《美国文学史》扩充材料第 3 部分
超验主义与美国的文艺复兴
Part I. Background Reading：
Transcendental Ideas: Definitions
An Overview of American Transcendentalism
Martin Bickman, University of Colorado
Although Transcendentalism as a historical movement was limited in time from the mid
1830s to the late 1840s and in space to eastern Massachusetts, its ripples continue to
spread through American culture. Beginning as a quarrel within the Unitarian church,
Transcendentalism's questioning of established cultural forms, its urge to reintegrate
spirit and matter, its desire to turn ideas into concrete action developed a momentum of
its own, spreading from the spheres of religion and education to literature, philosophy,
and social reform. While Transcendentalism's ambivalence about any communal effort
that would compromise individual integrity prevented it from creating lasting institutions,
it helped set the terms for being an intellectual in America.
It is easier to note its pervasive influence, though, than it is to clarify its doctrines. The
fluidity and elusiveness of Transcendentalism was registered even by some of its most
intelligent contemporaries. Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, writes: "He is German by
birth, and is called Giant Transcendentalist, but as to his form, his features, his substance,
and his nature generally, it is the chief peculiarity of this huge miscreant that neither he
for himself nor anybody for him has ever been able to describe them. As we rushed by the
cavern's mouth we caught a hasty glimpse of him, looking somewhat like an
ill-proportioned figure but considerably more like a heap of fog and duskiness. He
shouted after us, but in so strange a phraseology that we knew not what he meant, nor
whether to be encouraged or affrighted." [from "The Celestial Railroad" ] On an
American visit, Charles Dickens was told "that whatever was unintelligible would
certainly be transcendental" and Edgar Allan Poe instructs a young author to write the
Tone Transcendental by using small words but turning them upside down. A Baltimore
clergyman noted that "a new philosophy has risen, maintaining that nothing is everything
in general, and everything is nothing in particular."
While these quotations imply that Transcendentalism had a language problem
compounded of foreign borrowings and oracular jargon, the underlying difficulty in
comprehension is that it was both a cause and a result of a major paradigm shift in
epistemology, in conceptualizing how the mind knows the world, the divine, and itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, its leading exponent, described both this shift and the derivation
of the movement's name thus: "It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism
of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by
Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which
insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience
of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative
forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired;
that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental
forms." [from "The Transcendentalist"] Transcendentalism, then, is not as much
concerned with a metaphysics that transcends our daily lives but rather with a new view
of the mind that replaces Locke's empiricist, materialistic, and passive model with one
emphasizing the role of the mind itself in actively shaping experience. Against Locke's
claim that there is nothing in the mind not first put there through the senses, the
Transcendentalists answer with Leibnitz, yes, nothing except the mind itself. But while
Kant emphasized the power of the mind he also stressed its limits, its inability to know
reality absolutely. The Transcendentalist vision went beyond Kant in insisting that the
mind can apprehend absolute spiritual truths directly without having to go through the
detour of the senses, without the dictates of past authorities and institutions, and without
the plodding labor of ratiocination. In this sense particularly, it was the logical--or
supralogical--extension of both the Protestant reformation and American democratic
individualism.
To grasp the significance of this paradigm shift, we have to understand how dominant,
even hegemonic, Lockean thought was in America, and particularly at Harvard College
through the 1830s, where most of the male Transcendentalists were educated. For
example Edward Everett, who exemplified, along with William Ellery Channing and
Andrews Norton, the venerated group of Unitarian ministers and public men who taught
the generation of transcendentalists, impressed his Harvard peers as a student by reciting
verbatim throughout several class periods Locke's Essay Concerning Human
Understanding . Here matter melded with method, since the chief instructional
medium at Harvard and throughout American education was the "recitation," where
knowledge was demonstrated by replicating the words of the lesson without necessarily
showing any operational mastery. The Unitarians used Locke both negatively, to
undermine the orthodox Calvinist belief in original sin-if the mind is a blank slate at birth
it cannot be innately depraved-and positively, to underwrite belief in the special
dispensation of Christianity through the evidence of Jesus's miracles, sensory testimony
of his spiritual power, the flesh testifying to the word.
So while Unitarianism was more optimistic and rationalistic than the orthodoxy it
reformed, it weakened the foundation of Protestant faith by giving more authority to what
happens outside the individual conscience than within it and elevating matter over spirit
in shaping the mind. The Transcendentalists, in turn, took advantage of the multiple
meanings of "idealism" as both an epistemology and as a moral and social critique of the
"materialism" underlying the Unitarian alliance of commercial and religious interests, an
alliance called by Emerson in another generalizing pun the "Establishment," stressing its
static nature, contrasted with the Transcendentalist "Movement," a word suggesting
youth, flux, and novelty.
An early challenge to the Unitarian synthesis came from a Swedenborgian, Sampson
Reed, who in a Harvard M.A. speech in 1821 and a pamphlet, Observations on the
Growth of the Mind (1826), posited a more organic unfolding of the mind's powers, at
once romantic and apocalyptic: "There is a unison of spirit and nature. The genius of the
mind will descend, and unite with the genius of the rivers, the lakes, and the woods."
Ironically an even stronger challenge was from a Calvinist, James Marsh, who in 1829
published an American edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, the very title of which
emphasizes not only a new epistemological doctrine but an entirely different approach to
spiritual knowledge, a turning inward to our own mental drama as the bedrock of
religious truth. Marsh, who tried to enact this vision educationally as president of the
University of Vermont, added his own "Preliminary Essay," underscoring the distinction
between "the understanding," that distinctly Lockean faculty of rationalizing from the
senses and "the Reason," those higher intuitions valued not only by German idealists but
by mystics through the ages. Soon afterward, Henry Hedge, a Unitarian minister equally
