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Circles: An Essay
Circles
Introductory Note
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Mass., on May 25, 1803, the son
of a prominent Unitarian minister. He was educated at the Boston Latin School
and at Harvard College, from which he graduated at eighteen. On leaving
college he taught school for some time, and in 1825 returned to Cambridge to
study divinity. The next year he began to preach; and in 1829 he married Ellen
Tucker, and was chosen colleague to the Rev. Henry Ware, minister of the
historic church in Hanover Street, Boston. So far things seemed to be going
well with him: but in 1831 his wife died, and in the next year scruples about
administering the Lord`s Supper led him to give up his church. In sadness and
poor health he set out in December on his first visit to Europe, passing
through Italy, Switzerland, and France to Britain, and visiting Landor,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, and, most important of all, Carlyle, with whom he laid
the foundation of a life-long friendship. On his return to America he took
up lecturing, and he continued for nearly forty years to use this form of
expression for his ideas on religion, politics, literature, and philosophy. In
1835 he bought a house in Concord, and took there his second wife, Lidian
Jackson. The history of the rest of his life is uneventful, as far as external
incident is concerned. He traveled frequently giving lectures; took part in
founding in 1840 the Dial, and in 1857 the Atlantic Monthly, to both of which
he contributed freely, and the former of which he edited for a short time;
introduced the writings of Carlyle to America, and published a succession of
volumes of essays, addresses, and poems. He made two more visits to Europe,
and on the earlier delivered lectures in the principal towns of England and
Scotland. He died at Concord on April 27, 1882, after a few years of failing
memory, during which his public activities were necessarily greatly reduced.
At the time of Emerson`s death, he was recognized as the foremost writer
and thinker of his country; but this recognition had come only gradually. The
candor and the vigor of his thinking had led him often to champion unpopular
causes, and during his earlier years of authorship his departures from
Unitarian orthodoxy were viewed with hostility and alarm. In the Abolitionist
movement also he took a prominent part, which brought him the distinction of
being mobbed in Boston and Cambridge. In these and other controversies,
however, while frank in his opinions, and eloquent and vigorous in his
expression of them, he showed a remarkable quality of tact and reasonableness,
which prevented the opposition to him from taking the acutely personal turn
which it assumed in relation to some of his associates, and which preserved to
him a rare dignity.
Recognition of his eminence has not been confined to his countrymen.
Carlyle in Britain and Hermann Grimm in Germany were only leaders of a large
body of admirers in Europe, and it may be safely said that no American has
exerted in the Old World an intellectual influence comparable to that of
Emerson.
Circles
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second;
and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the
highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature
of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere.
We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One
moral we have already deduced in considering the circular or compensatory
character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that
every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the
truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in
nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen
on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable,
the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once the
inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently serve us to
connect many illustrations of human power in every department.
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.
Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent
law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid. Our
culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it all this train of
cities and institutions. Let us rise into another idea; they will disappear.
The Greek sculpture is all melted away, as if it had been statues of ice: here
and there a solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps
of snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts in June and July. For the
genius that created it creates now somewhat else. The Greek letters last a
little longer, but are already passing under the same sentence and tumbling
into the inevitable pit which the creation of new thought opens for all that
is old. The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet; the
new races fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the
old. See the investment of capital in aqueducts, made useless by hydraulics;
fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by steam;
steam, by electricity.
You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many ages.
Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better
than that which is built. The hand that built can topple it down much faster.
Better than the hand and nimbler was the invisible thought which wrought
through it; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which,
being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause. Every thing looks
permanent until its secret is known. A rich estate appears to women and
children a firm and lasting fact; to a merchant, one easily created out of any
materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a
fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a large farmer,
not much more fixed than the state of the crop. Nature looks provokingly
stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest; and when once I
comprehend that, will these fields stretch so immovably wide, these leaves
hang so individually considerable? Permanence is a word of degrees. Every
thing is medial. Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look,
he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are
classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands
his own. The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring
imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles,
and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel
without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.
For it is the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a
circular wave of circumstance, as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a
local usage, a religious rite, to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify
and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that
boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also
runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the
heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses it already
tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions.
Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general law
only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself.
There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man
finishes his story, - how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all
things! He fills the sky. Lo, on the other side rises also a man and draws a
circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere.
Then already is our first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only
redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do
by themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be
escaped, will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed
to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a bolder
generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to upheave all
thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the nations, and marshall
thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is not so
much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men
walk as prophecies of the next age.
Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder; the steps are actions, the
new prospect is power. Every several result is threatened and judged by that
which follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by the new; it is only
limited by the new. The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to
those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of scepticism. But the eye soon
gets wonted to it, for the eye and it are effects of one cause; then its
innocency and benefit appear, and presently, all its energy spent, it pales
and dwindles before the revelation of the new hour.
Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass and material,
threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to refine
and raise thy theory of matter just as much.
There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man
supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him,
if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The
last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened; there is always
a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a
greater possibility.
Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts
and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same
thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I
write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a
dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month
hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous
pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a
vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.
The continual effort to raise himself, above himself to work a pitch
above his last height, betrays itself in a man`s relations. We thirst for
approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of nature is love; yet
if I have a friend I am tormented by my imperfections. The love of me accuses
the other party. If he were high enough to slight me, then could I love him,
and rise by my affection to new heights. A man`s growth is seen in the
successive choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he
gains a better. I thought as I walked in the woods and mused on my friends,
why should I play with them this game of idolatry? I know and see too well,
when not voluntarily blind, the speedy limits of persons called high and
worthy. Rich, noble and great they are by the liberality of our speech, but
truth is sad. O blessed Spirit, whom I forsake for these, they are not thee!
Every personal consideration that we allow costs us heavenly state. We sell
the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.
How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to interest us when we
find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come
up with a man`s limitations, it is all over with him. Has he talents? has he
enterprises? has he knowledge? It boots not. Infinitely alluring and
attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in; now, you
have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care not if you never see it
again.
Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly discordant
facts, as expressions of one law. Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the
respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle
Platonizes. By going one step farther back in thought, discordant opinions are
reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of one principle, and we can never
go so far back as to preclude a still higher vision.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all
things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great
city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a
piece of science but its flank may be turned tomorrow; there is not any
literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not
be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart,
the religion of nations, the manner and morals of mankind are all at the mercy
of a new generalization. Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity
into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it.
Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have
his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he
stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of
truth, and his alert acceptance of it from whatever quarter; the intrepid
conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his christianity, his
world, may at any time be superseded and decease.
There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it
academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday of youth
and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and fragments. Then,
its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that it must be true. It now
shows itself ethical and practical. We learn that God is; that he is in me;
and that all things are shadows of him. The idealism of Berkeley is only a
crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement
of the fact that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and
organizing itself. Much more obviously is history and the state of the world
at any one time directly dependent on the intellectual classification then
existing in the minds of men. The things which are dear to men at this hour
are so on account of the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and
which cause the present order of things, as a tree bears its apples. A new
degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human
pursuits.
Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the
termini which bound the common of silence on every side. The parties are not
to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express under this Pentecost.
To-morrow they will have receded from this high-water mark. To-morrow
you shall find them stooping under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy
the cloven flame whilst it glows on our walls. When each new speaker strikes a
new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker to oppress
us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to
another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men. O, what truths
profound and executable only in ages and orbs, are supposed in the
announcement of every truth! In common hours, society sits cold and
statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty, - knowing, possibly, that we can be
full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and
trivial toys. Then cometh the god and converts the statues into fiery men, and
by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the
meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, or chair and clock and
tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday,
- property, climate, breeding, personal beauty and the like, have strangely
changed their proportions. All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles;
and literatures, cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations and
dance before our eyes. And yet here again see the swift circumscription! Good
as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the discourse
indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they
were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary
thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.
Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle through which a new
one may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence
we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it.
We fill ourselves with ancient learning, install ourselves the best we can in
Greek, in Punic, in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier see French,
English and American houses and modes of living. In like manner we see
literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or
from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The
astronomer must have his diameter of the earth`s orbit as a base to find the
parallax of any star.
Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not
in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity,
but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline to repeat my old
steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the power of change and
reform. But some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new wine of his
imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full of daring thought and
action. He smites and arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole
chain of habits, and I open my eye on my own possibilities. He claps wings to
the sides of all the solid old lumber of the world, and I am capable once more
of choosing a straight path in theory and practice.
We have the same need to command a view of the religion of the world. We
can never see christianity from the catechism: - from the pastures, from a
boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of woodbirds we possibly may. Cleansed
by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which
the field offers us, we may chance to cast a right glance back upon biography.
Christianity is rightly dear to the best of mankind; yet was there never a
young philosopher whose breeding had fallen into the christian church by whom
that brave text of Paul`s was not specially prized, "Then shall also the Son
be subject unto Him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all."
Let the claims and virtues of persons be never so great and welcome, the
instinct of man presses eagerly onward to the impersonal and illimitable, and
gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of bigots with this generous word out
of the book itself.
