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New England Reformers
New England Reformers
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.
A Lecture Read Before The Society In Amory Hall On Sunday, March 3, 1844.
Whoever has had opportunity of acquaintance with society in New England
during the last twenty-five years, with those middle and with those leading
sections that may constitute and just representation of the character and aim
of the community, will have been struck with the great activity of thought and
experimenting. His attention must be commanded by the signs that the Church or
religious party is falling from the church nominal, and is appearing in
temperance and non-resistance societies, in movements of abolitionists and
of socialists, and in very significant assemblies, called Sabbath and Bible
Conventions - composed of ultraists, of seekers, of all the soul of the
soldiery of dissent, and meeting to call in question the authority of the
Sabbath, of the priesthood, and of the church. In these movements nothing was
more remarkable than the discontent they begot in the movers. The spirit of
protest and of detachment drove the members of these Conventions to bear
testimony against the church, and immediately afterward to declare their
discontent with these Conventions, their independence of their colleagues, and
their impatience of the methods whereby they were working. They defied each
other, like a congress of kings, each of whom had a realm to rule, and a way
of his own that made concert unprofitable. What a fertility of projects for
the salvation of the world! One apostle thought all men should go to farming;
and another, that no man should buy or sell: that the use of money was the
cardinal evil; another, that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and
drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death to
fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife, that God made year as
well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation;
that fermentation develops the saccharine element in the grain and makes it
more palatable and more digestible. No; they wish the pure wheat, and will die
but it shall not ferment. Stop, dear nature, these incessant advances of
thine; let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels! Other attacked the system of
agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming, and the tyranny of man over
brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. The ox must be taken from the
plow and the horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm must be
spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and locomotives will not carry
him. Even the insect world was to be defended - that had been too long
neglected, and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and
mosquitoes was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the
adepts of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology and their
wonderful theories of the Christian miracles! Others assailed particular
vocations, as that of the lawyer, that of the merchant, of the manufacturer,
of the clergyman, of the scholar. Other attacked the institution of marriage,
as the fountain of social evils. Others devoted themselves to the worrying of
churches and meetings for public worship; and the fertile forms of
antinomianism among the elder puritans seemed to have their match in the
plenty of the new harvest of reform.
With this din of opinion and debate, there was a keener scrutiny of
institutions and domestic life than any we had known, there was sincere
protesting against existing evils, there were changes of employment dictated
by conscience. No doubt, there was plentiful vaporing, and cases of back -
sliding might occur. But in each of these movements emerged a good result, a
tendency to the adoption of simpler methods, and an assertion of the
sufficiency of the private man. Thus it was directly in the spirit and genius
of the age, what happened in one instance, when a church censured and
threatened to excommunicate one of its members on account of the somewhat
hostile part to the church which his conscience led him to take in the anti -
slavery business; the threatened individual immediately ex-communicated the
church in a public and formal process. This has been several times repeated:
it was excellent when it was done the first time, but, of course, loses all
value when it is copied. Every project in the history of reform, no matter how
violent and surprising, is good when it is the dictate of man`s genius and
constitution, but very dull and suspicious when adopted from another. It is
right and beautiful in any man to say: "I will take this coat, or this book,
or this measure of corn of yours" - in whom we see the act to be original, and
to flow from the whole spirit and faith of him; for then that taking will have
a giving as free and divine; but we are very easily disposed to resist the
same generosity of speech, when we miss originality and truth to character in
it.
There was in all the practical activities of New England, for the last
quarter of a century, a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the
social organization. There is observable throughout, the contest between
mechanical and spiritual methods, but with a steady tendency of the thoughtful
and virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spiritual facts.
In politics, for example, it is easy to see the progress of dissent. The
country is full of rebellion; the country is full of kings. Hands off! let
there be no control and no interference in the administration of the affairs
of this kingdom of me. Hence the growth of the doctrine and of the party of
Free Trade, and the willingness to try that experiment; in the face of what
appear incontestable facts. I confess the motto of the Globe newspaper is so
attractive to me that I can seldom find much appetite to read what is below it
in its columns, "The world is governed too much." So the country is frequently
affording solitary examples of resistance to the government, solitary
nullifiers, who throw themselves on their reserved rights: nay, who have
reserved all their rights; who reply to the assessor, and to the clerk of
court, that they do not know the State; and embarrass the courts of law, by
non-juring, and the commander-in-chief of the militia, by non-resistance.