conversant with German thought, wrote for that denomination's journal, The Christian
Examiner, a laudatory article on Coleridge that Emerson declared "a living leaping
Logos." Hedge, later to be one of the first members of the informal Transcendentalist
Club that began in 1836 and met most frequently on his visits to Boston from his Maine
congregation, soon faded from the forefront of the movement through his own caution
about changing the structure of the church. He later described himself as "ecclesiastically
conservative, though intellectually radical."
The issues were soon taken up by more activist Unitarian ministers such as Orestes
Brownson, who was influenced as much by French writers like Victor Cousin and
Benjamin Constant as by English and German ones. In an 1834 Christian Examiner
article, Brownson made a crucial link between the new epistemology and the limiting
temporality and instrumentality of all cultural forms, including those of religion: "Every
positive form, however satisfactory it may be for the present, contains a germ of
opposition to future progress. It contracts, by the very effect of its duration, a stationary
character, that refuses to follow the intellect in its discoveries, and the soul in its
emotions." Two years later George Ripley and Henry Furness would specifically question
the Unitarian stress on Christ's miracles as opposed to more personally inward and
universally moral validations of Christianity. Emerson stated this position most
eloquently in his "Divinity School Address" of 1838: "But the word Miracle, as
pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one
with the blowing clover and the falling rain." Andrews Norton soon labeled the
Transcendentalist position "the Latest Form of Infidelity. " Heeding his own words that
"there is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding,"
Emerson refused to become entangled in the ensuing theological debates led on the
Transcendentalist front first by Ripley and then by Theodore Parker. While these two
ministers had youthful energy and wide learning on their side, they soon found
themselves embattled and isolated within the institution as pulpit exchanges were
refused and social pressures mounted.
The controversy within the church was paralleled by another conflict between the
Establishment and the Movement in the field of education. Bronson Alcott, one of the few
non-ministerial Transcendentalists and a self-taught teacher who had run other
innovative schools in his native rural Connecticut, opened in 1834 near the Boston
Common his Temple School. Alcott translated Transcendentalism into pedagogy by
having the students shape and share their own thoughts in discussions and journals,
instead of rote memory and textbook recitation. Language was seen as not simply a skill
but the bridge between the individual soul and the physical and social worlds, so that
lessons on vocabulary and grammar were integrated with spiritual matters.
Elizabeth Peabody, Alcott's usually unpaid assistant, brought the school to the attention
of the larger public in her 1835 Record of a School, but the stormclouds did not break
until Alcott published under his own name in 1836-37 two volumes of her transcriptions
of his Conversations with Children on the Gospels. Although the explicit outcry was
against Alcott's discussions with young children of physical birth--Andrews Norton, again
in the forefront of reaction, called it "one-third absurd, one-third blasphemous, and
one-third obscene"--the underlying challenge was to the very structures of church and
secular authority. By granting a Neoplatonic/Wordsworthian spiritual wisdom to the
young, Alcott's practice threatened to invert the normal flow of teaching from adult to
child, clergy to laity, institution to individual. Again, a reversion to a more primitive and
protestant Christianity was seen as subversively to established Christianity. Despite
Emerson's defense in the newspapers, Alcott's student body dwindled and he was never
to be a classroom teacher again. He did go on to pioneer, along with Margaret Fuller and
Peabody herself, that uniquely Transcendentalist form of adult education, the
Conversation, where the interplay of the participants' minds becomes more important
than any specific doctrine, process more important than product. Through means like
these and Elizabeth Peabody's founding of the Kindergarten movement in postbellum
America, Transcendentalist education went underground only become a constant
progressive current in American education.
The Transcendentalists, then, lost their immediate skirmishes within the Unitarian
church and the field of education, however much their ideas were later to shape both
these institutions. An alternative strategy was to extrapolate Transcendentalist ideas in a
world outside these spheres, and no one did this more expansively than Margaret Fuller.
She applied the notions of self-reliance and equality to gender roles in the first significant
feminist essay in America, published in 1844 in The Dial, the Transcendentalist journal
she edited and helped found in 1840. Later, the piece was expanded to the book Woman
in the Nineteenth Century (1845). She then left New England scene completely to become
first literary reviewer and then reporter on social issues for the New York Tribune, finally
widening her circle even beyond America to become involved in the failed Italian
revolution of 1848 and dying soon thereafter in a tragic shipwreck.
The largest organized secession, though, from Boston Unitarianism and its values was the
communitarian experiment in rural living known as Brook Farm, initiated by George
Ripley in 1841. The goal was to unite the mind with the hand, and eliminate the
corresponding invidious distinctions between classes in society. Everyone participated in
farm work and its excellent school on the premises underlined the pedagogical nature of
the entire enterprise. There was a tension, however, between Trancendentalism's
spontaneous anti-formalism and the prescriptive systematic dictates of the French
utopian thinker Fourier which were increasingly taken as blueprints. Even before a
disastrous and uninsured fire the community's vision thus became blurred, and ended in
1847. Despite its demise and that of the even smaller, shorter-lived Fruitlands community
of Bronson Alcott, the notion of a pastoral retreat of simplicity and cooperation
confronting by example the capitalist industrialism of the larger society became fixed in
the American imagination.
Brook Farm threw into relief a basic tension in Transcendentalism between joint action
and individual development. At one pole, Emerson and Thoreau, who both declined to be
Brook Farmers, felt that improvement must begin with the self, that many of the specific
reforms rampant in Jacksonian America such as prohibition and vegetarianism were too
narrowly conceived and that to engage in social and political action was to dissipate
creative energies. One the other side were Brownson, Peabody, and, intermittently Alcott,
who felt that rampant individualism was part of the problem, not part of the solution, and
that social change could be effected only through social means. But even Emerson and
Thoreau recognized that when evils such as slavery and imperialistic war reach a certain
