Essays — First Series
can fix his sense of duty, braving such penalties, whenever it may
please the next newspaper and a sufficient number of his neighbors to
pronounce his opinions incendiary.
It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most susceptible heart
to see how quick a bound Nature has set to the utmost infliction of
malice. We rapidly approach a brink over which no enemy can follow us:—
“Let them rave:
Thou art quiet in thy grave.”
In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we are
deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy those who have seen safely
to an end their manful endeavor? Who that sees the meanness of our
politics but inly congratulates Washington that he is long already
wrapped in his shroud, and for ever safe; that he was laid sweet in his
grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him? Who does not
sometimes envy the good and brave who are no more to suffer from the
tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the
speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the
love that will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made
death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal but a native of the
deeps of absolute and inextinguishable being.
IX.
THE OVER-SOUL
“But souls that of his own good life partake,
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They are to Him: He’ll never them forsake:
When they shall die, then God himself shall die:
They live, they live in blest eternity.”
_Henry More_.
Space is ample, east and west,
But two cannot go abreast,
Cannot travel in it two:
Yonder masterful cuckoo
Crowds every egg out of the nest,
Quick or dead, except its own;
A spell is laid on sod and stone,
Night and Day ’ve been tampered with,
Every quality and pith
Surcharged and sultry with a power
That works its will on age and hour.
THE OVER-SOUL
There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their
authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice
is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which
constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other
experiences. For this reason the argument which is always forthcoming
to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely the
appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past
to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope. We grant
that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean? What
is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What
is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by
which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the
natural history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving
behind what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and books of
metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of six thousand years has not
searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments
there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could
not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is
descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator
has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next
moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin
for events than the will I call mine.
As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing
river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams
into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised
spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put
myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the
visions come.
The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the
only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we
rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity,
that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained
and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere
conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission;
that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and
constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his
character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass
into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and
beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the
universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related;
the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose
beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and
perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the
seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the
world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but
the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by
the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by
falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of
prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith. Every
man’s words who speaks from that life must sound vain to those who do
not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for
it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold.
Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be
lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I
desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the
heaven of this deity and to report what hints I have collected of the
transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.
If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse,
in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams,
wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade,—the droll disguises only
magnifying and enhancing a real element and forcing it on our distinct
notice,—we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into
knowledge of the secret of nature. All goes to show that the soul in
man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not
a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison,
but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not
the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the
will; is the background of our being, in which they lie,—an immensity
not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind,
a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are
nothing, but the light is all. A man is the facade of a temple wherein
all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating,
drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent
himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the
soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action,
would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it
is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it
flows through his affection, it is love. And the blindness of the
intellect begins when it would be something of itself. The weakness of
the will begins when the individual would be something of himself. All
reform aims in some one particular to let the soul have its way through
us; in other words, to engage us to obey.
Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language cannot
paint it with his colors. It is too subtile. It is undefinable,
unmeasurable; but we know that it pervades and contains us. We know
that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, “God comes
to see us without bell;” that is, as there is no screen or ceiling
between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall
in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins.
The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of
spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know,
Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they
tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to
wound them.
The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made known by its
independency of those limitations which circumscribe us on every hand.
The soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts all
experience. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence
of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that degree that
the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable;
and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of
insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of
the soul. The spirit sports with time,—
“Can crowd eternity into an hour,
Or stretch an hour to eternity.”
We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age than that
which is measured from the year of our natural birth. Some thoughts
always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the
universal and eternal beauty. Every man parts from that contemplation
with the feeling that it rather belongs to ages than to mortal life.
The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in a degree
from the conditions of time. In sickness, in languor, give us a strain
of poetry or a profound sentence, and we are refreshed; or produce a
volume of Plato or Shakspeare, or remind us of their names, and
instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. See how the deep divine
thought reduces centuries and millenniums and makes itself present
through all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less effective now than it
was when first his mouth was opened? The emphasis of facts and persons
in my thought has nothing to do with time. And so always the soul’s
scale is one, the scale of the senses and the understanding is another.
Before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space and Nature shrink away.
In common speech we refer all things to time, as we habitually refer
the immensely sundered stars to one concave sphere. And so we say that
the Judgment is distant or near, that the Millennium approaches, that a
day of certain political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the
like, when we mean that in the nature of things one of the facts we
contemplate is external and fugitive, and the other is permanent and
connate with the soul. The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by
one, detach themselves like ripe fruit from our experience, and fall.
The wind shall blow them none knows whither. The landscape, the
figures, Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past,
or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the world.
The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world before her,
leaving worlds behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons,
nor specialties nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of
events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.
After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its progress to
be computed. The soul’s advances are not made by gradation, such as can
be represented by motion in a straight line, but rather by ascension of
state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis,—from the egg to the
worm, from the worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a certain
_total_ character, that does not advance the elect individual first
over John, then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of
discovered inferiority,—but by every throe of growth the man expands
there where he works, passing, at each pulsation, classes, populations,