Essays, First Series

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

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If we look wider, things are all alike; laws and letters
and creeds and modes of living seem a travesty of truth.
Our society is encumbered by ponderous machinery, which
resembles the endless aqueducts which the Romans built
over hill and dale and which are superseded by the
discovery of the law that water rises to the level of
its source. It is a Chinese wall which any nimble Tartar
can leap over. It is a standing army, not so good as a
peace. It is a graduated, titled, richly appointed empire,
quite superfluous when town-meetings are found to answer
just as well.

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by
short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls. When the
fruit is despatched, the leaf falls. The circuit of the
waters is mere falling. The walking of man and all animals
is a falling forward. All our manual labor and works of
strength, as prying, splitting, digging, rowing and so
forth, are done by dint of continual falling, and the
globe, earth, moon, comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever.

The simplicity of the universe is very different from
the simplicity of a machine. He who sees moral nature
out and out and thoroughly knows how knowledge is acquired
and character formed, is a pedant. The simplicity of nature
is not that which may easily be read, but is inexhaustible.
The last analysis can no wise be made. We judge of a man's
wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the
inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth. The wild
fertility of nature is felt in comparing our rigid names
and reputations with our fluid consciousness. We pass in
the world for sects and schools, for erudition and piety,
and we are all the time jejune babes. One sees very well
how Pyrrhonism grew up. Every man sees that he is that
middle point whereof every thing may be affirmed and denied
with equal reason. He is old, he is young, he is very wise,
he is altogether ignorant. He hears and feels what you say
of the seraphim, and of the tin-peddler. There is no
permanent wise man except in the figment of the Stoics. We
side with the hero, as we read or paint, against the coward
and the robber; but we have been ourselves that coward and
robber, and shall be again,--not in the low circumstance,
but in comparison with the grandeurs possible to the soul.

A little consideration of what takes place around us
every day would show us that a higher law than that
of our will regulates events; that our painful labors
are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy,
simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and by
contenting ourselves with obedience we become divine.
Belief and love,--a believing love will relieve us of
a vast load of care. O my brothers, God exists. There
is a soul at the centre of nature and over the will of
every man, so that none of us can wrong the universe.
It has so infused its strong enchantment into nature
that we prosper when we accept its advice, and when we
struggle to wound its creatures our hands are glued to
our sides, or they beat our own breasts. The whole course
of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey.
There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening
we shall hear the right word. Why need you choose so
painfully your place and occupation and associates and
modes of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is
a possible right for you that precludes the need of
balance and wilful election. For you there is a reality,
a fit place and congenial duties. Place yourself in the
middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates
all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled
to truth, to right and a perfect contentment. Then you
put all gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are the world,
the measure of right, of truth, of beauty. If we will not
be mar-plots with our miserable interferences, the work,
the society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would
go on far better than now, and the heaven predicted from
the beginning of the world, and still predicted from the
bottom of the heart, would organize itself, as do now the
rose and the air and the sun.

I say, do not choose; but that is a figure of speech
by which I would distinguish what is commonly called
choice among men, and which is a partial act, the
choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appetites,
and not a whole act of the man. But that which I call
right or goodness, is the choice of my constitution;
and that which I call heaven, and inwardly aspire after,
is the state or circumstance desirable to my constitution;
and the action which I in all my years tend to do, is the
work for my faculties. We must hold a man amenable to
reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession.
It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they
are the custom of his trade. What business has he with
an evil trade? Has he not a calling in his character?

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call.
There is one direction in which all space is open to
him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither
to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he
runs against obstructions on every side but one, on
that side all obstruction is taken away and he sweeps
serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea.
This talent and this call depend on his organization,
or the mode in which the general soul incarnates itself
in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him
and good when it is done, but which no other man can do.
He has no rival. For the more truly he consults his own
powers, the more difference will his work exhibit from
the work of any other. His ambition is exactly proportioned
to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is determined by
the breadth of the base. Every man has this call of the
power to do somewhat unique, and no man has any other call.
The pretence that he has another call, a summons by name
and personal election and outward "signs that mark him
extraordinary, and not in the roll of common men," is
fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness to perceive that there
is one mind in all the individuals, and no respect of
persons therein.

By doing his work he makes the need felt which he can
supply, and creates the taste by which he is enjoyed.
By doing his own work he unfolds himself. It is the
vice of our public speaking that it has not abandonment.
Somewhere, not only every orator but every man should
let out all the length of all the reins; should find or
make a frank and hearty expression of what force and
meaning is in him. The common experience is that the
man fits himself as well as he can to the customary
details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends
it as a dog turns a spit. Then is he a part of the
machine he moves; the man is lost. Until he can manage
to communicate himself to others in his full stature
and proportion, he does not yet find his vocation. He
must find in that an outlet for his character, so that
he may justify his work to their eyes. If the labor is
mean, let him by his thinking and character make it
liberal. Whatever he knows and thinks, whatever in his
apprehension is worth doing, that let him communicate,
or men will never know and honor him aright. Foolish,
whenever you take the meanness and formality of that
thing you do, instead of converting it into the obedient
spiracle of your character and aims.