enormity, one must speak out and act, and they, along with other Transcendentalists,
most notably Theodore Parker, joined the abolitionist cause.
Well before the firebell of the Civil War, Transcendentalism as a living force seemed to be
extinguished as quickly as it flared up. As Perry Miller pointed out: "Parker killed himself
with overwork, and Thoreau expended himself; Emerson dissolved into aphasia, Ripley
subsided into disillusion, Hedge became a Harvard professor. . . Brownson became a
Catholic, as did Sophia Ripley, and Elizabeth Peabody became a 'character.'" There were a
number of younger and secondary figures such as Franklin Sanborn and Thomas
Wentworth Higginson who perpetuated the movement through their memoirs and their
own actions--Sanborn ran a progressive school in Concord, Higginson encouraged
women such as Emily Dickinson to write--but the energy was gone and the social
forms-clubs, periodicals like The Western Literary Messenger and The Dial, schools and
communes--had in proper Transcendentalist fashion self-destructed.
What did remain as a living movement was the ongoing effect of Transcendentalism in
literature and philosophy. Most of the Transcendentalists were writers: they wrote
voluminous personal journals, sermons, letters, manifestoes, poems, translations, and
essays. Of this, perhaps only Emerson's essays and Thoreau's Walden were in the highest
artist rank, but taken together the body of writings imply a theory of language. As often
the most influential formulations are in the works of Emerson. In that epitome of
Transcendentalism, Nature (1836), Emerson posits language as originating in names for
natural objects which, through the doctrine of correspondences, have intrinsic spiritual
and symbolic significance. Thus, every word was once a poem, or, more specifically, a
metaphor, since it combines a sensory meaning with a more intangible or psychological
one, the "natural fact" conveying a corresponding "spiritual fact." But the sensory
component of language begins to fade through use, as language entropically drifts
towards abstraction, and becomes only a set of one dimensional verbal counters that
buffers us from immediate perception of the inner and outer worlds. The truly creative
writer is one who can "pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things,"
liberating us from the most pervasive and imprisoning of cultural forms, the categories of
ordinary language. Emerson thus rescues the creative writer from the belletristic margins
of American society to the epistemological center where the husks of old meanings are
discarded and new ones made.
This aesthetic of deconstructing conventional language to open the doors of perception,
of using fresh concrete description that at the same time has symbolic resonance, was
internalized by writers who reject any trace of Transcendentalist metaphysics like Ernest
Hemingway and William Carlos Williams ("No ideas but in things"). It particularly
shaped American poetry, especially when joined with Emerson's rejection of traditional
poetic forms in favor of each utterance creating its own appropriate form, "a
metre-making-argument. . . a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a
plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own." While Emerson himself and the
younger poets he directly nurtured like Jones Very, a mad Harvard tutor, and Ellery
Channing, the ne'er do well nephew of William Ellery Channing, formulator of American
Unitarianism, were unable to make a successfully break from regular forms, Walt
Whitman and Emily Dickinson in widely different ways created poetic forms that are an
extension of content. Between them they helped modern poetry find its most compelling
subject in its embrace of the common, in grasping the immediacies of our lives with a
visionary intensity so that facts flower into truths, in Thoreau's phrase.
Transcendentalism also remains a shaping force at the heart of American philosophy, but
unlike its role in literature, its centrality to American philosophy has only recently been
argued, by contemporary philosophers such as Stanley Cavell and Cornel West. To trace
this lineage more precisely, we can return to Nature, which begins with a distinction
between the ME and the NOT ME. Any reader of German philosophy would then predict
that through a long series of dialectical manipulations of abstract propositions the two
turn out to be identical, two faces of the same unitary reality. But Emerson takes a
different road and immediately collapses the distinction through a direct personal
experience, that of crossing a bare common and becoming "a transparent eye-ball"
instead of simply an "I." Later in the work Emerson pulls back from monistic Idealism
not because it is false but because it disparages nature and leaves no Other to love. Both
this privileging of direct experience over coherent system-building and this weighing of
philosophical propositions not by their truth value but by how best they help us live were
to be developed later in the century by William James and John Dewey in America's most
crucial contribution to philosophy, Pragmatism. Both Transcendentalism and
Pragmatism articulate and conceptualize peculiarly American dispositions towards
knowing, as Daniel Boorstin writes: "We sometimes forget how gradual was the
'discovery' of America; it was a by-product of the occupation of the continent. To act, to
move on, to explore also meant to push back the frontiers of knowledge; this inevitably
gave a practical and dynamic character to the very idea of knowledge. To learn and to act
became one." This vision is at the center of Emerson's 1838 address, "The American
Scholar," which reunifies divisions that have plagued western philosophy such as
contemplation vs. action, soul vs. body, concept vs. specific object. The
Transcendentalists and Pragmatists viewed knowledge and cultural forms not as
perpetual truths but as temporary constructions, and insisted that all such constructions
be open to the tests of continuing experience, that we put more faith in the mind's ability
to order the world moment by moment than in complete and self-enclosed systems.
For this reason Transcendentalism remains in American life less as a specific
doctrine--no one now calls oneself a "Transcendentalist"--than as presiding spirit behind
many movements that resisting the dominant culture. The writings of Thoreau, for
example, shaped both the passive resistance methods of the civil rights movement and
the underlying vision of the ecology movement. Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody
are role models for feminist intellectuals who also espouse activism. The
Transcendentalist efforts in education were reincarnated both in Dewey' laboratory
school and the open school movement of the 1970s, and Brook Farm was the prototype of
many of the communes of this same period. At its core, Transcendentalism was a youth
movement, making eloquently obvious one of the first generation gaps in American
history. Emerson wrote, "This deliquium, this ossification of the soul, is the Fall of Man.
The redemption is lodged in the heart of youth," and went on to contrast the Party of
Hope with the Party of Memory. Based on the foundational American assumption that
the future can be better than the past through imagination and effort, the
