Essays, First Series

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

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So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with
her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But
do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with
Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work
and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and
shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A
political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick
or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable
event raises your spirits, and you think good days are
preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you
peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the
triumph of principles.

COMPENSATION.

The wings of Time are black and white,
Pied with morning and with night.
Mountain tall and ocean deep
Trembling balance duly keep.
In changing moon, in tidal wave,
Glows the feud of Want and Have.
Gauge of more and less through space
Electric star and pencil plays.
The lonely Earth amid the balls
That hurry through the eternal halls,
A makeweight flying to the void,
Supplemental asteroid,
Or compensatory spark,
Shoots across the neutral Dark.

Man's the elm, and Wealth the vine,
Stanch and strong the tendrils twine:
Though the frail ringlets thee deceive,
None from its stock that vine can reave.
Fear not, then, thou child infirm,
There's no god dare wrong a worm.
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts
And power to him who power exerts;
Hast not thy share? On winged feet,
Lo! it rushes thee to meet;
And all that Nature made thy own,
Floating in air or pent in stone,
Will rive the hills and swim the sea
And, like thy shadow, follow thee.

III.
COMPENSATION.

Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse
on Compensation; for it seemed to me when very young that
on this subject life was ahead of theology and the people
knew more than the preachers taught. The documents too
from which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy
by their endless variety, and lay always before me, even
in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the bread
in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm
and the dwelling-house; greetings, relations, debts and
credits, the influence of character, the nature and
endowment of all men. It seemed to me also that in it
might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of
the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition;
and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of
eternal love, conversing with that which he knows was always
and always must be, because it really is now. It appeared
moreover that if this doctrine could be stated in terms with
any resemblance to those bright intuitions in which this
truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would be a star in many
dark hours and crooked passages in our journey, that would
not suffer us to lose our way.

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon
at church. The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy,
unfolded in the ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last
Judgment. He assumed that judgment is not executed in this
world; that the wicked are successful; that the good are
miserable; and then urged from reason and from Scripture a
compensation to be made to both parties in the next life.
No offence appeared to be taken by the congregation at this
doctrine. As far as I could observe when the meeting broke
up they separated without remark on the sermon.

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the
preacher mean by saying that the good are miserable in
the present life? Was it that houses and lands, offices,
wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by unprincipled men,
whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a
compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by
giving them the like gratifications another day,--bank-
stock and doubloons, venison and champagne? This must be
the compensation intended; for what else? Is it that they
are to have leave to pray and praise? to love and serve
men? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate inference
the disciple would draw was,--'We are to have such a good
time as the sinners have now';--or, to push it to its
extreme import,--'You sin now; we shall sin by and by; we
would sin now, if we could; not being successful, we
expect our revenge to-morrow.'

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are
successful; that justice is not done now. The blindness of
the preacher consisted in deferring to the base estimate
of the market of what constitutes a manly success, instead
of confronting and convicting the world from the truth;
announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of
the will; and so establishing the standard of good and
ill, of success and falsehood.

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works
of the day and the same doctrines assumed by the literary
men when occasionally they treat the related topics. I
think that our popular theology has gained in decorum, and
not in principle, over the superstitions it has displaced.
But men are better than their theology. Their daily life
gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves
the doctrine behind him in his own experience, and all men
feel sometimes the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate.
For men are wiser than they know. That which they hear in
schools and pulpits without afterthought, if said in
conversation would probably be questioned in silence. If a
man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the
divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well
enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but
his incapacity to make his own statement.

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record
some facts that indicate the path of the law of Compensation;
happy beyond my expectation if I shall truly draw the
smallest arc of this circle.

POLARITY, or action and reaction, we meet in every part
of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in
the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the
inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the
equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the
animal body; in the systole and diastole of the heart;
in the undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the
centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity,
galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism
at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes
place at the other end. If the south attracts, the north
repels. To empty here, you must condense there. An
inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing
is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole;
as, spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective,
objective; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts.
The entire system of things gets represented in every particle.
There is somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea,
day and night, man and woman, in a single needle of the pine,
in a kernel of corn, in each individual of every animal tribe.
The reaction, so grand in the elements, is repeated within
these small boundaries. For example, in the animal kingdom
the physiologist has observed that no creatures are favorites,
but a certain compensation balances every gift and every defect.
A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction from
another part of the same creature. If the head and neck are
enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut short.

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What
we gain in power is lost in time, and the converse. The
periodic or compensating errors of the planets is another
instance. The influences of climate and soil in political
history are another. The cold climate invigorates. The
barren soil does not breed fevers, crocodiles, tigers or
scorpions.