The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric circles,
and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations which apprize us that
this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding. These manifold
tenacious qualities, this chemistry and vegetation, these metals and animals,
which seem to stand there for their own sake, are means and methods only, are
words of God, and as fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist
learned his craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective
affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is only a
partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to like, and that the
goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need not be pursued with pains
and cost? Yet is that statement approximate also, and not final. Omnipresence
is a higher fact. Not through subtle subterranean channels need friend and
fact be drawn to their counterpart, but, rightly considered, these things
proceed from the eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two
sides of one fact.
The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues,
and extinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man will not be
prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much deduction from
his grandeur. But it behoves each to see, when he sacrifices prudence, to what
god he devotes it; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if
to a great trust, he can well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged
chariot instead. Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his
feet may be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril.
In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me that
with every precaution you take against such an evil you put yourself into the
power of the evil. I suppose that the highest prudence is the lowest prudence.
Is this too sudden a rushing from the centre to the verge of our orbit? Think
how many times we shall fall back into pitiful calculations before we take up
our rest in the great sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new centre.
Besides, your bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and
the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as
you. "Blessed be nothing" and "The worse things are, the better they are" are
proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.
One man`s justice is another`s injustice; one man`s beauty another`s
ugliness; one man`s wisdom another`s folly; as one beholds the same objects
from a higher point of view. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts,
and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this
duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own
way of looking at things; asks himself which debt must I pay first, the debt
to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money, or the debt of
thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is no other
principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith,
truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach
one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces
mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find
that, though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these
debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to
the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Owes he no debt but money?
And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord`s or a banker`s?
There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of
society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we
must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the
same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,
Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.
It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our
contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by day;
but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost time. I no
longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what remains to me of the
month or the year; for these moments confer a sort of omnipresence and
omnipotence which asks nothing of duration, but sees that the energy of the
mind is commensurate with the work to be done, without time.
And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have
arrived at a fine pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency of all
actions, and would fain teach us that if we are true, forsooth, our crimes may
be lively stones out of which we shall construct the temple of the true God.
I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened by seeing the
predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature, and not
less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of the principle of
good into every chink and hole that selfishness has left open, yea into
selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself without
its extreme satisfactions. But lest I should mislead any when I have my own
head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an
experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit
on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I
unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply
experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.
Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake
could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of fixture
or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds,
the eternal generator abides. That central life is somewhat superior to
creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and contains all its circles. For
ever it labors to create a life and thought as large and excellent as itself;
but in vain; for that which is made instructs how to make a better.
Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew,
germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour?
Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease: all others run into
this one. We call it by many names, - fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity
and crime: they are all forms of old age: they are rest, conservatism,
appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day.
I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow
old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye
looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction
flowing from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all;
throw up their hope; renounce aspiration; accept the actual for the necessary
and talk down to the young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let
them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their
wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power. This old age
ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is
always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure
but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or
covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be
trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled:
only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the
pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being. Of
lower states, - of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat, but the
masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements of the soul, he
hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth is divine and helpful;
but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for so to be is the sole inlet
of so to know. The new position of the advancing man has all the powers of the
old, yet has them all new. It carries in its bosom all the energies of the
past, yet is itself an exhalation of the morning. I cast away in this new
moment all my once hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now for the first
time seem I to know any thing rightly. The simplest words, - we do not know
what they mean except when we love and aspire.
The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the
old and trodden round, and power and courage to make a new road to new and
better goals. Character makes an overpowering present, a cheerful, determined
hour, which fortifies all the company by making them see that much is possible
and excellent that was not thought of. Character dulls the impression of
particular events. When we see the conqueror we do not think much of any one
battle or success. We see that we had exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy
to him. The great man is not convulsible or tormentable. He is so much that
events pass over him without much impression. People say sometimes, "See what
I have overcome; see how cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed
over these black events." Not if they still remind me of the black evens, -
they have not yet conquered. Is it conquest to be a gay and decorated
sepulchre, or a half-crazed widow, hysterically laughing? True conquest is
the causing the black event to fade and disappear as an early cloud of
insignificant result in a history so large and advancing.
The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget
ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal
memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new
circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is
wonderful. It is by abandonment. The great moments of history are the
facilities of performance through the strength of ideas, as the works of
genius and religion. "A man," said Oliver Cromwell, "never rises so high as
when he knows not whither he is going." Dreams and drunkenness, the use of
opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius,
and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For the like reason they ask the
aid of wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames
and generosities of the heart.
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