Transcendentalists envisioned a culture that would foster further acts of culture-making,
a community that would also liberate the individual, a way of thinking that would also
become a way of doing.
Albanese, Catherine L. Corresponding Motion: Transcendental Religion and the New
America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977.
Barbour, Brian M. American Transcendentalism: An Anthology of Criticism. Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973.
Boller, Paul F. American Transcendentalism, 1830-60: An Intellectual Inquiry. New
York: Putnam 抯, 1974.
Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American
Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.
---. 揟 he Transcendentalists?in Columbia Literary History of the United States. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Cavell, Stanley. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Francis, Richard. Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm,
Fruitlands, and Walden. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1997.
Goodman, Russell B. American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Gura, Philip F. and Joel Myerson, Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism.
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
Hutchison, William R. The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in The New
England Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.
Kern, Alexander, 揟 he Rise of Transcendentalism, 1815-1860.?In Transitions in
American Literary History, ed. Harry Hayden Clark. Durham: Duke University Press,
1954. 245-314.
Levin, Jonathan. The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American
Literary Modernism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson.
New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1941.
Miller, Perry. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1950.
Mott, Wesley T. ed. Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1996.
---, ed. Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Myerson, Joel, ed. The Transcendentalists: A Review of Research and Criticism. New
York: Modern Language Association, 1984.
Barbara Packer, 揟 he Transcendentalists,? in The Cambridge History of American
Literature: Volume Two, Prose Writing 1820-60, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 329-604.
Poirier, Richard. The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections. New York:
Random House, 1987.
Rose, Anne C. Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1981.
Simon, Myron, and Thornton H. Parsons, eds. Transcendentalism and its Legacy. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan P, 1966.
Versluis, Arthur. American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions. New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993.
West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
Transcendental Ideas
Philosophy of Nature
Primary Texts: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature (1836); Nature Study Text
"The Method of Nature" (Lecture, 1841)
"Nature" (Essays, Second Series, 1844)
Primary Texts: Henry David Thoreau
Walden (1854)
Walden Web text
"Ktaadn" section from The Maine Woods, Web Study text
Saddle-back Mountain experience
Cape Cod
"Walking" (1849), Web Study Text [Meg Brulatour, VCU]
Natural History of Massachusetts
A Walk to Wachusetts
A Winter Walk
Wild Apples
Autumnal Tints
Night and Moonlight
The Succession of Forests
Excursions[1863] Includes Biographical sketch [by R.W. Emerson]--Natural
history of Massachusetts.--A walk to Wachusetts.--The landlord.--A winter walk.--The
succession of forest trees.--Walking.--Autumnal tints.--Wild apples.--Night and
moonlight [On Library of Congress, American Memory site]
The Writings of Henry David Thoreau.
Related links:
"Emerson and Thoreau as Eco-Transcendentalists" by Ann Woodlief
Botanical Index to Thoreau's Journals. Ray Angelo.
Student Notes on the Transcendentalist Perspective of Nature
Man learns that Nature is awe-inspiring, all-powerful and full of dangerous beauty. Man
is limited by nature's fences; there are some places in Nature that man is incapable of
traversing?be it too daunting emotionally, as it was for Thoreau in Ktaadn, or simply a
physical impossibility. Thoreau in "Walking" observes, "For my part I feel that with
regard to Nature I live sort of a border life, on the confines of a world into which I make
occasional and transient forays only. . . ." Man is so insignificant in the face of nature, our
existence is untenable: Thoreau's "House-Warming" . . . ."Nor need we trouble ourselves
to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their
threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from Cold
Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to
man's existence on the globe."
As treacherous and cruel that Nature's justice can be, Mother Nature simultaneously
rejuvenates the soul, and both Emerson and Thoreau believed that emotional and
spiritual rebirth was an important tool of Nature's glory. In his journal, Emerson writes
(in absolutely beautiful prose reminiscent of Whitman): "In the instant you leave far
behind all human relations, wife, mother and child, and live only with the savages?water,
air, light, carbon, lime, and granite. Nature grows over me. Frogs pipe; waters far off
tinkle; dry leaves hiss; grass bends and rustles, and I have died out of the human world
and come to feel a strange, cold, aqueous, terraqueous, aerial, ethereal sympathy and
existence. I sow the sun and moon for seeds." Similarly in "Walking", Thoreau writes, "If
you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and
friends, and never see them again, --if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and
settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk." Dying in nature
is automatic rebirth, a recycling. "Walking": "So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till
one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine
into our minds and hearts. And light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as
warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn."
Recaptured innocence is another aspect of man's relationship with nature, which
coincides with truth. Emerson's "The Method of Nature", states:
"Shall we not quit our companions, and betake. . . .some unvisited recess in Moosehead
Lake, to bewail our innocency and recover it, and with it the power to communicate again
with these sharers of a more sacred idea." He continues: "Let us worship the mighty and
transcendent Soul. . . . Truth is always holy, holiness is wise. . . . Tenderly, tenderly they
woo and court us from every object in nature, from every fact in life, from every thought
in the mind. The one condition coupled to the gift of truth is its use. . . .Emanuel
Swedenborg affirmed that it was opened to him, that the spirits who knew truth in this
life, but did it not, at death shall lose their knowledge."
Emerson and Thoreau realized that Nature is elusive, an infinite circle that man would
never really quite grasp. But for both of these men, there was thrill in the chase?a
stimulating enigma and mind-bending chase for answers that remained just outside of
the periphery. In Thoreau's "Where I Lived and what I Lived For": "Men esteem truth
remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the