The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent appeared in civil, festive,
neighborly, and domestic society. A restless, prying, conscientious criticism
broke out in unexpected quarters. Who gave me the money with which I bought my
coat? Why should professional labor and that of the counting-house be paid
so disproportionately to the labor of the porter and wood-sawyer? This whole
business of Trade causes me to pause and think, as it constitutes false
relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself relieved of any
responsibility to behave well and nobly to that person whom I pay with money,
whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in
all companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as being himself his only
certificate that he had a right to those aids and services which each ask of
the other. Am I not too protected a person? Is there not a wide disparity
between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor sister? Am
I not defrauded on my best culture in the loss of those gymnastics which
manual labor and the emergencies of poverty constitute? I find nothing
healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society; I do not like the
close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to a be a prisoner, though
treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my
conformity.
The same insatiable criticism may be traced in the efforts for the reform
of Education. The popular education has been taxed with a want of truth and
nature. It was complained that an education to things was not given. We are
students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -
rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a
memory of words, and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our
legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods, we
cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of day by the sun. It is
well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog,
of a snake, of a spider. The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he
could not learn standing. The old English rule was, "All summer in the fields,
and all winter in the study." And it seems as if a man should learn to plant,
or to fish or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and
not be painful to his friends and fellow men. The lessons of science should be
experimental also. The sight of the planet through a telescope is worth all
the course on astronomy: the shock of the electric spark in the elbow
outvalues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an
artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.
One of the traits of the new spirit is the inquisition it fixed on our
scholastic devotion to the dead languages. The ancient languages, with great
beauty of structure, contain wonderful remains of genius, which draw, and
always will draw, certain likeminded men - Greek men, and Roman men - in all
countries, to their study; but by a wonderful drowsiness of usage, they had
exacted the study of all men. Once (say two centuries ago), Latin and Greek
had a strict relation to all the science and culture there was in Europe, and
the Mathematics had a momentary importance at some era of activity in physical
science. These things became stereotyped as education, as the manner of men
is. But the Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and
boys were now drilled in Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, it had quite left
these shells high and dry on the beach, and was now creating and feeding other
matters at other ends of the world. But in a hundred high schools and colleges
this warfare against common sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years,
the pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he leaves the University,
as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those books for the last time. Some
thousands of young men are graduated at our colleges in this country every
year, and the persons who at forty years still read Greek can all be counted
on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read
Plato.
But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country
should be directed in its best years on studies which lead to nothing? What
was the consequence? Some intelligent person said or thought: "Is that Greek
and Latin some spell to conjure with, and not words of reason? If the
physician, the lawyer, the divine, never use it to come at their ends, I need
never learn it to come at mine. Conjuring is gone out of fashion, and I will
omit this conjugating and go straight to affairs." So they jumped the Greek
and Latin, and read law, medicine or sermons without it. To the astonishment
of all, the self-made men took even ground at once with the oldest of the
regular graduates, and in a few months the most conservative circles of Boston
and New York had quite forgotten who of their gownsmen was college-bred and
who was not.
One tendency appears alike in the philosophical speculation and in the
rudest democratical movements, through all the petulance and all the
puerility, the wish, namely, to cast aside the superfluous and arrive at short
methods, urged, as I suppose, by an intuition that the human spirit is equal
to all energies, alone, and that man is more often injured than helped by the
means he uses.
I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and the indication
of growing trust in the private, self-supplied powers of the individual to
be the affirmative principle of the recent philosophy; and that it is feeling
its own profound truth and is reaching forward at this very hour to the
happiest conclusions. I readily concede that in this, as in every period of
intellectual activity, there has been a noise of denial and protest; much was
to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by those who were reared in the old,
before they could begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer perishes
in his removal of rubbish - and that makes the offensiveness of the class.
They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their
way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy
on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit. It is of
little moment that one or two or twenty errors of our social system be
corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses.
