Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of
action. Life is our dictionary.[52] Years are well spent in country
labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank
intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one
end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate
and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how
much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his
speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and
copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn
grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and
the work-yard made.
But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than
books, is that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in
nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath;
in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night;
in heat and cold; and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and
every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity,--these "fits of
easy transmission and reflection," as Newton[53] called them, are the
law of nature because they are the law of spirit.
The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit reproduces the other. When
the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer
paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended and books are a
weariness,--he has always the resource _to live_. Character is higher
than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.
The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to
live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to
impart his truth? He can still fall back on this elemental force of
living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the
grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection
cheer his lowly roof. Those "far from fame," who dwell and act with
him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and
passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and
designed display. Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour
which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his
instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is
gained in strength. Not out of those on whom systems of education have
exhausted their culture comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or
to build the new, but out of unhandselled[54] savage nature; out of
terrible Druids[55] and Berserkers[56] come at last Alfred[57] and
Shakespeare. I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be
said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is
virtue yet in the hoe and the spade,[58] for learned as well as for
unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are
invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall
not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the
popular judgments and modes of action.
* * * * *
I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books,
and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.
They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in
self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to
guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow,
unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed[59] and
Herschel,[60] in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars
with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and
useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing
obscure and nebulous[61] stars of the human mind, which as yet no man
has thought of as such,--watching days and months sometimes for a few
facts; correcting still his old records,--must relinquish display and
immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation he must betray
often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the
disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in
his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must
accept--how often!--poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of
treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the
religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of
course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty
and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way
of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual
hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to
educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to
find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature.
He is one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes
and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye.
He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that
retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic
sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of
history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in
all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of
actions,--these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new
verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men
and events of to-day,--this he shall hear and promulgate.
These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in
himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows
the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some
great decorum, some fetich[62] of a government, some ephemeral trade,
or war, or man, is cried up[63] by half mankind and cried down by the
other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds
are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the
scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his
belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable[64]
of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in
steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add
observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach,
and bide his own time,--happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone
that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every
right step. For the instinct is sure that prompts him to tell his
brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the
secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all
minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private
thoughts is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks,
and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in
utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording
them, is found to have recorded that which men in cities vast find
true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his
frank confessions, his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses,
until he finds that he is the complement[65] of his hearers;--that
they drink his words because he fulfills for them their own nature;
the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his
wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public and
universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every
man feels--This is my music; this is myself.
In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the
scholar be,--free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom,
"without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own
constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing which a scholar by his very
function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a
shame to him if his tranquility, amid dangerous times, arise from the
presumption that like children and women his is a protected class; or
if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from
politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the
flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a
boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still;
so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look
into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin,--see the
whelping of this lion,--which lies no great way back; he will then
find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he
will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth
defy it and pass on superior. The world is his who can see through its
pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown
error you behold is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See
it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.
Yes, we are the cowed,--we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion
that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long
time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so
it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To
ignorance and sin it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they
may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the
firmament flows before him and takes his signet[66] and form. Not he
is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.
They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present
thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men, by the cheerful
serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do
is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe,
and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great
thing. Wherever Macdonald[67] sits, there is the head of the table.
Linnæus[68] makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it
from the farmer and the herb-woman: Davy,[69] chemistry; and
Cuvier,[70] fossils. The day is always his who works in it with
serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him
whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic
follow the moon.[71]
For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed,--darker
than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my
audience in stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground
of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man
has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light
that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no
account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are
spawn, and are called "the mass" and "the herd." In a century, in a
millennium, one or two men;[72] that is to say, one or two
approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in
the hero or the poet their own green and crude being,--ripened; yes, and
are content to be less, so _that_ may attain to its full stature. What a
testimony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of
his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in
the glory of his chief! The poor and the low find some amends to their
immense moral capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social
inferiority.[73] They are content to be brushed like flies from the path
of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common
nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and
glorified. They sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to
be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod
selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of
blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and
conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.