Essays — First Series

ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES

By Ralph Waldo Emerson


Contents

  I. HISTORY
  II. SELF-RELIANCE
  III. COMPENSATION
  IV. SPIRITUAL LAWS
  V. LOVE
  VI. FRIENDSHIP
  VII. PRUDENCE
  VIII. HEROISM
  IX. THE OVER-SOUL
  X. CIRCLES
  XI. INTELLECT
  XII. ART


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I.
HISTORY


There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are
And it cometh everywhere.


I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Cæsar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.




HISTORY


There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet
to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the
right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has
thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any
time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this
universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is
the only and sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is
illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing
less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human
spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every
thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But
the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history
preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances
predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time.
A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand
forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain,
America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp,
kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his
manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must
solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all
to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between
the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe
is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book
is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise
of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal
forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages
explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is
one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact
in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men
have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every
revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same
thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform
was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion
again it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must
correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as we
read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and
executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret
experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or
Cæsar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind’s powers and
depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political
movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say,
‘Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.’ This remedies the
defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions
into perspective; and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the
waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can
see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon,
Alcibiades, and Catiline.

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and
things. Human life, as containing this, is mysterious and inviolable,
and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence
their ultimate reason; all express more or less distinctly some command
of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also holds of the soul,
covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it
with swords and laws and wide and complex combinations. The obscure
consciousness of this fact is the light of all our day, the claim of
claims; the plea for education, for justice, for charity; the
foundation of friendship and love and of the heroism and grandeur which
belong to acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we
always read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the
romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures,—in the sacerdotal, the
imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius,—anywhere lose
our ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better
men; but rather is it true that in their grandest strokes we feel most
at home.