The criticism and attack on institutions which we have witnessed has made
one thing plain, that society gains nothing while a man, not himself
renovated, attempts to renovate things around him; he has become tediously
good in some particular, but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy
and vanity are often the disgusting result.
It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the
establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a sally
against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total
regeneration. Do not be so vain of your one objection. Do you think there is
only one? Alas! my good friend, there is no part of society or of life better
than any other part. All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of
evil washes all our institutions alike. Do you complain of our Marriage? Our
marriage is no worse than our education, our diet, our trade, our social
customs. Do you complain of the laws of Property? It is a pedantry to give
such importance to them. Can we not play the game of life with these counters
as well as with those, in the institution of property as well as out of it?
Let into it the new and renewing principle of love, and property will be
universality. No one gives the impression of superiority to the institution,
which he must give who will reform it. It makes no difference what you say,
you must make me feel that you are aloof from it, by your natural and
supernatural advantages, do easily see to the end of it - do see how man can
do without it. Now all men are on one side. No man deserves to be heard
against property. Only love, only an Idea, is against property, as we hold it.
I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor waste all my time in
attacks. If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false statement, I
could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? The street is as false
as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech,
I have not got away from the lie. When we see an eager assailant of one of
these wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking him, What right have
you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel amid the
rags of a beggar.
In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst of abuses, in
the heart of cities, in the aisles of false churches, alike in one place and
in another - wherever, namely, a just and heroic soul finds itself, there it
will do what is next at hand, and by the new quality of character it shall put
forth, it shall abrogate that old condition, law or school in which it stands,
before the law of its own mind.
If partiality was one fault of the movement party, the other defect was
their reliance on Association. Doubts such as those I have intimated drove
many good persons to agitate the questions of social reform. But the revolt
against the spirit of commerce, the spirit of aristocracy, and the inveterate
abuses of cities, did not appear possible to individuals; and to do battle
against numbers, they armed themselves with numbers, and against concert, they
relied on new concert.
Following or advancing beyond the ideas of St. Simon, of Fourier, and of
Owen, three communities have already been formed in Massachusetts on kindred
plans, and many more in the country at large. They aim to give every member a
share in the manual labor, and to give an equal reward to labor and to talent;
and to unite a liberal culture with an education to labor. The scheme offers,
by the economies of associated labor and expense, to make every member rich,
on the same amount of property that in separate families would leave every
member poor. These new associations are composed of men and women of superior
talents and sentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such a
community will draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good; whether
those who have energy will not prefer their chance of superiority and power in
the world to the humble certainties of the Association; whether such a retreat
does not promise to become an asylum to those who have tried and failed,
rather than a field to the strong; and whether the members will not
necessarily be fractions of men, because each finds that he cannot enter it
without some compromise. Friendship and association are very fine things, and
a grand phalanx of the best of the human race, banded for some catholic
object. Yes, excellent, but remember that no society can ever be so large as
one man. He, in his friendship, in his natural and momentary associations,
doubles or multiplies himself, but in the hour in which he mortgages himself
to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one.
But the men of less faith could not thus believe, and to such, concert
appears the sole specific of strength. I have failed, and you have failed, but
perhaps together we shall not fail. Our housekeeping is not satisfactory to
us, but perhaps a phalanx, a community, might be. Many of us have differed in
opinion, and we could find no man who could make the truth plain, but possibly
a college or an ecclesiastical council might. I have not been able either to
persuade my brother, or to prevail on myself, to disuse the traffic or the
potation of brandy, but perhaps a pledge of total abstinence might effectually
restrain us. The candidate my party votes for is not to be trusted with a
dollar, but he will be honest in the Senate, for we can bring public opinion
to bear on him. Thus concert was the specific in all cases. But concert is
neither better nor worse, neither more nor less potent than individual force.
All the men in the world cannot make a statue walk and speak, cannot make a
drop of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than one man can. But let there
be one man, let there be truth in two men, in ten men, then is concert for the
first time possible, because the force which moves the world is a new quality,
and can never be furnished by adding whatever quantities of a different kind.
What is the use of the concert of the false and the disunited? There can be no
concert in two where there is no concert in one. When the individual is not
individual, but is dual; when his thoughts look one way and his actions
another; when his faith is traversed by his habits, when his will, enlightened
by reason, is warped by his sense; when with one hand he rows, and with the
other backs water, what concert can be?
