
saying of Epictetus is as follows: "Every thing has two handles, the
one by which it may be borne, the other by which it may not. If your
brother acts unjustly, do not lay hold of the act by that handle
wherein he acts unjustly, for this is the handle which cannot be
borne: but lay hold of the other, that he is your brother, that he was
nurtured with you, and you will lay hold of the thing by that handle
by which it can be borne."]
[Footnote 10: Every day, the sun (shines).]
[Footnote 11: Beholden. Emerson here uses this past participle with
its original meaning instead of in its present sense of "indebted."]
[Footnote 12: Here we have a reminder of Emerson's pantheism. He means