"Ne te quaesiveris extra."
"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest
Man's Fortune
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
I read the other day some verses written by
an eminent painter which were original and
not conventional.
The soul always hears an admonition in such
lines, let the subject be what it may.
The sentiment they instil is of more value
than any thought they may contain.
To believe your own thought, to believe that
what is true for you in your private heart
is true for all men, — that is genius.
Speak your latent conviction, and it shall
be the universal sense; for the inmost in
due time becomes the outmost,—— and our
first thought is rendered back to us by the
trumpets of the Last Judgment.
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each,
the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato,
and Milton is, that they set at naught books
and traditions, and spoke not what men but
what they thought.
A man should learn to detect and watch that
gleam of light which flashes across his mind
from within, more than the lustre of the firmament
of bards and sages.
Yet he dismisses without notice his thought,
because it is his.
In every work of genius we recognize our own
rejected thoughts: they come back to us with
a certain alienated majesty.
Great works of art have no more affecting
lesson for us than this.
They teach us to abide by our spontaneous
impression with good-humored inflexibility
then most when the whole cry of voices is
on the other side.
Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly
good sense precisely what we have thought
and felt all the time, and we shall be forced
to take with shame our own opinion from another.
There is a time in every man's education when
he arrives at the conviction that envy is
ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that
he must take himself for better, for worse,
as his portion; that though the wide universe
is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn
can come to him but through his toil bestowed
on that plot of ground which is given to him
to till.
The power which resides in him is new in nature,
and none but he knows what that is which he
can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Not for nothing one face, one character, one
fact, makes much impression on him, and another
none.
This sculpture in the memory is not without
preestablished harmony.
The eye was placed where one ray should fall,
that it might testify of that particular ray.
We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed
of that divine idea which each of us represents.
It may be safely trusted as proportionate
and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted,
but God will not have his work made manifest
by cowards.
A man is relieved and gay when he has put
his heart into his work and done his best;
but what he has said or done otherwise, shall
give him no peace.
It is a deliverance which does not deliver.
In the attempt his genius deserts him; no
muse befriends; no invention, no hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that
iron string.
Accept the place the divine providence has
found for you, the society of your contemporaries,
the connection of events.
Great men have always done so, and confided
themselves childlike to the genius of their
age, betraying their perception that the absolutely
trustworthy was seated at their heart, working
through their hands, predominating in all
their being.
And we are now men, and must accept in the
highest mind the same transcendent destiny;
and not minors and invalids in a protected
corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution,
but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying
the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos
and the Dark.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this
text, in the face and behaviour of children,
babes, and even brutes!
That divided and rebel mind, that distrust
of a sentiment because our arithmetic has
computed the strength and means opposed to
our purpose, these have not.
Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet
unconquered, and when we look in their faces,
we are disconcerted.
Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to
it, so that one babe commonly makes four or
five out of the adults who prattle and play
to it.
So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood
no less with its own piquancy and charm, and
made it enviable and gracious and its claims
not to be put by, if it will stand by itself.
Do not think the youth has no force, because
he cannot speak to you and me.
Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently
clear and emphatic.
It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries.
Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to
make us seniors very unnecessary.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a
dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord
to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the
healthy attitude of human nature.
A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in
the playhouse; independent, irresponsible,
looking out from his corner on such people
and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences
them on their merits, in the swift, summary
way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly,
eloquent, troublesome.
He cumbers himself never about consequences,
about interests: he gives an independent,
genuine verdict.
You must court him: he does not court you.
But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail
by his consciousness.
As soon as he has once acted or spoken with
eclat, he is a committed person, watched by
the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose
affections must now enter into his account.
There is no Lethe for this.
Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality!
Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having
observed, observe again from the same unaffected,
unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence,
must always be formidable.
He would utter opinions on all passing affairs,
which being seen to be not private, but necessary,
would sink like darts into the ear of men,
and put them in fear.
These are the voices which we hear in solitude,
but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter
into the world.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against
the manhood of every one of its members.
Society is a joint-stock company, in which
the members agree, for the better securing
of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender
the liberty and culture of the eater.
The virtue in most request is conformity.
Self-reliance is its aversion.
It loves not realities and creators, but names
and customs.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
He who would gather immortal palms must not
be hindered by the name of goodness, but must
explore if it be goodness.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity
of your own mind.
Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have
the suffrage of the world.
I remember an answer which when quite young
I was prompted to make to a valued adviser,
who was wont to importune me with the dear
old doctrines of the church.
On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness
of traditions, if I live wholly from within?
my friend suggested, — "But these impulses
may be from below, not from above."