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man.
Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every
sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty
which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on
its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life.
For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every
thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and
for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches
increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer
gathers too much, Nature takes out of the man what she puts
into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner.
Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves of the sea
do not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest tossing
than the varieties of condition tend to equalize themselves.
There is always some levelling circumstance that puts down
the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate,
substantially on the same ground with all others. Is a man
too strong and fierce for society and by temper and position
a bad citizen,--a morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate
in him?--Nature sends him a troop of pretty sons and daughters
who are getting along in the dame's classes at the village
school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to
courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and
felspar, takes the boar out and puts the lamb in and keeps
her balance true.

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But
the President has paid dear for his White House. It has
commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly
attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an
appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust
before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.
Or, do men desire the more substantial and permanent
grandeur of genius? Neither has this an immunity. He who
by force of will or of thought is great and overlooks
thousands, has the charges of that eminence. With every
influx of light comes new danger. Has he light? he must
bear witness to the light, and always outrun that sympathy
which gives him such keen satisfaction, by his fidelity to
new revelations of the incessant soul. He must hate father
and mother, wife and child. Has he all that the world loves
and admires and covets?--he must cast behind him their
admiration, and afflict them by faithfulness to his truth,
and become a byword and a hissing.

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in
vain to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse
to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male administrari.
Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist,
and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor's
life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will
yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary,
juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private
vengeance comes in. If the government is a terrific democracy,
the pressure is resisted by an over-charge of energy in the
citizen, and life glows with a fiercer flame. The true life
and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost rigors or
felicities of condition and to establish themselves with
great indifferency under all varieties of circumstances.
Under all governments the influence of character remains
the same,--in Turkey and in New England about alike. Under
the primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses
that man must have been as free as culture could make him.

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is
represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in
nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is
made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type
under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running
man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a
tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the
main character of the type, but part for part all the
details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies
and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade,
art, transaction, is a compend of the world and a
correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of
human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies,
its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate
the whole man and recite all his destiny.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope
cannot find the animalcule which is less perfect for being
little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance,
appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold on
eternity,--all find room to consist in the small creature.
So do we put our life into every act. The true doctrine of
omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in
every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives
to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so
is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the
force, so the limitation.

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul
which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We
feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its
fatal strength. "It is in the world, and the world was made
by it." Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts
its balance in all parts of life. Hoi kuboi Dios aei
eupiptousi,--The dice of God are always loaded. The world
looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation,
which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what
figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still
returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished,
every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and
certainty. What we call retribution is the universal necessity
by which the whole appears wherever a part appears. If you see
smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or a limb, you
know that the trunk to which it belongs is there behind.

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words integrates
itself, in a twofold manner; first in the thing, or in
real nature; and secondly in the circumstance, or in
apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the retribution.
The causal retribution is in the thing and is seen by the
soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the
understanding; it is inseparable from the thing, but is
often spread over a long time and so does not become
distinct until after many years. The specific stripes may
follow late after the offence, but they follow because
they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one
stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within
the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and
effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed;
for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end
preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to be
disparted, we seek to act partially, to sunder, to
appropriate; for example,--to gratify the senses we sever
the pleasure of the senses from the needs of the character.
The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the
solution of one problem,--how to detach the sensual sweet,
the sensual strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the
moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again,
to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as
to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an other
end. The soul says, 'Eat;' the body would feast. The soul
says, 'The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul;'
the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, 'Have
dominion over all things to the ends of virtue;' the body
would have the power over things to its own ends.

The soul strives amain to live and work through all things.
It would be the only fact. All things shall be added unto
it,--power, pleasure, knowledge, beauty. The particular
man aims to be somebody; to set up for himself; to truck
and higgle for a private good; and, in particulars, to ride
that he may ride; to dress that he may be dressed; to eat
that he may eat; and to govern, that he may be seen. Men
seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power,
and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side
of nature,--the sweet, without the other side, the bitter.

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up
to this day it must be owned no projector has had the
smallest success. The parted water reunites behind our
hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant things, profit
out of profitable things, power out of strong things, as
soon as we seek to separate them from the whole. We can
no more halve things and get the sensual good, by itself,
than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or
a light without a shadow. "Drive out Nature with a fork,
she comes running back."

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which
the unwise seek to dodge, which one and another brags
that he does not know, that they do not touch him;--but
the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul.
If he escapes them in one part they attack him in another
more vital part. If he has escaped them in form and in
the appearance, it is because he has resisted his life
and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much
death. So signal is the failure of all attempts to make
this separation of the good from the tax, that the
experiment would not be tried,--since to try it is to be
mad,--but for the circumstance, that when the disease
began in the will, of rebellion and separation, the
intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases to
see God whole in each object, but is able to see the
sensual allurement of an object and not see the sensual
hurt; he sees the mermaid's head but not the dragon's
tail, and thinks he can cut off that which he would have
from that which he would not have. "How secret art thou
who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, O thou
only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied providence
certain penal blindnesses upon such as have unbridled
desires!"1

1 St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I.

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of
fable, of history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation.
It finds a tongue in literature unawares. Thus the Greeks
called Jupiter, Supreme Mind; but having traditionally
ascribed to him many base actions, they involuntarily made
amends to reason by tying up the hands of so bad a god. He
is made as helpless as a king of England. Prometheus knows
one secret which Jove must bargain for; Minerva, another.
He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps the key of
them:--

"Of all the gods, I only know the keys
That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
His thunders sleep."