I do not wonder at the interest these projects inspire. The world is
awaking to the idea of union, and these experiments show what it is thinking
of. It is and will be magic. Men will live and communicate, and plow, and
reap, and govern, as by added ethereal power, when once they are united, as in
a celebrated experiment; by expiration and respiration exactly together, four
persons lift a heavy man from the ground by the little finger only, and
without sense of weight. But this union must be inward and not one of the
covenants, and is to be reached by a reverse of the methods they use. The
union is only perfect when all the uniters are isolated. It is the union of
friends who live in different streets or towns. Each man, if he attempts to
join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his
proportion, and the stricter the union the smaller and the more pitiful he is.
But leave him alone to recognize in every hour and place the secret soul, he
will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment
of all the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke. Government
will be adamantine without any governor. The union must be ideal in actual
individualism.
I pass to the indication in some particulars of that faith in man, which
the heart is preaching in these days, and which engages more regard from the
consideration that the speculations of one generation are the history of the
next following.
In alluding just now to our system of education, I spoke of the deadness
of its details. But it is open to graver criticism than the palsy of its
members, it is a system of despair. The disease with which the human mind now
labors is want of faith. Men do not believe in a power of education. We do not
think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce
all high aims. We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many
frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital
of incurables. A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion
seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me "that he
liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches and other public amusements go
on." I am afraid the remark is too honest, and comes from the same origin as
the maxim of the tyrant, "If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep
it amused." I notice, too, that the ground on which eminent public servants
urge the claims of popular education is fear: "This country is filling up with
thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from
our throats." We do not believe that any education, any system of philosophy,
any influence of genius, will ever give depth of insight to a superficial
mind. Having settled ourselves into this infidelity, our skill is expended to
procure alleviations, diversion, opiates. We adorn the victim with manual
skill, his tongue with languages, his body with inoffensive and comely
manners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy of limitation and inner death we
cannot avert. Is it strange that society should be devoured by a secret
melancholy, which breaks through all its smiles and all its gayety and games?
But even one step further our infidelity has gone. It appears that some
doubt is felt by good and wise men whether really the happiness and probity of
men is increased by the culture of the mind in those disciplines to which we
give the name of education. Unhappily, too, the doubt comes from scholars,
from persons who have tried these methods. In their experience, the scholar
was not raised by the sacred thoughts among which he dwelt, but used them to
selfish ends. He was a profane person and became a showman, turning his gifts
to a marketable use and not to his own sustenance and growth. It was found
that the intellect could be independently developed, that is, in separation
from the man, as any single organ can be invigorated, and the result was
monstrous. A canine appetite for knowledge was generated, which must still be
fed, but was never satisfied, and this knowledge not being directed on action,
never took the character of substantial, humane truth, blessing those whom it
entered. It gave the scholar certain powers of expression, the power of
speech, the power of poetry, of literary art, but it did not bring him to
peace, or to beneficence.
When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange
that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief. What remedy?
Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to
which we are always invited to ascend, there the whole aspect of things
changes. I resist the skepticism of our education, and of our educated men. I
do not believe that the differences of opinion and character in men are
organic. I do not recognize, beside the class of the good and the wise, a
permanent class of skeptics, or a class of conservatives, or of malignants, or
of materialists. I do not believe in two classes. You remember the story of
the poor woman who importuned King Philip of Macedon to grant her justice,
which Philip refused; the woman exclaimed, "I appeal;" the king, astonished,
asked to whom she appealed: the woman replied, "from Philip drunk to Philip
sober." The text will suit me very well. I believe not in two classes of men,
but in man in two moods - in Philip drunk and Philip sober. I think, according
to the good-hearted word of Plato, "Unwillingly the soul is deprived of
truth." Iron conservative, miser, or thief, no man is, but by a supposed
necessity, which he tolerates by shortness or torpidity of sight. The soul
lets no man go without some visitations and holy-days of a diviner presence.
It would be easy to show, by a narrow scanning of a man`s biography, that we
are not so wedded to our paltry performances of every kind, but that every man
has at intervals the grace to scorn his performances in comparing them with
his belief of what he should do, that he puts himself on the side of his
enemies, listening gladly to what they say of him, and accusing himself of the
same things.