I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such;
but if I am the Devil's child, I will live
then from the Devil."
No law can be sacred to me but that of my
nature.
Good and bad are but names very readily transferable
to that or this; the only right is what is
after my constitution, the only wrong what
is against it.
A man is to carry himself in the presence
of all opposition, as if every thing were
titular and ephemeral but he.
I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate
to badges and names, to large societies and
dead institutions.
Every decent and well-spoken individual affects
and sways me more than is right.
I ought to go upright and vital, and speak
the rude truth in all ways.
If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy,
shall that pass?
If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause
of Abolition, and comes to me with his last
news from Barbadoes, why should I not say
to him, 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper:
be good-natured and modest: have that grace;
and never varnish your hard, uncharitable
ambition with this incredible tenderness for
black folk a thousand miles off.
Thy love afar is spite at home.'
Rough and graceless would be such greeting,
but truth is handsomer than the affectation
of love.
Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else
it is none.
The doctrine of hatred must be preached as
the counteraction of the doctrine of love
when that pules and whines.
I shun father and mother and wife and brother,
when my genius calls me.
I would write on the lintels of the door-post,
Whim.
I hope it is somewhat better than whim at
last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.
Expect me not to show cause why I seek or
why I exclude company.
Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man
did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor
men in good situations.
Are they my poor?
I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist,
that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent,
I give to such men as do not belong to me
and to whom I do not belong.
There is a class of persons to whom by all
spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for
them I will go to prison, if need be; but
your miscellaneous popular charities; the
education at college of fools; the building
of meeting-houses to the vain end to which
many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold
Relief Societies; — though I confess with
shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar,
it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall
have the manhood to withhold.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather
the exception than the rule.
There is the man and his virtues.
Men do what is called a good action, as some
piece of courage or charity, much as they
would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance
on parade.
Their works are done as an apology or extenuation
of their living in the world, — as invalids
and the insane pay a high board.
Their virtues are penances.
I do not wish to expiate, but to live.
My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.
I much prefer that it should be of a lower
strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that
it should be glittering and unsteady.
I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to
need diet and bleeding.
I ask primary evidence that you are a man,
and refuse this appeal from the man to his
actions.
I know that for myself it makes no difference
whether I do or forbear those actions which
are reckoned excellent.
I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where
I have intrinsic right.
Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually
am, and do not need for my own assurance or
the assurance of my fellows any secondary
testimony.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not
what the people think.
This rule, equally arduous in actual and in
intellectual life, may serve for the whole
distinction between greatness and meanness.
It is the harder, because you will always
find those who think they know what is your
duty better than you know it.
It is easy in the world to live after the
world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to
live after our own; but the great man is he
who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect
sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that
have become dead to you is, that it scatters
your force.
It loses your time and blurs the impression
of your character.
If you maintain a dead church, contribute
to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great
party either for the government or against
it, spread your table like base housekeepers,
— under all these screens I have difficulty
to detect the precise man you are.
And, of course, so much force is withdrawn
from your proper life.
But do your work, and I shall know you.
Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.
A man must consider what a blindman's-buff
is this game of conformity.
If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.
I hear a preacher announce for his text and
topic the expediency of one of the institutions
of his church.
Do I not know beforehand that not possibly
can he say a new and spontaneous word?
Do I not know that, with all this ostentation
of examining the grounds of the institution,
he will do no such thing?
Do I not know that he is pledged to himself
not to look but at one side, — the permitted
side, not as a man, but as a parish minister?
He is a retained attorney, and these airs
of the bench are the emptiest affectation.
Well, most men have bound their eyes with
one or another handkerchief, and attached
themselves to some one of these communities
of opinion.
This conformity makes them not false in a
few particulars, authors of a few lies, but
false in all particulars.
Their every truth is not quite true.
Their two is not the real two, their four
not the real four; so that every word they
say chagrins us, and we know not where to
begin to set them right.
Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in
the prison-uniform of the party to which we
adhere.
We come to wear one cut of face and figure,
and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine
expression.
There is a mortifying experience in particular,
which does not fail to wreak itself also in
the general history; I mean "the foolish face
of praise," the forced smile which we put
on in company where we do not feel at ease
in answer to conversation which does not interest
us.
The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but
moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight
about the outline of the face with the most
disagreeable sensation.
For nonconformity the world whips you with
its displeasure.
And therefore a man must know how to estimate
a sour face.
The by-standers look askance on him in the
public street or in the friend's parlour.
If this aversation had its origin in contempt
and resistance like his own, he might well
go home with a sad countenance; but the sour
faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces,
have no deep cause, but are put on and off
as the wind blows and a newspaper directs.