last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime."
Emerson in "Circles" : "There is no end in nature, but every ending is a beginning; that
there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep
opens. This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying
Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet. . . ." To Emerson, the fluidness
of his surroundings meant Nature is a continuous expression of the spirit. Thoreau
continues the same idea in "The Pond in Winter": "After a still winter night I awoke with
the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in
vain to answer in my sleep, as what 梙 ow 梬 hen 梬 here? But there was dawning Nature,
in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face,
and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question to nature and daylight." The
answer was there is no answer--just open your eyes to see what Nature reveals to you day
after day! He continues this idea of not really wanting to know all of nature's laws: "Our
notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances we detect; but the
harmony results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring,
laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful."
Shannon Riley
Insofar as American thought is concerned, there seem to be two distinct lines of thought
concerning Nature. One, which had among its proponents the bulk of colonial Americans,
is that Nature?the wilderness, more accurately?is a foreign, rather fearful entity that must
be dealt with by taming it. It is not uncommon for the wilderness to be referred to as a
"desert" in early American writing. We must remember the writers were most often
speaking of the lush green wildness of the mid-Atlantic and New England states when
they used this term! Nature was unpredictable, irrational, and vaguely feminine and bad.
According to this view, the main purpose of Nature is how it may serve mankind; it has
little value in itself if left in a "natural" state. Evolving from this fearful outlook is the
attitude contained in the word "frontier," which translates as opportunity; the frontier is
a tabula rasa commodity, a blank slate available to anyone with the guts, willpower, and
means to inscribe his name. Again, it has little or no value in itself but only in its potential
offering to the prospective owner. Once owned, it is of course no longer "frontier" but
merely "property."
The second line of thought?which most Americans espouse today in theory, at least, if not
in actual practice?is that Nature is a good entity and valuable on its own unique terms, as
itself, without regard to the purposes of mankind. However, it's very difficult to escape
our Puritan/Yankee heritage. (Yankee is used in a pre-Civil War sense here). We still ask
of Nature: what good is it? Even that we want left strictly alone in its pristine wild beauty
is unmolested because we've already taken what we wanted: the idea of a place still with
clean air, water, animals. This desire was the driving force behind the creation of the
National Parks: we want to preserve not Nature, exactly, but the loveliness of it. While
one surely cannot argue with the positive result of such a desire, nonetheless it goes right
back to "What good is it?" To value Nature strictly as itself without any regard to profit,
financial, spiritual, or otherwise, seems an impossible task.
Meg Brulatour
What strikes me the most in each of the readings, not only in Emerson's Nature is the
intense connection made between spirituality and nature. It is certainly present in
Thoreau's texts; Walden and "Walking" are probably the best examples. The entirety of
"Walking" seems to be an extended metaphor for pushing forward, not only physically,
but mentally and spiritually as well. Without nature, we wouldn't survive in any manner:
physically, emotionally, mentally or most of all spiritually. Thoreau seems to endorse a
constant communion with nature. Obviously, he devotes his life to it, in what we learn
from Walden.
Emerson, while endorsing a similar type of philosophy of nature, seems more stringent in
his ideas of nature and less stringent in his actual communion with nature. Of course, this
could be false. It might be his writing style and authoritative tone that seem to preach
more than practice. Emerson gives few personal examples, so readers really don't know if
he lives in the way that he suggests readers or listeners live. Emerson seems to focus a
great deal on the ties between nature and the spirit. He tells readers what the connections
are. Thoreau, on the other hand, often shows us the connections, but leaves it up to us to
make them in our own minds.
Ellen Moore
Transcendental Ideas
Philosophy of Writing and Aesthetics
The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion, 1840-1844.
Aesthetics is defined by Random House as "having a sense of the beautiful." This can
certainly be said of such Transcendental writers as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph
Waldo Emerson. Both writers were constantly seeking beauty, not only in terms of nature,
but also in terms of the individual spirit. While aesthetics can refer to any sense of beauty,
it is often used in terms of literature. How does a piece work aesthetically? How does it
look or how is it shaped and/or crafted? When reading Thoreau, I often feel as if he is
writing for himself. But if his only intended audience was himself, why would he have
bothered shaping such works as Walden into different sections? He would have written in
his own internal language that would hold little meaning for anyone other than himself.
The Transcendentalists did not write only for themselves. They wrote for anyone who was
and is interested in the notion of transcendence, or the notion of using reason and
intellect in order to go beyond the pre-existing limits of the world. When considering
aesthetics, most people think of poetry, which often attempts to portray beauty --however
pleasant or terrifying-- in some way or another.
While Emerson and Thoreau are usually thought of as the fathers of American
Transcendentalism, they are not the only poets who are considered in the
Transcendentalist poetic canon. Although he wrote "The Poet" and a vast number of his
own poems, Emerson has a strange role in the aesthetics of American Transcendentalism.
Many critics consider his ideas on the role of the poet, or writer, to be revolutionary.
However, those same critics are less than thrilled about Emerson's own poetry. He is said
to have influenced such famous writers as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, both
poets who are extremely well-known on their own, but who are also linked to
Transcendentalism by many scholars and critics. There are also lesser known, or lesser
remembered poets, such as Jones Very and Christopher Cranch, who were encouraged
and influenced by Emerson. Although Thoreau did not have the impact on poetry or poets
that Emerson can claim, he wrote many poems himself and had his own theories about
poetry and beauty. His main contribution to aesthetics lies in his ideas of nature and the
ability to transcend the rest of the world and focus supremely on nature.
Overall, the major elements of aesthetics that we can attribute to the Transcendentalists
include a new definition of the role of the poet and a different perspective of nature. The