We like only such actions as have already long had the
praise of men, and do not perceive that any thing man
can do may be divinely done. We think greatness entailed
or organized in some places or duties, in certain offices
or occasions, and do not see that Paganini can extract
rapture from a catgut, and Eulenstein from a jews-harp,
and a nimble-fingered lad out of shreds of paper with his
scissors, and Landseer out of swine, and the hero out of
the pitiful habitation and company in which he was hidden.
What we call obscure condition or vulgar society is that
condition and society whose poetry is not yet written, but
which you shall presently make as enviable and renowned as
any. In our estimates let us take a lesson from kings. The
parts of hospitality, the connection of families, the
impressiveness of death, and a thousand other things,
royalty makes its own estimate of, and a royal mind will.
To make habitually a new estimate,--that is elevation.

What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with
hope or fear? In himself is his might. Let him regard
no good as solid but that which is in his nature and
which must grow out of him as long as he exists. The
goods of fortune may come and go like summer leaves;
let him scatter them on every wind as the momentary
signs of his infinite productiveness.

He may have his own. A man's genius, the quality that
differences him from every other, the susceptibility
to one class of influences, the selection of what is
fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines
for him the character of the universe. A man is a method,
a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle,
gathering his like to him wherever he goes. He takes only
his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles
round him. He is like one of those booms which are set
out from the shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, or like
the loadstone amongst splinters of steel. Those facts,
words, persons, which dwell in his memory without his
being able to say why, remain because they have a relation
to him not less real for being as yet unapprehended. They
are symbols of value to him as they can interpret parts
of his consciousness which he would vainly seek words for
in the conventional images of books and other minds. What
attracts my attention shall have it, as I will go to the
man who knocks at my door, whilst a thousand persons as
worthy go by it, to whom I give no regard. It is enough
that these particulars speak to me. A few anecdotes, a
few traits of character, manners, face, a few incidents,
have an emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to
their apparent significance if you measure them by the
ordinary standards. They relate to your gift. Let them
have their weight, and do not reject them and cast about
for illustration and facts more usual in literature. What
your heart thinks great is great. The soul's emphasis is
always right.

Over all things that are agreeable to his nature and
genius the man has the highest right. Everywhere he
may take what belongs to his spiritual estate, nor can
he take any thing else though all doors were open, nor
can all the force of men hinder him from taking so much.
It is vain to attempt to keep a secret from one who has
a right to know it. It will tell itself. That mood into
which a friend can bring us is his dominion over us. To
the thoughts of that state of mind he has a right. All
the secrets of that state of mind he can compel. This is
a law which statesmen use in practice. All the terrors
of the French Republic, which held Austria in awe, were
unable to command her diplomacy. But Napoleon sent to
Vienna M. de Narbonne, one of the old noblesse, with the
morals, manners and name of that interest, saying that it
was indispensable to send to the old aristocracy of Europe
men of the same connection, which, in fact, constitutes a
sort of free-masonry. M. de Narbonne in less than a
fortnight penetrated all the secrets of the imperial
cabinet.

Nothing seems so easy as to speak and to be understood.
Yet a man may come to find that the strongest of defences
and of ties,--that he has been understood; and he who
has received an opinion may come to find it the most
inconvenient of bonds.

If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal,
his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that
as into any which he publishes. If you pour water into
a vessel twisted into coils and angles, it is vain to
say, I will pour it only into this or that;--it will find
its level in all. Men feel and act the consequences of
your doctrine without being able to show how they follow.
Show us an arc of the curve, and a good mathematician will
find out the whole figure. We are always reasoning from
the seen to the unseen. Hence the perfect intelligence
that subsists between wise men of remote ages. A man
cannot bury his meanings so deep in his book but time and
like-minded men will find them. Plato had a secret doctrine,
had he? What secret can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon?
of Montaigne? of Kant? Therefore, Aristotle said of his
works, "They are published and not published."

No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning,
however near to his eyes is the object. A chemist may
tell his most precious secrets to a carpenter, and he
shall be never the wiser,--the secrets he would not utter
to a chemist for an estate. God screens us evermore from
premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see
things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives
when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the
time when we saw them not is like a dream.