What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all
it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it
never executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet, the Doric column, the Roman arch, the
Gothic minster, the German anthem, when they are ended, the master casts
behind him. How sinks the song in the waves of melody which the universe pours
over his soul! Before that gracious Infinite, out of which he drew these few
strokes, how mean they look, though the praises of the world attend them. From
the triumphs of his art, he turns with desire to this greater defeat. Let
those admire who will. With silent joy he sees himself to be capable of a
beauty that eclipses all which his hands have done, all which human hands have
ever done.
Well, we are all children of genius, the children of virtue, and feel
their inspirations in our happier hours. Is not every man sometimes a radical
in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they
are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking
their rest; when they are sick or aged; in the morning, or when their
intellect or their conscience have been aroused; when they hear music or when
they read poetry they are radicals. In the circle of the rankest tories that
could be collected in England, Old or New, let a powerful and stimulating
intellect, a man of great heart and mind act on them, and very quickly these
frozen conservators will yield to the friendly influence, these hopeless will
begin to hope, these haters will begin to love, these immovable statues will
begin to spin and revolve. I cannot help recalling the fine anecdote which
Warton relates of Bishop Berkeley, when he was preparing to leave England with
his plan of planting the gospel among the American savages. "Lord Bathurst
told me that the members of the Scriblerus Club being met at his house at
dinner, they agreed to rally Berkeley, who was also his guest, on his scheme
at Bermudas. Berkeley, having listened to the many lively things they had to
say, begged to be heard in his turn, and displayed his plan with such an
astonishing and animating force of eloquence and enthusiasm that they were
struck dumb, and after some pause, rose up all together with earnestness,
exclaiming: `Let us set out with him immediately.`" Men in all ways are better
than they seem. They like flattery for the moment, but they know the truth for
their own. It is a foolish cowardice which keeps us from trusting them, and
speaking to them rude truth. They resent your honesty for an instant, they
will thank you for it always. What is it we heartily wish of each other? Is it
to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed
out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and
phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghost-like through the world, which is
itself so slight and unreal. We crave a sense of reality, though it come in
strokes of pain. I explain so - by this manlike love of truth - those excesses
and errors into which souls of great vigor, but not equal insight, often fall.
They feel the poverty at the bottom of all the seeming affluence of the world.
They know the speed with which they come straight through the thin masquerade,
and conceive a disgust at the indigence of nature: Rousseau, Mirabeau, Charles
Fox, Napoleon, Byron - and I could easily add names nearer home, of raging
riders, who drive their steeds so hard in the violence of living to forget its
illusion: they would know the worst, and tread the floors of hell. The heroes
of ancient and modern fame, Cimon, Themistocles, Alcibiades, Alexander,
Caesar, have treated life and fortune as a game to be well and skilfully
played, but the stake not to be so valued, but that any time, it could be held
as a trifle light as air, and thrown up. Caesar, just before the battle of
Pharsalia, discourses with the Egyptian priest concerning the fountains of the
Nile, and offers to quit the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will show
him those mysterious sources.
The same magnanimity shows itself in our social relations, in the
preference, namely, which each man gives to the society of superiors over that
of his equals. All that a man has will he give for right relations with his
mates. All that he has will he give for an erect demeanor in every company and
on each occasion. He aims at such things as his neighbors prize, and gives his
days and nights, his talents and his heart, to strike a good stroke, to acquit
himself in all men`s sight as a man. The consideration of an eminent citizen,
of a noted merchant, of a man of mark in his profession; naval and military
honor, a general`s commission, a marshal`s baton, a ducal coronet, the laurel
of poets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowledgment of eminent merit, have this
lustre for each candidate, that the enable him to walk erect and unshamed, in
the presence of some persons, before whom he felt himself inferior. Having
raised himself to this rank, having established his equality with class after
class, of those with whom he would live well, he still finds certain others,
before whom he cannot possess himself, because they have somewhat fairer,
somewhat grander, somewhat purer, which extorts homage of him. Is his ambition
pure? then will his laurels and his possessions seem worthless; instead of
avoiding these men who make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him,
and seek their society only, woo and embrace this his humiliation and
mortification, until he shall know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and
his brilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. He is sure that the soul
which gives the lie to all things will tell none. His constitution will not
mislead him. If it cannot carry itself as it ought, high and unmatchable in
the presence of any man, if the secret oracles whose whisper makes the
sweetness and dignity of his life, do here withdraw and accompany him no
longer, it is time to undervalue what he has valued, to dispossess himself of
what he has acquired, and with Caesar to take in his hand the army, the
empire, and Cleopatra, and say: "All these will I relinquish, if you will show
me the fountains of the Nile." Dear to us are those who love us - the swift
moments we spend with them are the compensation for a great deal of misery;
they enlarge our life; but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for
they add another life; they build a heaven before us, whereof we had not
dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the
spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.