transcendentalists believed that the poet was representative of everyman or everywoman,
but simultaneously different, in that he or she could observe the world, nature in
particular, and express its beauty through his or her own verse. They believed that
function was just as important, if not more so, as form, and that art lies in the process, or
the experience, and not so much in the product. In fact, the Transcendentalists usually
eskewed anything that was said to be definitive or all-encompassing. They believed in the
circularity of ideas, in that as long as people are using their intellect, ideas are always
evolving and never-ending.
Ellen Moore, Virginia Commonwealth University
Transcendental Ideas--Social and Political Reform
"In the history of the world the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as the present
hour," Emerson in the Dial.
To understand transcendental attitudes toward reform, it's necessary to have a grasp of
just what was going on, politically and socially, at the time. Jacksonian Democrats, with
some populist excesses, were in conflict with the Whig party conservatives, but both
seemed primarily interested in keeping the status quo and adding as much territory to the
country as possible. Confrontation of the rights of slaves, women, and Indians was
definitely NOT on the agenda for either party and differences between classes (and
financial resources) grew, especially as more and more immigrants poured in from a
starving Ireland and industry grew as farming diminished, turning independent farmers
into factory operatives. It was an age of endless (and ineffectual) compromises to keep
political power relatively equal between north and south, free and slave states. No wonder
it was also an age of multiple reform movements, usually by small groups of people
indignant at social and political inequalities but unable to make their voices heard
effectively in Congress. How was one to act effectively, then? Small but vocal reforms
were generally the path; speeches were made, essays were written, and some people even
totally rearranged their lives, establishing small communities to correct problems in
education, family and class structures, including sexual and gender norms. Another
solution was to go west, looking for freedoms that seemed to be denied in the east, but
anarchic lawlessness often replaced the traditional forms of government. Small inroads
were made here and there, but certainly not enough to make the sort of changes that
would prevent the Civil War.
Transcendental Ideas: Education
It could be argued that ideas about learning and growing intellectually and spiritually,
education, in a word, are the heart of American transcendentalism. Even the
transcendentalists' most literary works are explorations, open-ended and suggestive, both
conducted by the author and, as they always hoped, the reader. All of the major
transcendentalists--Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Palmer, Alcott, Brownson, Very and
more--spent years in the classroom as teachers, and all had found traditional education to
be inadequate and stultifying. Brook Farm found its greatest successes as an educational
enterprise. Although their ideas were often too idealistic and revolutionary to be activated
in the classrooms of their time--and indeed, many were more related to self-education
than a group setting, they are still setting directions for creative thinking, theorizing, and
change in education for all ages of learnings.
Transcendental ideas about education did not begin in a vacuum, as Meg Brulatour shows
in her essay on Background for the State of Education in New England:
Post-Revolutionary War to Mid-19th Century. Krystyna Grocholski's essay, American
Transcendentalists as Teachers of their Times, offers an overview on Emerson, Thoreau,
Alcott, Peabody, and Fuller as teachers, in classes but especially in their writings.
As usual with this group, Ralph Waldo Emerson set the tone for discussions about
education, especially with his Harvard lecture, "The American Scholar "[1837] which has
had endless "rewritings" by Phi Beta Kappa lecturers and writers; his later unfinished"
Essay on Education" shows his lifelong interest in the subject. Krystyna Grocholski shares
her responses to Alcott, Emerson, and Thoreau. Another response is the on-line essay,
"Emerson's Philosophy of Education" by Sanderson Beck.
Henry David Thoreau tried to carry out some of his own revolutionary ideas, teaching
several years in Concord. An excellent overview of his ideas may be found in Martin
Bickman's essay, "Thoreau and the Tradition of the Active Mind"in Uncommon Learning:
Thoreau on Education.
Amos Bronson Alcott, the arch-idealist, also was the one who most thoroughly applied
transcendental principles in his Temple School, with the help of Elizabeth Peabody and
Margaret Fuller. His experiments at Temple School were revolutionary, as this excerpt
from Changing Educational Paradigms by Carol B. Macknight shows. See also John
Crouch's essay on "Bronson Alcott's Experiment in Practical Transcendentalism."
Transcendental Ideas: Definitions
Comparison of Early American Theologies
R. W. Horton and H. W. Edwards
Concept
Puritanism
Deism
Unitarianism
Transcendentalism
Religious
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Prime
Mover
God:
triune, God: One, powerful,
Oversoul:
not
God: One, powerful,
all-powerful,
initially benevolent,
anthropomorphic but
benevolent
good,
just now detached
good
wrathful
Universe
Creation
of Creation of God, but
God,
man's
charge;
Same as Deism
predestined,
eventually
unknowable
knowable, good
Manifestation
of
creative power of the
Oversoul
Man
God's creature;
Same as Puritans
not an animal
Same as above
Nature
Created by God,
but
often
hostile,
evil,
and source of
temptation
Human
Nature
Corrupted
by
Original
Sin, Perfectible
depraved
Source
Evil
of
Same as Puritans
Created by God,
Created by God, Same
as
above,
benevolent,
benevolent, proof of benevolent, proof of
mechanistic, proof
God's exist
of Divine existence
of God's existence
Partakes
of
Divine Nature
the Basically good (comes
from Oversoul)
Man's
nature
Ignorance and the
(through
Human perversity
"passions"
Adam's fall)
Evil non-existence
Optimistic--progress
Attitude
Deterministic
Optimistic--progress
Optimistic--inevitable
through faith, good
toward Life (predestination) through reason
progress
works
Man's Will Not free
Free
Free
Free--self-reliance
compensation
+
Faith,
glorification of To cultivate reason, To
imitate
the To realize his fullest
Man's Duty
God,
prepare do good works
goodness of God
capabilities
for afterlife
Social
Attitude
Obedience
to
authority,
Environmentalist,
spiritual
ethical,
stewardship of humanitarian
man
Man's
Destiny
Election
reprobation
How
Will of God
Determined
or
Same as Deism
Individualistic
humanitarian
and
Happiness on earth,
rewards
and Progresss forever
punishments after
Reemergence with the
Oversoul
Good
rationality
Cultivation of innate
Divinity
works,
Same as Deism
Backgrounds of American Literary Thought, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice- Hall, 1974.
Brief Timeline of
American Literature
and Events
1840-1849
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Political and
1840-1849
1840
Literature
Social History