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth
he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to
this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride. "Earth
fills her lap with splendors" not her own. The vale of
Tempe, Tivoli and Rome are earth and water, rocks and
sky. There are as good earth and water in a thousand
places, yet how unaffecting!

People are not the better for the sun and moon, the
horizon and the trees; as it is not observed that the
keepers of Roman galleries or the valets of painters
have any elevation of thought, or that librarians are
wiser men than others. There are graces in the demeanor
of a polished and noble person which are lost upon the
eye of a churl. These are like the stars whose light has
not yet reached us.

He may see what he maketh. Our dreams are the sequel of
our waking knowledge. The visions of the night bear some
proportion to the visions of the day. Hideous dreams are
exaggerations of the sins of the day. We see our evil
affections embodied in bad physiognomies. On the Alps
the traveller sometimes beholds his own shadow magnified
to a giant, so that every gesture of his hand is terrific.
"My children," said an old man to his boys scared by a
figure in the dark entry, "my children, you will never
see any thing worse than yourselves." As in dreams, so in
the scarcely less fluid events of the world every man sees
himself in colossal, without knowing that it is himself.
The good, compared to the evil which he sees, is as his
own good to his own evil. Every quality of his mind is
magnified in some one acquaintance, and every emotion of
his heart in some one. He is like a quincunx of trees,
which counts five,--east, west, north, or south; or an
initial, medial, and terminal acrostic. And why not? He
cleaves to one person and avoids another, according to
their likeness or unlikeness to himself, truly seeking
himself in his associates and moreover in his trade and
habits and gestures and meats and drinks, and comes at
last to be faithfully represented by every view you take
of his circumstances.

He may read what he writes. What can we see or acquire
but what we are? You have observed a skilful man reading
Virgil. Well, that author is a thousand books to a
thousand persons. Take the book into your two hands and
read your eyes out, you will never find what I find. If
any ingenious reader would have a monopoly of the wisdom
or delight he gets, he is as secure now the book is
Englished, as if it were imprisoned in the Pelews' tongue.
It is with a good book as it is with good company. Introduce
a base person among gentlemen, it is all to no purpose; he
is not their fellow. Every society protects itself. The
company is perfectly safe, and he is not one of them,
though his body is in the room.

What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of mind,
which adjust the relation of all persons to each other
by the mathematical measure of their havings and beings?
Gertrude is enamored of Guy; how high, how aristocratic,
how Roman his mien and manners! to live with him were
life indeed, and no purchase is too great; and heaven and
earth are moved to that end. Well, Gertrude has Guy; but
what now avails how high, how aristocratic, how Roman his
mien and manners, if his heart and aims are in the senate,
in the theatre and in the billiard-room, and she has no
aims, no conversation that can enchant her graceful lord?

He shall have his own society. We can love nothing but
nature. The most wonderful talents, the most meritorious
exertions really avail very little with us; but nearness
or likeness of nature,--how beautiful is the ease of its
victory! Persons approach us, famous for their beauty,
for their accomplishments, worthy of all wonder for their
charms and gifts; they dedicate their whole skill to the
hour and the company,--with very imperfect result. To be
sure it would be ungrateful in us not to praise them
loudly. Then, when all is done, a person of related mind,
a brother or sister by nature, comes to us so softly and
easily, so nearly and intimately, as if it were the blood
in our proper veins, that we feel as if some one was gone,
instead of another having come; we are utterly relieved
and refreshed; it is a sort of joyful solitude. We foolishly
think in our days of sin that we must court friends by
compliance to the customs of society, to its dress, its
breeding, and its estimates. But only that soul can be my
friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that
soul to which I do not decline and which does not decline
to me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats
in its own all my experience. The scholar forgets himself
and apes the customs and costumes of the man of the world
to deserve the smile of beauty, and follows some giddy
girl, not yet taught by religious passion to know the noble
woman with all that is serene, oracular and beautiful in her
soul. Let him be great, and love shall follow him. Nothing
is more deeply punished than the neglect of the affinities
by which alone society should be formed, and the insane
levity of choosing associates by others' eyes.

He may set his own rate. It is a maxim worthy of all
acceptation that a man may have that allowance he takes.
Take the place and attitude which belong to you, and all
men acquiesce. The world must be just. It leaves every
man, with profound unconcern, to set his own rate. Hero
or driveller, it meddles not in the matter. It will
certainly accept your own measure of your doing and being,
whether you sneak about and deny your own name, or whether
you see your work produced to the concave sphere of the
heavens, one with the revolution of the stars.