Yet is the discontent of the multitude more
formidable than that of the senate and the
college.
It is easy enough for a firm man who knows
the world to brook the rage of the cultivated
classes.
Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they
are timid as being very vulnerable themselves.
But when to their feminine rage the indignation
of the people is added, when the ignorant
and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent
brute force that lies at the bottom of society
is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit
of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike
as a trifle of no concernment.
The other terror that scares us from self-trust
is our consistency; a reverence for our past
act or word, because the eyes of others have
no other data for computing our orbit than
our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint
them.
But why should you keep your head over your
shoulder?
Why drag about this corpse of your memory,
lest you contradict somewhat you have stated
in this or that public place?
Suppose you should contradict yourself; what
then?
It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely
on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts
of pure memory, but to bring the past for
judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and
live ever in a new day.
In your metaphysics you have denied personality
to the Deity: yet when the devout motions
of the soul come, yield to them heart and
life, though they should clothe God with shape
and color.
Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the
hand of the harlot, and flee.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds, adored by little statesmen and
philosophers and divines.
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing
to do.
He may as well concern himself with his shadow
on the wall.
Speak what you think now in hard words, and
to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard
words again, though it contradict every thing
you said to-day.
— 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.'
— Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?
Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates,
and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and
Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise
spirit that ever took flesh.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
I suppose no man can violate his nature.
All the sallies of his will are rounded in
by the law of his being, as the inequalities
of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in
the curve of the sphere.
Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him.
A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian
stanza; — read it forward, backward, or
across, it still spells the same thing.
In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which
God allows me, let me record day by day my
honest thought without prospect or retrospect,
and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical,
though I mean it not, and see it not.
My book should smell of pines and resound
with the hum of insects.
The swallow over my window should interweave
that thread or straw he carries in his bill
into my web also.
We pass for what we are.
Character teaches above our wills.
Men imagine that they communicate their virtue
or vice only by overt actions, and do not
see that virtue or vice emit a breath every
moment.
There will be an agreement in whatever variety
of actions, so they be each honest and natural
in their hour.
For of one will, the actions will be harmonious,
however unlike they seem.
These varieties are lost sight of at a little
distance, at a little height of thought.
One tendency unites them all.
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line
of a hundred tacks.
See the line from a sufficient distance, and
it straightens itself to the average tendency.
Your genuine action will explain itself, and
will explain your other genuine actions.
Your conformity explains nothing.
Act singly, and what you have already done
singly will justify you now.
Greatness appeals to the future.
If I can be firm enough to-day to do right,
and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right
before as to defend me now.
Be it how it will, do right now.
Always scorn appearances, and you always may.
The force of character is cumulative.
All the foregone days of virtue work their
health into this.
What makes the majesty of the heroes of the
senate and the field, which so fills the imagination?
The consciousness of a train of great days
and victories behind.
They shed an united light on the advancing
actor.
He is attended as by a visible escort of angels.
That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's
voice, and dignity into Washington's port,
and America into Adams's eye.
Honor is venerable to us because it is no
ephemeris.
It is always ancient virtue.
We worship it to-day because it is not of
to-day.
We love it and pay it homage, because it is
not a trap for our love and homage, but is
self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore
of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown
in a young person.
I hope in these days we have heard the last
of conformity and consistency.
Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear
a whistle from the Spartan fife.
Let us never bow and apologize more.
A great man is coming to eat at my house.
I do not wish to please him; I wish that he
should wish to please me.
I will stand here for humanity, and though
I would make it kind, I would make it true.
Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity
and squalid contentment of the times, and
hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and
office, the fact which is the upshot of all
history, that there is a great responsible
Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works;
that a true man belongs to no other time or
place, but is the centre of things.
Where he is, there is nature.
He measures you, and all men, and all events.
Ordinarily, every body in society reminds
us of somewhat else, or of some other person.
Character, reality, reminds you of nothing
else; it takes place of the whole creation.
The man must be so much, that he must make
all circumstances indifferent.
Every true man is a cause, a country, and
an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers
and time fully to accomplish his design; — and
posterity seem to follow his steps as a train
of clients.
A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we
have a Roman Empire.
Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow
and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded
with virtue and the possible of man.
An institution is the lengthened shadow of
one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony;
the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of
Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson.
Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome";
and all history resolves itself very easily
into the biography of a few stout and earnest
persons.
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things
under his feet.
Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and
down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard,
or an interloper, in the world which exists
for him.