4 July.
The Independent

Transcendentalist
Treasury Act is signed into law by
Club begins to publish
President Martin Van Buren. It
The Dial with Margaret
makes the federal government
Fuller as the first editor
exclusively

responsible
for
Bronson
Alcott,
managing its own funds.
Orphic Sayings

Anti-Slavery
Richard Henry Dana,
Convention in London, William
Jr. Two Years Before
Lloyd Garrison and others walk
the Mast
At
the
out when women abolitionists are
not allowed to be seated as
delegates.

U. S. population: 17,069,453.
 William Henry Harrison ("Old
Tippecanoe") defeats incumbent
Martin
Van
Buren
for
the
presidency.
1841

Supreme Court upholds lower
court
ruling
and
allows
the

Ralph
Waldo
Emerson, Essays, First
Amistad mutineers to return to
Series
Africa.
"Self-Reliance")


13 August. The Independent
(including
Edgar Allan Poe
Treasury Act is repealed.
becomes

Graham's Magazine in
4 March. William Henry
Harrison
is
inaugurated
as
editor
of
Philadelphia
president. Chilled through after

a lengthy outdoor ceremony, the
months
68-year-old
Harrison
contracts
Acushnet and jumps
pneumonia
and
on
ship in the Marquesas
dies
4
April. Vice-President John Tyler
Melville sails for 18
on
whaler
in July 1842.
becomes president.

7 November. Slaves aboard
the Creole mutiny and sail the
ship to Nassau, a British port,
where they are freed.

Forty-eight wagons arrive in
Sacramento
by
way
of
the
Oregon Trail, one of the earliest
large groups to make this journey.

Brook
Farm
Institute
is
founded 9 miles from Boston
(1841-47).
1842
1843

May. Colonel John C. Fremont
Poe,
Reviews
leads an expedition to explore the
Hawthorne's
Rocky Mountains.
Twice-Told Tales


Beginning of large migration
of
Henry James, Jr.,
westward.
born in New York City.


Second Seminole War ends.

Sculptor
Hiram
Powers
completes The Greek Slave.
Poe, "The Gold
Bug"; "The Black Cat"

The New-Englander
(1843-92)
1844

Aggressive
expansionist

Emerson, Essays:
James K. Polk defeats Henry
Second
Clay for the presidency.
(including "Experience"

and "The Poet"
The Springfield Republican,
Series
edited by Samuel Bowles, is

founded;
publish
his family spend seven
Emily Dickinson's poetry years
months at Fruitlands.
later.
See
Bowles
will
Bronson Alcott and
the
Concord
chronology
for
more
Living
Age
dates.
Littell's
(1844-1900)
1845

In
The
Magazine
United
and
States
Democratic

Poe, The Raven
and Other Poems
Review, John L. O'Sullivan writes

of "the fulfillment of our manifest
Woman
destiny
Nineteenth Century
to
overspread
the
Margaret
Fuller,
in
the
continent allotted by Providence,"

and the phrase catched on with
Thoreau begins living
expansionist politicians and the
at Walden Pond
public.


Hooper, Simon Suggs
Anti-rent wars in New York
Henry
David
Johnson
Jones
State protest the patroonship

system.
Narrative of the Life of
 Texas joins the union as the
Frederick Douglass, an
28th
American Slave

state.
Potato famine in Ireland brings
great
numbers
of
Irish

Frederick Douglass,
American
Whig
Review (1848-52)
immigrants. See the "Interpreting
the Irish Famine, 1846-1850" site
at the University of Virginia and
"Views of the Famine," Vassar's
pictures
and
text
from
contemporary newspapers.
1846

3 May. The Battle at Palo Alto

James
Russell
in which 2300 Americans put to
Lowell publishes the
rout twice as many Mexican
first of "The Bigelow
forces marks the beginning of the
Papers" in the Boston
Mexican War. At President Polk's
Courier to voice his
request, on 11 May Congress
opposition to war with
declares the U.S. at war with
Mexico.
Mexico.


Philosophy
6 June. Treaty with Great
Britain
extends
the
Oregon
Poe,"The
of
Composition"
Territory boundary at latitude 40

degrees to Puget Sound. This
from an Old Manse
allows President James K. Polk
(includes
to focus his attention on the war
Malvin's
with Mexico.
"Young
Hawthorne, Mosses
"Roger
Burial"
and
Goodman

14 June. In California, U.S.
Brown")
settlers proclaim the independent

Melville, Typee
Republic of California, which in

Whitman editor of
August is annexed by the United
The Brooklyn Eagle
States.

of
15 August. U.S. annexation
New
Mexico,
formerly
a
Mexican territory.

1847
Iowa becomes a state.

22-23 February. Battle of

Frederick Douglass
Buena Vista in which General
founds The North Star,
Taylor's
an
army
of
4800
men
abolitionist
defeats General Santa Anna's
newspaper.
15,000-man force.


(includes "Hamatreya"
9 March. General Winfield
Emerson, Poems
Scott's forces lay siege to Vera
and "Each and All")
Cruz and take it on 29 March.


