Essays, First Series

R >> Ralph Waldo Emerson >> Essays, First Series

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What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the
face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes! That
divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because
our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to
our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their
eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces we
are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to
it; so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the
adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and
puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm,
and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put
by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no
force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next
room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he
knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then,
he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would
disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate
one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in
the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse; independent,
irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people
and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their
merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad,
interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself
never about consequences, about interests; he gives an
independent, genuine verdict. You must court him; he does
not court you. But the man is as it were clapped into jail
by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken
with eclat he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy
or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter
into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he
could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all
pledges and, having observed, observe again from the same
unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence,--
must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all
passing affairs, which being seen to be not private but
necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men and
put them in fear.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they
grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society
everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one
of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the
members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each
shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.
The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its
aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and
customs.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would
gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of
goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at
last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you
to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I
remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to
make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the
dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, "What have I
to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from
within?" my friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from
below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to
be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from
the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.
Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or
this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only
wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the
presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and
ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate
to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me
more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak
the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat
of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this
bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news
from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, 'Go love thy infant;
love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that
grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with
this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off.
Thy love afar is spite at home.' Rough and graceless would be
such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of
love. Your goodness must have some edge to it,--else it is none.
The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction
of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. I shun
father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls
me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, *Whim*. I
hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot
spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why
I seek or why I exclude company. Then again, do not tell me,
as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men
in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee thou foolish
philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I
give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not
belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual
affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison
if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the
education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses
to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the
thousand-fold Relief Societies;--though I confess with shame I
sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar
which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception
than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do
what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or
charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of
daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an
apology or extenuation of their living in the world,--as
invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are
penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is
for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it
should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than
that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be
sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask
primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal
from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes
no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which
are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege
where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be,
I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the
assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people
think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual
life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness
and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find
those who think they know what is your duty better than you
know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's
opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but
the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with
perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead
to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and
blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead
church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great
party either for the government or against it, spread your
table like base housekeepers,--under all these screens I have
difficulty to detect the precise man you are: and of course
so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your
work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce
yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this
game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your
argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the
expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not
know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous
word? Do I not know that with all this ostentation of examining
the grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? Do I
not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one
side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister?
He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the
emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with
one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some
one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes
them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies,
but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite
true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real
four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not
where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow
to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we
adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire
by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying
experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself
also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise,"
the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel
at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us.
The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved by a low
usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face
with the most disagreeable sensation.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.
And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face.
The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or
in the friend's parlor. If this aversation had its origin
in contempt and resistance like his own he might well go home
with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude,
like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on
and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the
discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the
senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who
knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes.
Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid, as
being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine
rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant
and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force
that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow,
it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it
godlike as a trifle of no concernment.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our
consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because
the eyes of others have no other data for computing our
orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint
them.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why
drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict
somewhat you have stated in this or that public place?
Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems
to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone,
scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past
for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever
in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality
to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come,
yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God
with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat
in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.
Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak
what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it
contradict every thing you said to-day.--'Ah, so you shall
be sure to be misunderstood.'--Is it so bad then to be
misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates,
and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and
Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.
To be great is to be misunderstood.

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies
of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the
inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the
curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and
try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian
stanza;--read it forward, backward, or across, it still
spells the same thing. In this pleasing contrite wood-life
which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest
thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt,
it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see
it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the
hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave
that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also.
We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills.
Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only
by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a
breath every moment.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions,
so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of
one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike
they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little
distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency
unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag
line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient
distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain
your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.
Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify
you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm
enough to-day to do right and scorn eyes, I must have done
so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will,
do right now. Always scorn appearances and you always may.
The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days
of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty
of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the
imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and
victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing
actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That
is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity
into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor
is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is always
ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of
to-day. We love it and pay it homage because it is not a
trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-
derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even
if shown in a young person.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity
and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous
henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear
a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and
apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house.
I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to
please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I
would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront
and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment
of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and
office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that
there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working
wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other
time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is,
there is nature. He measures you and all men and all events.
Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat
else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds
you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation.
The man must be so much that he must make all circumstances
indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an
age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to
accomplish his design;--and posterity seem to follow his
steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for
ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and
millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that
he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An
institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as,
Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther;
Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson.
Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome"; and all history
Resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout
and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his
feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with
the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper in
the world which exists for him. But the man in the street,
finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force
which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor
when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a
costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a
gay equipage, and seem to say like that, 'Who are you, Sir?'
Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners
to his faculties that they will come out and take possession.
The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me,
but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable
of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street,
carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in
the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious
ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane,
owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well
the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now
and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a
true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history our
imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power
and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and
Edward in a small house and common day's work; but the things
of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the
same. Why all this deference to Alfred and Scanderbeg and
Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out
virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act to-day,
as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men
shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred
from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so
magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this
colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man
to man. The joyful loyalty with which men have everywhere
suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to
walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale of
men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not
with money but with honor, and represent the law in his
person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely
signified their consciousness of their own right and
comeliness, the right of every man.

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained
when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee?
What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance
may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-
baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements,
which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure
actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry
leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of
virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.
We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later
teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact
behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common
origin. For the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we
know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from
space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and
proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and
being also proceed. We first share the life by which things
exist and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and
forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain
of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration
which giveth man wisdom and which cannot be denied without
impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence,
which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity.
When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of
ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence
this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all
philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we
can affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts
of his mind and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to
his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err
in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are
so, like day and night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions
and acquisitions are but roving;--the idlest reverie, the
faintest native emotion, command my curiosity and respect.
Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statement of
perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily; for
they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They
fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception
is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children
will see it after me, and in course of time all mankind,--
although it may chance that no one has seen it before me.
For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure
that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be
that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing,
but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should
scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of
the present thought; and new date and new create the whole.
Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old
things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it
lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour.
All things are made sacred by relation to it,--one as much
as another. All things are dissolved to their centre by their
cause, and in the universal miracle petty and particular
miracles disappear. If therefore a man claims to know and
speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of
some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world,
believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its
fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child
into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this
worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against
the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but
physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is
light: where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history
is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than
a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he
dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or
sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing
rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former
roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they
exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is
simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its
existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts;
in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless
root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it
satisfies nature in all moments alike. But man postpones or
remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted
eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround
him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy
and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above
time.

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects
dare not yet hear God himself unless he speak the phraseology
of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not
always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives.
We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of
grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of
talents and character they chance to see,--painfully recollecting
the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the
point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they
understand them and are willing to let the words go; for at any
time they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live
truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to
be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new
perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded
treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice
shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of
the corn.

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