But the man in the street, finding no worth
in himself which corresponds to the force
which built a tower or sculptured a marble
god, feels poor when he looks on these.
To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book
have an alien and forbidding air, much like
a gay equipage, and seem to say like that,
'Who are you, Sir?'
Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice,
petitioners to his faculties that they will
come out and take possession.
The picture waits for my verdict: it is not
to command me, but I am to settle its claims
to praise.
That popular fable of the sot who was picked
up dead drunk in the street, carried to the
duke's house, washed and dressed and laid
in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated
with all obsequious ceremony like the duke,
and assured that he had been insane, owes
its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes
so well the state of man, who is in the world
a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up,
exercises his reason, and finds himself a
true prince.
Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic.
In history, our imagination plays us false.
Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are
a gaudier vocabulary than private John and
Edward in a small house and common day's work;
but the things of life are the same to both;
the sum total of both is the same.
Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg,
and Gustavus?
Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear
out virtue?
As great a stake depends on your private act
to-day, as followed their public and renowned
steps.
When private men shall act with original views,
the lustre will be transferred from the actions
of kings to those of gentlemen.
The world has been instructed by its kings,
who have so magnetized the eyes of nations.
It has been taught by this colossal symbol
the mutual reverence that is due from man
to man.
The joyful loyalty with which men have everywhere
suffered the king, the noble, or the great
proprietor to walk among them by a law of
his own, make his own scale of men and things,
and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with
money but with honor, and represent the law
in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which
they obscurely signified their consciousness
of their own right and comeliness, the right
of every man.
The magnetism which all original action exerts
is explained when we inquire the reason of
self-trust.
Who is the Trustee?
What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal
reliance may be grounded?
What is the nature and power of that science-baffling
star, without parallax, without calculable
elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even
into trivial and impure actions, if the least
mark of independence appear?
The inquiry leads us to that source, at once
the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life,
which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.
We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition,
whilst all later teachings are tuitions.
In that deep force, the last fact behind which
analysis cannot go, all things find their
common origin.
For, the sense of being which in calm hours
rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not
diverse from things, from space, from light,
from time, from man, but one with them, and
proceeds obviously from the same source whence
their life and being also proceed.
We first share the life by which things exist,
and afterwards see them as appearances in
nature, and forget that we have shared their
cause.
Here is the fountain of action and of thought.
Here are the lungs of that inspiration which
giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied
without impiety and atheism.
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence,
which makes us receivers of its truth and
organs of its activity.
When we discern justice, when we discern truth,
we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage
to its beams.
If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to
pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy
is at fault.
Its presence or its absence is all we can
affirm.
Every man discriminates between the voluntary
acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions,
and knows that to his involuntary perceptions
a perfect faith is due.
He may err in the expression of them, but
he knows that these things are so, like day
and night, not to be disputed.
My wilful actions and acquisitions are but
roving; — the idlest reverie, the faintest
native emotion, command my curiosity and respect.
Thoughtless people contradict as readily the
statement of perceptions as of opinions, or
rather much more readily; for, they do not
distinguish between perception and notion.
They fancy that I choose to see this or that
thing.
But perception is not whimsical, but fatal.
If I see a trait, my children will see it
after me, and in course of time, all mankind,
— although it may chance that no one has
seen it before me.
For my perception of it is as much a fact
as the sun.
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit
are so pure, that it is profane to seek to
interpose helps.
It must be that when God speaketh he should
communicate, not one thing, but all things;
should fill the world with his voice; should
scatter forth light, nature, time, souls,
from the centre of the present thought; and
new date and new create the whole.
Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a
divine wisdom, old things pass away, — means,
teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now,
and absorbs past and future into the present
hour.
All things are made sacred by relation to
it, — one as much as another.
All things are dissolved to their centre by
their cause, and, in the universal miracle,
petty and particular miracles disappear.
If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak
of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology
of some old mouldered nation in another country,
in another world, believe him not.
Is the acorn better than the oak which is
its fulness and completion?
Is the parent better than the child into whom
he has cast his ripened being?
Whence, then, this worship of the past?
The centuries are conspirators against the
sanity and authority of the soul.
Time and space are but physiological colors
which the eye makes, but the soul is light;
where it is, is day; where it was, is night;
and history is an impertinence and an injury,
if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue
or parable of my being and becoming.
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer
upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,'
but quotes some saint or sage.
He is ashamed before the blade of grass or
the blowing rose.
These roses under my window make no reference
to former roses or to better ones; they are
for what they are; they exist with God to-day.
There is no time to them.
There is simply the rose; it is perfect in
every moment of its existence.
Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life
acts; in the full-blown flower there is no
more; in the leafless root there is no less.
Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies
nature, in all moments alike.
But man postpones or remembers; he does not
live in the present, but with reverted eye
laments the past, or, heedless of the riches
that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee
the future.
He cannot be happy and strong until he too
lives with nature in the present, above time.
This should be plain enough.
Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet
hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology
of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or
Paul.
We shall not always set so great a price on
a few texts, on a few lives.
We are like children who repeat by rote the
sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as
they grow older, of the men of talents and
character they chance to see, — painfully
recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards,
when they come into the point of view which
those had who uttered these sayings, they
understand them, and are willing to let the
words go; for, at any time, they can use words
as good when occasion comes.
If we live truly, we shall see truly.
It is as easy for the strong man to be strong,
as it is for the weak to be weak.
When we have new perception, we shall gladly
disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures
as old rubbish.
When a man lives with God, his voice shall
be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and
the rustle of the corn.
And now at last the highest truth on this
subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be
said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering
of the intuition.
That thought, by what I can now nearest approach
to say it, is this.
When good is near you, when you have life
in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed
way; you shall not discern the foot-prints
of any other; you shall not see the face of
man; you shall not hear any name;—— the
way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly
strange and new.
It shall exclude example and experience.
You take the way from man, not to man.
All persons that ever existed are its forgotten
ministers.
Fear and hope are alike beneath it.
There is somewhat low even in hope.
In the hour of vision, there is nothing that
can be called gratitude, nor properly joy.
The soul raised over passion beholds identity
and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence
of Truth and Right, and calms itself with
knowing that all things go well.
Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean,
the South Sea, — long intervals of time,
years, centuries, — are of no account.
This which I think and feel underlay every
former state of life and circumstances, as
it does underlie my present, and what is called
life, and what is called death.
Life only avails, not the having lived.
Power ceases in the instant of repose; it
resides in the moment of transition from a
past to a new state, in the shooting of the
gulf, in the darting to an aim.
This one fact the world hates, that the soul
becomes; for that for ever degrades the past,
turns all riches to poverty, all reputation
to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue,
shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.
Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance?
Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will
be power not confident but agent.
To talk of reliance is a poor external way
of speaking.
Speak rather of that which relies, because
it works and is.
Who has more obedience than I masters me,
though he should not raise his finger.
Round him I must revolve by the gravitation
of spirits.
We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent
virtue.
We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and
that a man or a company of men, plastic and
permeable to principles, by the law of nature
must overpower and ride all cities, nations,
kings, rich men, poets, who are not.
This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly
reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution
of all into the ever-blessed ONE.
Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme
Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good
by the degree in which it enters into all
lower forms.
All things real are so by so much virtue as
they contain.
Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war,
eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat,
and engage my respect as examples of its presence
and impure action.
I see the same law working in nature for conservation
and growth.
Power is in nature the essential measure of
right.
Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms
which cannot help itself.
The genesis and maturation of a planet, its
poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering
itself from the strong wind, the vital resources
of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations
of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying
soul.
Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let
us sit at home with the cause.
Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble
of men and books and institutions, by a simple
declaration of the divine fact.
Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their
feet, for God is here within.
Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility
to our own law demonstrate the poverty of
nature and fortune beside our native riches.
But now we are a mob.
Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his
genius admonished to stay at home, to put
itself in communication with the internal
ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of
water of the urns of other men.
We must go alone.
I like the silent church before the service
begins, better than any preaching.
How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons
look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary!
So let us always sit.
Why should we assume the faults of our friend,
or wife, or father, or child, because they
sit around our hearth, or are said to have
the same blood?
All men have my blood, and I have all men's.
Not for that will I adopt their petulance
or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed
of it.
But your isolation must not be mechanical,
but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.
At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy
to importune you with emphatic trifles.
Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want,
charity, all knock at once at thy closet door,
and say, — 'Come out unto us.'
But keep thy state; come not into their confusion.
The power men possess to annoy me, I give
them by a weak curiosity.
No man can come near me but through my act.
"What we love that we have, but by desire
we bereave ourselves of the love."
If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities
of obedience and faith, let us at least resist
our temptations; let us enter into the state
of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and
constancy, in our Saxon breasts.
This is to be done in our smooth times by
speaking the truth.
Check this lying hospitality and lying affection.
Live no longer to the expectation of these
deceived and deceiving people with whom we
converse.
Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O
brother, O friend, I have lived with you after
appearances hitherto.
Henceforward I am the truth's.
Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey
no law less than the eternal law.
I will have no covenants but proximities.
