Essays, First Series

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

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And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains
unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is
the far-off remembering of the intuition. That thought by
what I can now nearest approach to say it, is this. When
good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not
by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the
footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of man;
you shall not hear any name;--the way, the thought, the good
shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example
and experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All
persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear
and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even
in hope. In the hour of vision there is nothing that can
be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over
passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives
the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself
with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature,
the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; long intervals of time,
years, centuries, are of no account. This which I think and
feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances,
as it does underlie my present, and what is called life,
and what is called death.

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the
instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition
from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in
the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates; that
the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns
all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds
the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally
aside. Why then do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as
the soul is present there will be power not confident but
agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking.
Speak rather of that which relies because it works and is.
Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should
not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the
gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric when we speak
of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height,
and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to
principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all
cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this,
as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed
ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause,
and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which
it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so
much virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting,
whaling, war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and
engage my respect as examples of its presence and impure
action. I see the same law working in nature for conservation
and growth. Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right.
Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot
help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise
and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong
wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are
demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying
soul.

Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home
with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding
rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple
declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the
shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our
simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law
demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our
native riches.

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor
is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in
communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad
to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go
alone. I like the silent church before the service begins,
better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste
the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary!
So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our
friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around
our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have
my blood and I have all men's. Not for that will I adopt their
petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it.
But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that
is, must be elevation. At times the whole world seems to be in
conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend,
client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once
at thy closet door and say,--'Come out unto us.' But keep thy
state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to
annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near
me but through my act. "What we love that we have, but by
desire we bereave ourselves of the love."

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and
faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter
into the state of war and wake Thor and Woden, courage and
constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our
smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying
hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the
expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with
whom we converse. Say to them, 'O father, O mother, O wife,
O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances
hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto
you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal
law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall
endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, to
be the chaste husband of one wife,--but these relations I
must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from
your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any
longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am,
we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek
to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or
aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that
I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly
rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will
love you: if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by
hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same
truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own.
I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your
interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt
in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You
will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as
mine, and if we follow the truth it will bring us out safe at
last.'--But so may you give these friends pain. Yes, but I
cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility.
Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they
look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they
justify me and do the same thing.

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards
is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and
the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild
his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are
two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be
shriven. You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing
yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. Consider
whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother,
cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these
can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard
and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and
perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices
that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts it
enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one
imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment
one day.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast
off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust
himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his
will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine,
society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him
as strong as iron necessity is to others!

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called
by distinction society, he will see the need of these
ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out,
and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are
afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death and
afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect
persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and
our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent,
cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all
proportion to their practical force and do lean and beg day
and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our
arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have
not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor
soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength
is born.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they
lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is
ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges
and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards
in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to
his friends and to himself that he is right in being
disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy
lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the
professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school,
preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township,
and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls
on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks
abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a
profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives
already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a
Stoic open the resources of man and tell men they are not
leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with
the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man
is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations;
that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the
moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books,
idolatries and customs out of the window, we pity him no more
but thank and revere him;--and that teacher shall restore the
life of man to splendor and make his name dear to all history.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a
revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their
religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes
of living; their association; in their property; in their
speculative views.

1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they
call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer
looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come
through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless
mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and
miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity,
any thing less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the
contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point
of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant
soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good.
But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness
and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and
consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he
will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The
prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the
prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar,
are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap
ends. Caratach, in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to
inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies,--

"His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
Our valors are our best gods."

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent
is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.
Regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer;
if not, attend your own work and already the evil begins
to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to
them who weep foolishly and sit down and cry for company,
instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough
electric shocks, putting them once more in communication
with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our
hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping
man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues
greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our
love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not
need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and
celebrate him because he held on his way and scorned our
disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him.
"To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the blessed
Immortals are swift."

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their
creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with those
foolish Israelites, 'Let not God speak to us, lest we die.
Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.'
Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother,
because he has shut his own temple doors and recites
fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's
God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it prove a
mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a
Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification
on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to the
depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects
it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his
complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and
churches, which are also classifications of some powerful
mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man's
relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism,
Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in
subordinating every thing to the new terminology as a
girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth
and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time that
the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by
the study of his master's mind. But in all unbalanced
minds the classification is idolized, passes for the end
and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the
walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote
horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries
of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master
built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right
to see,--how you can see; 'It must be somehow that you
stole the light from us.' They do not yet perceive that
light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any
cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call
it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently
their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will
crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal
light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-
colored, will beam over the universe as on the first
morning.

2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition
of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt,
retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They
who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the
imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like
an axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty
is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays
at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any
occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands,
he is at home still and shall make men sensible by the
expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary
of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a
sovereign and not like an interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the
globe for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence,
so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad
with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He
who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does
not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in
youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and
mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries
ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover
to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at
Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose
my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on
the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me
is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that
I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to
be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not
intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper
unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The
intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters
restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced
to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the
travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign
taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments;
our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow
the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever
they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist
sought his model. It was an application of his own thought
to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed.
And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty,
convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint expression are
as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will
study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by
him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the
day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the
government, he will create a house in which all these will
find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be
satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can
present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole
life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another
you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which
each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man
yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited
it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare?
Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or
Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique.
The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not
borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of
Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot
hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for
you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal
chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen
of Moses or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly
will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven
tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what
these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the
same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two
organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions
of thy life, obey thy heart and thou shalt reproduce the
Foreworld again.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so
does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the
improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as
it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it
is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is
rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration.
For every thing that is given something is taken. Society
acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast
between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American,
with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket,
and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a
spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep
under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall
see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If
the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad
axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if
you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall
send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use
of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much
support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails
of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical
almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he
wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the
sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows
as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is
without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory;
his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases
the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether
machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by
refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in
establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For
every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the
Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in
the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now
than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between
the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can
all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the
nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than
Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago.
Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates,
Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no
class. He who is really of their class will not be called
by their name, but will be his own man, and in his turn the
founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period
are only its costume and do not invigorate men. The harm of
the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and
Behring accomplished so much in their fishing-boats as to
astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the
resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass,
discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena
than any one since. Columbus found the New World in an
undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse
and perishing of means and machinery which were introduced
with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The
great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the
improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science,
and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which
consisted of falling back on naked valor and disencumbering
it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a
perfect army, says Las Cases, "without abolishing our arms,
magazines, commissaries and carriages, until, in imitation
of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply
of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread
himself."

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water
of which it is composed does not. The same particle does
not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only
phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next
year die, and their experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance
on governments which protect it, is the want of self-
reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things
so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned
and civil institutions as guards of property, and they
deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be
assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other
by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated
man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for
his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that it
is accidental,--came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime;
then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him,
has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution
or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does
always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is
living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or
mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but
perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy lot
or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking after
thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it." Our
dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish
respect for numbers. The political parties meet in numerous
conventions; the greater the concourse and with each new
uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! The
Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young
patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thousand
of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon
conventions and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O
friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but
by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts
off all foreign support and stands alone that I see him to
be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to
his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of
men, and, in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must
presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He
who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has
looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving,
throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights
himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs,
works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is
stronger than a man who stands on his head.

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