As every man at heart wishes the best and not inferior society, wishes to
be convicted of his error, and to come to himself, so he wishes that the same
healing should not stop in his thought, but should penetrate his will or
active power. The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from
whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit. What he most wishes is
to be lifted to some higher platform, that he may see beyond his present fear
the transalpine good, so that his fear, his coldness, his custom may be broken
up like fragments of ice, melted and carried away in the great stream of good
will. Do you ask my aid? I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish more to be a
benefactor and servant than you wish to be served by me, and surely the
greatest good fortune that could befall me is precisely to be so moved by you
that I should say, "Take me and all mine, and use me and mine freely to your
ends!" for I could not say it, otherwise than because a great enlargement had
come to my heart and mind, which made me superior to my fortunes. Here we are
paralyzed with fear; we hold on to our little properties, house and land,
office and money, for the bread which they have in our experience yielded us,
although we confess that our being does not flow through them. We desire to be
made great, we desire to be touched with that fire which shall command this
ice to stream, and make our existence a benefit. If, therefore, we start
objections to your project, O friend of the slave, or friend of the poor, or
of the race, understand well, that it is because we wish to drive you to drive
us into your measures. We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are haunted with
a belief that you have a secret, which it would highliest advantage us to
learn; we would force you to impart it to us, though it should bring us to
prison, or to worse extremity.
Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth.
There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the
proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no
skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief,
suicide would unpeople the planet. It has had a name to live in some dogmatic
theology, but each man`s innocence and his real liking of his neighbor, have
kept it a dead letter. I remember standing at the polls one day, and when the
anger of the political contest gave a certain grimness to the faces of the
independent electors, and a good man at my side looking on the people,
remarked, "I am satisfied that the largest part of these men on either side
mean to vote right." I suppose considerate observers, looking at the masses of
men in their blameless, and in their equivocal actions, will assent that in
spite of selfishness and frivolity the general purpose in the great number of
persons is fidelity. The reason why any one refuses his assent to your
opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you; he refuses to accept
you as a bringer of truth, because, though you think you have it, he feels
that you have it not. You have not given him the authentic sign.
If it were worth while to run into details this general doctrine of the
latent but ever soliciting Spirit, it would be easy to adduce illustration in
particulars of a man`s equality to the church, of his equality to the state,
and of his equality to every other man. It is yet in all men`s memory, that a
few years ago the liberal churches complained that the Calvinistic church
denied to them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession: a
religious church would not complain. A religious man like Behmen, Fox, or
Swedenborg, is not irritated by wanting the sanction of the church, but the
church feels the accusation of his presence and belief.
It only needs that a just man should walk in our streets, to make it
appear how pitiful and inartificial a contrivance is our legislation. The man
whose part is taken, and who does not wait for society in anything, has a
power which society cannot choose but feel. The familiar experiment, called
the hydrostatic paradox, in which a capillary column of water balances the
ocean, is the symbol of the relation of one man to the whole family of men.
The wise Dandini, on hearing the lives of Socrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes
read, "judged them to be great men every way, excepting that they were too
much subjected to the reverence of the laws, which to second and authorize,
true virtue must abate very much of its original vigor."