The same reality pervades all teaching. The man may
teach by doing, and not otherwise. If he can communicate
himself he can teach, but not by words. He teaches who
gives, and he learns who receives. There is no teaching
until the pupil is brought into the same state or
principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place;
he is you and you are he; then is a teaching, and by no
unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite lose
the benefit. But your propositions run out of one ear
as they ran in at the other. We see it advertised that
Mr. Grand will deliver an oration on the Fourth of July,
and Mr. Hand before the Mechanics' Association, and we
do not go thither, because we know that these gentlemen
will not communicate their own character and experience
to the company. If we had reason to expect such a
confidence we should go through all inconvenience and
opposition. The sick would be carried in litters. But
a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an
apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech,
not a man.

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual works. We
have yet to learn that the thing uttered in words is
not therefore affirmed. It must affirm itself, or no
forms of logic or of oath can give it evidence. The
sentence must also contain its own apology for being
spoken.

The effect of any writing on the public mind is
mathematically measurable by its depth of thought. How
much water does it draw? If it awaken you to think, if
it lift you from your feet with the great voice of
eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent,
over the minds of men; if the pages instruct you not,
they will die like flies in the hour. The way to speak
and write what shall not go out of fashion is to speak
and write sincerely. The argument which has not power
to reach my own practice, I may well doubt will fail
to reach yours. But take Sidney's maxim:--"Look in thy
heart, and write." He that writes to himself writes to
an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made
public which you have come at in attempting to satisfy
your own curiosity. The writer who takes his subject from
his ear and not from his heart, should know that he has
lost as much as he seems to have gained, and when the
empty book has gathered all its praise, and half the
people say, 'What poetry! what genius!' it still needs
fuel to make fire. That only profits which is profitable.
Life alone can impart life; and though we should burst we
can only be valued as we make ourselves valuable. There
is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the
final verdict upon every book are not the partial and
noisy readers of the hour when it appears, but a court as
of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated
and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to
fame. Only those books come down which deserve to last.
Gilt edges, vellum and morocco, and presentation-copies
to all the libraries will not preserve a book in circulation
beyond its intrinsic date. It must go with all Walpole's
Noble and Royal Authors to its fate. Blackmore, Kotzebue,
or Pollok may endure for a night, but Moses and Homer stand
for ever. There are not in the world at any one time more
than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato,--never
enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every
generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few
persons, as if God brought them in his hand. "No book," said
Bentley, "was ever written down by any but itself." The
permanence of all books is fixed by no effort, friendly or
hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic
importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.
"Do not trouble yourself too much about the light on your
statue," said Michael Angelo to the young sculptor; "the
light of the public square will test its value."

In like manner the effect of every action is measured
by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds.
The great man knew not that he was great. It took a
century or two for that fact to appear. What he did,
he did because he must; it was the most natural thing
in the world, and grew out of the circumstances of the
moment. But now, every thing he did, even to the lifting
of his finger or the eating of bread, looks large, all-
related, and is called an institution.

These are the demonstrations in a few particulars of
the genius of nature; they show the direction of the
stream. But the stream is blood; every drop is alive.
Truth has not single victories; all things are its
organs,--not only dust and stones, but errors and lies.
The laws of disease, physicians say, are as beautiful
as the laws of health. Our philosophy is affirmative
and readily accepts the testimony of negative facts, as
every shadow points to the sun. By a divine necessity
every fact in nature is constrained to offer its testimony.

Human character evermore publishes itself. The most
fugitive deed and word, the mere air of doing a thing,
the intimated purpose, expresses character. If you act
you show character; if you sit still, if you sleep, you
show it. You think because you have spoken nothing when
others spoke, and have given no opinion on the times,
on the church, on slavery, on marriage, on socialism,
on secret societies, on the college, on parties and
persons, that your verdict is still expected with
curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far otherwise; your
silence answers very loud. You have no oracle to utter,
and your fellow-men have learned that you cannot help
them; for oracles speak. Doth not Wisdom cry and
Understanding put forth her voice?

Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of
dissimulation. Truth tyrannizes over the unwilling
members of the body. Faces never lie, it is said. No
man need be deceived who will study the changes of
expression. When a man speaks the truth in the spirit
of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he
has base ends and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy and
sometimes asquint.

I have heard an experienced counsellor say that he
never feared the effect upon a jury of a lawyer who
does not believe in his heart that his client ought
to have a verdict. If he does not believe it his
unbelief will appear to the jury, despite all his
protestations, and will become their unbelief. This
is that law whereby a work of art, of whatever kind,
sets us in the same state of mind wherein the artist
was when he made it. That which we do not believe we
cannot adequately say, though we may repeat the words
never so often. It was this conviction which Swedenborg
expressed when he described a group of persons in the
spiritual world endeavoring in vain to articulate a
proposition which they did not believe; but they could
not, though they twisted and folded their lips even to
indignation.

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