I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to
support my family, to be the chaste husband
of one wife, — but these relations I must
fill after a new and unprecedented way.
I appeal from your customs.
I must be myself.
I cannot break myself any longer for you,
or you.
If you can love me for what I am, we shall
be the happier.
If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve
that you should.
I will not hide my tastes or aversions.
I will so trust that what is deep is holy,
that I will do strongly before the sun and
moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart
appoints.
If you are noble, I will love you; if you
are not, I will not hurt you and myself by
hypocritical attentions.
If you are true, but not in the same truth
with me, cleave to your companions; I will
seek my own.
I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly.
It is alike your interest, and mine, and all
men's, however long we have dwelt in lies,
to live in truth.
Does this sound harsh to-day?
You will soon love what is dictated by your
nature as well as mine, and, if we follow
the truth, it will bring us out safe at last.
— But so you may give these friends pain.
Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power,
to save their sensibility.
Besides, all persons have their moments of
reason, when they look out into the region
of absolute truth; then will they justify
me, and do the same thing.
The populace think that your rejection of
popular standards is a rejection of all standard,
and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist
will use the name of philosophy to gild his
crimes.
But the law of consciousness abides.
There are two confessionals, in one or the
other of which we must be shriven.
You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing
yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way.
Consider whether you have satisfied your relations
to father, mother, cousin, neighbour, town,
cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid
you.
But I may also neglect this reflex standard,
and absolve me to myself.
I have my own stern claims and perfect circle.
It denies the name of duty to many offices
that are called duties.
But if I can discharge its debts, it enables
me to dispense with the popular code.
If any one imagines that this law is lax,
let him keep its commandment one day.
And truly it demands something godlike in
him who has cast off the common motives of
humanity, and has ventured to trust himself
for a taskmaster.
High be his heart, faithful his will, clear
his sight, that he may in good earnest be
doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a
simple purpose may be to him as strong as
iron necessity is to others!
If any man consider the present aspects of
what is called by distinction society, he
will see the need of these ethics.
The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn
out, and we are become timorous, desponding
whimperers.
We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune,
afraid of death, and afraid of each other.
Our age yields no great and perfect persons.
We want men and women who shall renovate life
and our social state, but we see that most
natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their
own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion
to their practical force, and do lean and
beg day and night continually.
Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our
occupations, our marriages, our religion,
we have not chosen, but society has chosen
for us.
We are parlour soldiers.
We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength
is born.
If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises,
they lose all heart.
If the young merchant fails, men say he is
ruined.
If the finest genius studies at one of our
colleges, and is not installed in an office
within one year afterwards in the cities or
suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to
his friends and to himself that he is right
in being disheartened, and in complaining
the rest of his life.
A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont,
who in turn tries all the professions, who
teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school,
preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress,
buys a township, and so forth, in successive
years, and always, like a cat, falls on his
feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.
He walks abreast with his days, and feels
no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for
he does not postpone his life, but lives already.
He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and
tell men they are not leaning willows, but
can and must detach themselves; that with
the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall
appear; that a man is the word made flesh,
born to shed healing to the nations, that
he should be ashamed of our compassion, and
that the moment he acts from himself, tossing
the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs
out of the window, we pity him no more, but
thank and revere him, — and that teacher
shall restore the life of man to splendor,
and make his name dear to all history.
It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance
must work a revolution in all the offices
and relations of men; in their religion; in
their education; in their pursuits; their
modes of living; their association; in their
property; in their speculative views.
1.
In what prayers do men allow themselves!
That which they call a holy office is not
so much as brave and manly.
Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign
addition to come through some foreign virtue,
and loses itself in endless mazes of natural
and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous.
Prayer that craves a particular commodity,
— any thing less than all good, — is vicious.
Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of
life from the highest point of view.
It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant
soul.
It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works
good.
But prayer as a means to effect a private
end is meanness and theft.
It supposes dualism and not unity in nature
and consciousness.
As soon as the man is at one with God, he
will not beg.
He will then see prayer in all action.
The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field
to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling
with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers
heard throughout nature, though for cheap
ends.
Caratach, in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished
to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies,
—
"His hidden meaning lies in our endeavours;
Our valors are our best gods."
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets.
Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it
is infirmity of will.
Regret calamities, if you can thereby help
the sufferer; if not, attend your own work,
and already the evil begins to be repaired.
Our sympathy is just as base.
We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit
down and cry for company, instead of imparting
to them truth and health in rough electric
shocks, putting them once more in communication
with their own reason.
The secret of fortune is joy in our hands.
Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping
man.