A plain confession of the in-working of the All and of
its moral aim. The Indian mythology ends in the same
ethics; and it would seem impossible for any fable to be
invented and get any currency which was not moral. Aurora
forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though Tithonus is
immortal, he is old. Achilles is not quite invulnerable;
the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis
held him. Siegfried, in the Nibelungen, is not quite
immortal, for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was
bathing in the dragon's blood, and that spot which it
covered is mortal. And so it must be. There is a crack
in every thing God has made. It would seem there is always
this vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares even
into the wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted to
make bold holiday and to shake itself free of the old laws,
--this back-stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that
the law is fatal; that in nature nothing can be given, all
things are sold.

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch
in the universe and lets no offence go unchastised. The
Furies they said are attendants on justice, and if the sun
in heaven should transgress his path they would punish him.
The poets related that stone walls and iron swords and
leathern thongs had an occult sympathy with the wrongs of
their owners; that the belt which Ajax gave Hector dragged
the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels of the car of
Achilles, and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that on
whose point Ajax fell. They recorded that when the Thasians
erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the games, one
of his rivals went to it by night and endeavored to throw
it down by repeated blows, until at last he moved it from
its pedestal and was crushed to death beneath its fall.

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came
from thought above the will of the writer. That is the
best part of each writer which has nothing private in
it; that which he does not know; that which flowed out
of his constitution and not from his too active invention;
that which in the study of a single artist you might not
easily find, but in the study of many you would abstract
as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but the
work of man in that early Hellenic world that I would know.
The name and circumstance of Phidias, however convenient
for history, embarrass when we come to the highest
criticism. We are to see that which man was tending to do
in a given period, and was hindered, or, if you will,
modified in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias,
of Dante, of Shakspeare, the organ whereby man at the moment
wrought.

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the
proverbs of all nations, which are always the literature
of reason, or the statements of an absolute truth without
qualification. Proverbs, like the sacred books of each
nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which
the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow
the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to
say in proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws,
which the pulpit, the senate and the college deny, is hourly
preached in all markets and workshops by flights of proverbs,
whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of birds
and flies.

All things are double, one against another.--Tit for tat;
an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood;
measure for measure; love for love.--Give and it shall be
given you.--He that watereth shall be watered himself.--
What will you have? quoth God; pay for it and take it.--
Nothing venture, nothing have.--Thou shalt be paid exactly
for what thou hast done, no more, no less.--Who doth not
work shall not eat.--Harm watch, harm catch. --Curses always
recoil on the head of him who imprecates them.--If you put
a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens
itself around your own.--Bad counsel confounds the adviser.
--The Devil is an ass.

It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our action
is overmastered and characterized above our will by the law
of nature. We aim at a petty end quite aside from the public
good, but our act arranges itself by irresistible magnetism
in a line with the poles of the world.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will
or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of
his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him
who utters it. It is a thread-ball thrown at a mark, but
the other end remains in the thrower's bag. Or rather it
is a harpoon hurled at the whale, unwinding, as it flies,
a coil of cord in the boat, and, if the harpoon is not
good, or not well thrown, it will go nigh to cut the
steersman in twain or to sink the boat.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. "No man had
ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him," said
Burke. The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that
he excludes himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to
appropriate it. The exclusionist in religion does not see
that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving
to shut out others. Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you
shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their heart,
you shall lose your own. The senses would make things of all
persons; of women, of children, of the poor. The vulgar
proverb, "I will get it from his purse or get it from his
skin," is sound philosophy.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations
are speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst
I stand in simple relations to my fellow-man, I have no
displeasure in meeting him. We meet as water meets water,
or as two currents of air mix, with perfect diffusion and
interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any
departure from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good
for me that is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong;
he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk from him; his
eyes no longer seek mine; there is war between us; there is
hate in him and fear in me.

All the old abuses in society, universal and particular,
all unjust accumulations of property and power, are avenged
in the same manner. Fear is an instructor of great sagacity
and the herald of all revolutions. One thing he teaches,
that there is rottenness where he appears. He is a carrion
crow, and though you see not well what he hovers for, there
is death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws are
timid, our cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has
boded and mowed and gibbered over government and property.
That obscene bird is not there for nothing. He indicates
great wrongs which must be revised.

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