And as a man is equal to the church, and equal to the state, so he is
equal to every other man. The disparities of power in men are superficial; and
all frank and searching conversation, in which a man lays himself open to his
brother, apprizes each of their radical unity. When two persons sit and
converse in thoroughly good understanding, the remark is sure to be made. See
how we have disputed about words! Let a clear, apprehensive mind, such as
every man knows among his friends, converse with the most commanding poetic
genius, I think, it would appear that there was no inequality such as men
fancy between them; that a perfect understanding, a like receiving, a like
perceiving, abolished differences, and the poet would confess that his
creative imagination gave him no deep advantage, but only the superficial one,
that he could express himself, and the other could not; that his advantage was
a knack, which might impose on indolent men, but could not impose on lovers of
truth; for they know the tax of talent, or, what a price of greatness the
power of expression too often pays. I believe it is the conviction of the
purest men that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is
incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. His want of skill in
other directions has added to his fitness for his own work. Each seems to have
some compensation yielded to him by his infirmity, and every hindrance
operates as a concentration of his force.
These and the like experiences intimate that man stands in strict
connection with a higher fact never yet manifested. There is power over and
behind us, and we are the channels of its communications. We seek to say thus
and so, and over our head some spirit sits, which contradicts what we say. We
would persuade our fellow to this or that; another self within our eyes
dissuades him. That which we keep back, this reveals. In vain we compose our
faces and our words; it holds uncontrollable communication with the enemy, and
he answers civilly to us, but believes the spirit. We exclaim, "There`s a
traitor in the house!" but at last it appears that he is the true man, and I
am the traitor. This open channel to the highest life is the first and last
reality, so subtle, so quiet, yet so tenacious, that although I have never
expressed the truth, and although I have never heard the expression of it from
any other, I know that the whole truth is here for me. What if I cannot answer
your questions? I am not pained that I cannot frame a reply to the question,
What is the operation we call Providence? There lies the unspoken thing,
present, omnipresent. Every time we converse, we seek to translate it into
speech, but whether we hit or whether we miss we have the fact. Every
discourse is an approximate answer; but it is of small consequence that we do
not get it into verbs and nouns, while it abides for contemplation forever.
If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall make themselves good in
time, the man who shall be born, whose advent men and events prepare and
foreshow, is one who shall enjoy his connection with a higher life, with the
man within man; shall destroy distrust by his trust, shall use his native but
forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely
on the Law alive and beautiful, which works over our heads and under our feet.
Pitiless, it avails itself of our success, when we obey it, and of our ruin,
when we contravene it. Men are all secret believers in it, else the word
justice would have no meaning: they believe that the best is the true; that
right is done at last; or chaos would come. It rewards actions after their
nature and not after the design of the agent. "Work," it saith to man, "in
every hour, paid or unpaid, see only that thou work, and thou canst not escape
the reward: whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn, or writing
epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn
a reward to these senses as well as to the thought: no matter, how often
defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well done, is to have
done it."
As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond surfaces, and to see how this
high will prevails without an exception or an interval, he settles himself
into serenity. He can already rely on the laws of gravity, that every stone
will fall where it is due; the good globe is faithful, and carries us securely
through the celestial spaces, anxious or resigned; we need not interfere to
help it on, and he will learn, one day, the mild lesson they teach, that our
own orbit is all our task, and we need not assist the administration of the
universe. Do not be so impatient to set the town right concerning the
unfounded pretensions and the false reputation of certain men of standing.
They are laboring harder to set the town right concerning themselves, and will
certainly succeed. Suppress for a few days your criticism on the insufficiency
of this or that teacher or experimenter, and he will have demonstrated his
insufficiency to all men`s eyes. In like manner, let a man fall into the
divine circuits, and he is enlarged. Obedience to his genius is the only
liberating influence. We wish to escape from subjection, and a sense of
inferiority - and we make self-denying ordinances, we drink water, we eat
grass, we refuse the laws, we go to jail: it is all in vain; only by obedience
to his genius; only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him,
does an angel seem to arise before a man, and lead him by the hand out of all
the wards of the prison.
That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is
cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. The
life of man is the true romance, which, when it is valiantly conducted, will
yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction. All around us, what
powers are wrapped up under the coarse mattings of custom, and all wonder
prevented. It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without
his eyes, that it does not occur to them that it is just as wonderful that he
should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the
unwise; the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the
usual. Shall not the heart which has received so much, trust the Power by
which it lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that
has guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure that the future will be
worthy of the past?
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