Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

raws after it all this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise
into another idea; they will disappear. The Greek sculpture[693] 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[694] 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.[695] 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. Everything 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,[696]
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;[697] 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 marshal 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[698] 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,[699] 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[700] 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 any
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[701]
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 to-morrow;
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 manners 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[702] 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[703] 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.[704] 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, of 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[705] 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,[706]
in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier see French, English and
American houses and modes of living. In like manner[707] 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 encyclopædia, 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[708] or Ariosto,[709]
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 wood-birds 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."[710] 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,[711] 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 behooves 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.[712]

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,[713] 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[714] 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 anything 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
event,--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[715] 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,[716] "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 the gaming and
war, ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the heart.

NOTES

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

[Footnote 1: Games of strength. The public games of Greece were
athletic and intellectual contests of various kinds. There were four
of importance: the Olympic, held every four years; the Pythian, held
every third Olympic year; and the Nemean and Isthmian, held alternate
years between the Olympic periods. These great national festivals
exercised a strong influence in Greece. They were a secure bond of
union between the numerous independent states and did much to help the
nation to repel its foreign invaders. In Greece the accomplished
athlete was reverenced almost as a god, and cases have been recorded
where altars were erected and sacrifices made in his honor. The
extreme care and cultivation of the body induced by this national
spirit is one of the most significant features of Greek culture, and
one which might wisely be imitated in the modern world.]

[Footnote 2: Troubadours. In southern France during the eleventh
century, wandering poets went from castle to castle reciting or
singing love-songs, composed in the old Provençal dialect, a sort of
vulgarized Latin. The life in the great feudal chateaux was so dull
that the lords and ladies seized with avidity any amusement which
promised to while away an idle hour. The troubadours were made much of
and became a strong element in the development of the Southern spirit.
So-called Courts of Love were formed where questions of an amorous
nature were discussed in all their bearings; learned opinions were