For him all doors are flung wide: him all
tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes
follow with desire.
Our love goes out to him and embraces him,
because he did not need it.
We solicitously and apologetically caress
and celebrate him, because he held on his
way and scorned our disapprobation.
The gods love him because men hated him.
"To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster,
"the blessed Immortals are swift."
As men's prayers are a disease of the will,
so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
They say with those foolish Israelites, 'Let
not God speak to us, lest we die.
Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we
will obey.'
Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in
my brother, because he has shut his own temple
doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's,
or his brother's brother's God.
Every new mind is a new classification.
If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and
power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham,
a Fourier, it imposes its classification on
other men, and lo! a new system.
In proportion to the depth of the thought,
and so to the number of the objects it touches
and brings within reach of the pupil, is his
complacency.
But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and
churches, which are also classifications of
some powerful mind acting on the elemental
thought of duty, and man's relation to the
Highest.
Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism.
The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating
every thing to the new terminology, as a girl
who has just learned botany in seeing a new
earth and new seasons thereby.
It will happen for a time, that the pupil
will find his intellectual power has grown
by the study of his master's mind.
But in all unbalanced minds, the classification
is idolized, passes for the end, and not for
a speedily exhaustible means, so that the
walls of the system blend to their eye in
the remote horizon with the walls of the universe;
the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung
on the arch their master built.
They cannot imagine how you aliens have any
right to see, — how you can see; 'It must
be somehow that you stole the light from us.'
They do not yet perceive, that light, unsystematic,
indomitable, will break into any cabin, even
into theirs.
Let them chirp awhile and call it their own.
If they are honest and do well, presently
their neat new pinfold will be too strait
and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and
vanish, and the immortal light, all young
and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored,
will beam over the universe as on the first
morning.
2.
It is for want of self-culture that the superstition
of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England,
Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated
Americans.
They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable
in the imagination did so by sticking fast
where they were, like an axis of the earth.
In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place.
The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays
at home, and when his necessities, his duties,
on any occasion call him from his house, or
into foreign lands, he is at home still, and
shall make men sensible by the expression
of his countenance, that he goes the missionary
of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and
men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper
or a valet.
I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation
of the globe, for the purposes of art, of
study, and benevolence, so that the man is
first domesticated, or does not go abroad
with the hope of finding somewhat greater
than he knows.
He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat
which he does not carry, travels away from
himself, and grows old even in youth among
old things.
In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have
become old and dilapidated as they.
He carries ruins to ruins.
Travelling is a fool's paradise.
Our first journeys discover to us the indifference
of places.
At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I
can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my
sadness.
I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark
on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples,
and there beside me is the stern fact, the
sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled
from.
I seek the Vatican, and the palaces.
I affect to be intoxicated with sights and
suggestions, but I am not intoxicated.
My giant goes with me wherever I go.
3.
But the rage of travelling is a symptom of
a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual
action.
The intellect is vagabond, and our system
of education fosters restlessness.
Our minds travel when our bodies are forced
to stay at home.
We imitate; and what is imitation but the
travelling of the mind?
Our houses are built with foreign taste; our
shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments;
our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean,
and follow the Past and the Distant.
The soul created the arts wherever they have
flourished.
It was in his own mind that the artist sought
his model.
It was an application of his own thought to
the thing to be done and the conditions to
be observed.
And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic
model?
Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought,
and quaint expression are as near to us as
to any, and if the American artist will study
with hope and love the precise thing to be
done by him, considering the climate, the
soil, the length of the day, the wants of
the people, the habit and form of the government,
he will create a house in which all these
will find themselves fitted, and taste and
sentiment will be satisfied also.
Insist on yourself; never imitate.
Your own gift you can present every moment
with the cumulative force of a whole life's
cultivation; but of the adopted talent of
another, you have only an extemporaneous,
half possession.
That which each can do best, none but his
Maker can teach him.
No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till
that person has exhibited it.
Where is the master who could have taught
Shakspeare?
Where is the master who could have instructed
Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton?
Every great man is a unique.
The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that
part he could not borrow.
Shakspeare will never be made by the study
of Shakspeare.
Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot
hope too much or dare too much.
There is at this moment for you an utterance
brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel
of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or
the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different
from all these.
Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent,
with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat
itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs
say, surely you can reply to them in the same
pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue
are two organs of one nature.
Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy
life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce
the Foreworld again.
4.
As our Religion, our Education, our Art look
abroad, so does our spirit of society.
All men plume themselves on the improvement
of society, and no man improves.
Society never advances.
It recedes as fast on one side as it gains
on the other.
