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 "Ne te quaesiveris extra." "Man
is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all
fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that
walk by us still." Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune. Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat,
Wintered with the
hawk and fox.
Power and speed be hands and feet. I READ the other day some
verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such
lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe
your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius. Speak your
latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought
is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit
we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they
thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the
lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work
of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art
have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good- humored inflexibility
then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely
what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance;
that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is
full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given
to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does
he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.
This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it
might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us
represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have
his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but
what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his
genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope. Trust thyself:
every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries,
the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying
their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in
all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and
invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the
Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark. 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. 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. 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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - The sense of Being
Click here for Wendell Refior as Ralph Waldo Emerson delivering an excerpt from Self-Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Natural Perfection
Emerson: The Ideal In America (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
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