It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous,
it is civilized, it is christianized, it is
rich, it is scientific; but this change is
not amelioration.
For every thing that is given, something is
taken.
Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
What a contrast between the well-clad, reading,
writing, thinking American, with a watch,
a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket,
and the naked New Zealander, whose property
is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided
twentieth of a shed to sleep under!
But compare the health of the two men, and
you shall see that the white man has lost
his aboriginal strength.
If the traveller tell us truly, strike the
savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two
the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck
the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow
shall send the white to his grave.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has
lost the use of his feet.
He is supported on crutches, but lacks so
much support of muscle.
He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of
the skill to tell the hour by the sun.
A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so
being sure of the information when he wants
it, the man in the street does not know a
star in the sky.
The solstice he does not observe; the equinox
he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar
of the year is without a dial in his mind.
His note-books impair his memory; his libraries
overload his wit; the insurance-office increases
the number of accidents; and it may be a question
whether machinery does not encumber; whether
we have not lost by refinement some energy,
by a Christianity entrenched in establishments
and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.
For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom
where is the Christian?
There is no more deviation in the moral standard
than in the standard of height or bulk.
No greater men are now than ever were.
A singular equality may be observed between
the great men of the first and of the last
ages; nor can all the science, art, religion,
and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail
to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes,
three or four and twenty centuries ago.
Not in time is the race progressive.
Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are
great men, but they leave no class.
He who is really of their class will not be
called by their name, but will be his own
man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect.
The arts and inventions of each period are
only its costume, and do not invigorate men.
The harm of the improved machinery may compensate
its good.
Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in
their fishing-boats, as to astonish Parry
and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the
resources of science and art.
Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a
more splendid series of celestial phenomena
than any one since.
Columbus found the New World in an undecked
boat.
It is curious to see the periodical disuse
and perishing of means and machinery, which
were introduced with loud laudation a few
years or centuries before.
The great genius returns to essential man.
We reckoned the improvements of the art of
war among the triumphs of science, and yet
Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac,
which consisted of falling back on naked valor,
and disencumbering it of all aids.
The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect
army, says Las Casas, "without abolishing
our arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages,
until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the
soldier should receive his supply of corn,
grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread
himself."
Society is a wave.
The wave moves onward, but the water of which
it is composed does not.
The same particle does not rise from the valley
to the ridge.
Its unity is only phenomenal.
The persons who make up a nation to-day, next
year die, and their experience with them.
And so the reliance on Property, including
the reliance on governments which protect
it, is the want of self-reliance.
Men have looked away from themselves and at
things so long, that they have come to esteem
the religious, learned, and civil institutions
as guards of property, and they deprecate
assaults on these, because they feel them
to be assaults on property.
They measure their esteem of each other by
what each has, and not by what each is.
But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his
property, out of new respect for his nature.
Especially he hates what he has, if he see
that it is accidental, — came to him by
inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels
that it is not having; it does not belong
to him, has no root in him, and merely lies
there, because no revolution or no robber
takes it away.
But that which a man is does always by necessity
acquire, and what the man acquires is living
property, which does not wait the beck of
rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire,
or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually
renews itself wherever the man breathes.
"Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph
Ali, "is seeking after thee; therefore be
at rest from seeking after it."
Our dependence on these foreign goods leads
us to our slavish respect for numbers.
The political parties meet in numerous conventions;
the greater the concourse, and with each new
uproar of announcement, The delegation from
Essex!
The Democrats from New Hampshire!
The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels
himself stronger than before by a new thousand
of eyes and arms.
In like manner the reformers summon conventions,
and vote and resolve in multitude.
Not so, O friends! will the God deign to enter
and inhabit you, but by a method precisely
the reverse.
It is only as a man puts off all foreign support,
and stands alone, that I see him to be strong
and to prevail.
He is weaker by every recruit to his banner.
Is not a man better than a town?
Ask nothing of men, and in the endless mutation,
thou only firm column must presently appear
the upholder of all that surrounds thee.
He who knows that power is inborn, that he
is weak because he has looked for good out
of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws
himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly
rights himself, stands in the erect position,
commands his limbs, works miracles; just as
a man who stands on his feet is stronger than
a man who stands on his head.
So use all that is called Fortune.
Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and
lose all, as her wheel rolls.
But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings,
and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors
of God.
In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast
chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit
hereafter out of fear from her rotations.
A political victory, a rise of rents, the
recovery of your sick, or the return of your
absent friend, or some other favorable event,
raises your spirits, and you think good days
are preparing for you.
Do not believe it.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph
of principles.