8 September. Scott occupies
Longfellow,
the heights of Chapultepec and
Evangeline
later marches into Mexico City.


22
December.
Henry Wadsworth
Melville, Omoo
New
congressman Abraham Lincoln
makes a speech opposing the
Mexican War.

Senator Lewis Cass proposes
"popular sovereignty" by which
residents of territories decide
whether the state will be slave or
free.
1848

24 January. James Marshall

James
discovers gold near Sutter's Fort,
Lowell,
California.
Critics
News
of
the
find
Russell
A Fable for
begins the California Gold Rush
Joel Chandler Harris
of 1849.
born (d. 1928)

Mexican War ends with the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In
exchange for $15 million and the
settling
of
$3.25
million
in
American claims, Mexico cedes
some 500,000 square miles of its
territory
in
the
western
and
southwestern U.S.

12-20 July.
Lucretia
and
Mott
Elizabeth
Cady
Stanton
organize
first
the
American
women's rights
convention in Seneca Falls, New
York, where the Declaration of
Sentiments was signed by 68
women and 32 men. Picture of
Elizabeth Cady Stanton courtesy
of the National Portrait Gallery
site
on
the
Seneca
Falls
Convention.

Free Soil party organizes and
nominates Martin Van Buren on
an anti-slavery platform.

John
Humphrey
Noyes
the
Oneida
establishes
Community, a communal society
based
on
the
"complex
principles
marriage"
perfectionism.
of
and
The
society
Bloomer
begins
disbands in 1880.
1849


Thoreau,
publishing The Lily, a journal
"Resistance
to
supporting
Government"; A Week
Amelia
temperance
and
women's rights.
on the Concord and

28
Merrimack
Better known under the
ary.
title
First
Disobedience,"
gold
"Resistance
seeke
Government" recounts
rs
his
arrive
refusing to pay his poll
in San
tax as a means of
Franci
protesting the Mexican
"Civil
War.

Political
to
experience
Images
American
Rivers.
Febru
sco. (Image courtesy of the
of
Civil
his
Civil
in
Poe, "The Bells";
History site.)
"Annabel Lee"


Zachary Taylor inaugurated as
12th

Poe
dies
in
president.
Baltimore (b. 1809)
Harriet Tubman (1820-1913)

Sarah Orne Jewett
escapes to the North and begins
born
working with the Underground

Railroad. Tubman helps at least
Mardi
300 slaves to escape before the

Civil War; during the war, she
The Female Poets of
worked
America
as
a
nurse,
cook,
Melville, Redburn;
Rufus
Griswold,
laundress, and, it is said, spy
behind Confederate lines for the
Union forces.
What is Transcendentalism?
Readers have asked this question often. Here's my
answer:
When I first learned about Transcendentalism, Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in high school
English class, I admit: I couldn't figure out what the term
"Transcendentalism" meant. I couldn't figure out what the
central idea was that held all those authors and poets and
philosophers together so that they deserved this
categorical name, Transcendentalists. And so, if you're at
this page because you're having difficulty: you're not
alone. Here's what I've learned since high school about
this subject.
Margaret
Fuller*
The Transcendentalists can be understood in one sense by their context -- by
what they were rebelling against, what they saw as the current situation and
therefore as what they were trying to be different from.
Theodore
Parker*
One way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them
as a generation of well educated people who lived in the
decades before the American Civil War and the national
division that it both reflected and helped to create. These
people, mostly New Englanders, mostly around Boston,
were attempting to create a uniquely American body of
literature. It was already decades since the Americans had
won independence from England. Now, these people
believed, it was time for literary independence. And so
they deliberately went about creating literature, essays, novels, philosophy,
poetry, and other writing that were clearly different from anything from
England, France, Germany, or any other European nation.
Another way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them
as a generation of people struggling to define spirituality
and religion (our words, not necessarily theirs) in a way that
took into account the new understandings their age made
available.
Harriet
Martineau*
The new Biblical Criticism in Germany and elsewhere had
been looking at the Christian and Jewish scriptures through
the eyes of literary analysis and had raised questions for
some about the old assumptions of religion.
James
Martineau*
The Enlightenment had come to new
rational conclusions about the natural world, mostly based
on experimentation and logical thinking. The pendulum
was swinging, and a more Romantic way of thinking -- less
rational, more intuitive, more in touch with the senses -was coming into vogue. Those new rational conclusions
had raised important questions, but were no longer
enough.
German philosopher Kant raised both questions and
insights into the religious and philosophical thinking about
reason and religion.
This new generation looked at the previous generation's rebellions of the early
19th century Unitarians and Universalists against traditional Trinitarianism
and against Calvinist predestinationarianism. This new generation decided
that the revolutions had not gone far enough, and had stayed too much in the
rational mode. "Corpse-cold" Emerson called the previous generation of
rational religion.
Thomas
The spiritual hunger of the age that also gave rise to a new
evangelical Christianity gave rise, in the educated centers
in New England and around Boston, to an intuitive,
experiential, passionate, more-than-just-rational
perspective. God gave humankind the gift of intuition, the
gift of insight, the gift of inspiration. Why waste such a
gift?
Wentworth
Higginson*
Added to all this, the scriptures of non-Western cultures
were discovered in the West, translated, and published so
that they were more widely available. The
Harvard-educated Emerson and others began to read
Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, and examine their own religious assumptions
against these scriptures. In their perspective, a loving God would not have led
so much of humanity astray; there must be truth in these scriptures, too.
Truth, if it agreed with an individual's intuition of truth, must be indeed truth.
And so Transcendentalism was born. In the words of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "We will walk on our own feet; we
will work with our own hands; we will speak our own
minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist,
because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul
which also inspires all men."
Yes, men, but women too.
Most of the Transcendentalists became involved as well in
social reform movements, especially anti-slavery and
Emerson*
women's rights. (Abolitionism was the word used for the
more radical branch of anti-slavery reformism; feminism
was a word that was invented deliberately in France some decades later and
was not, to my knowledge, found in the time of the Transcendentalists.) Why
social reform, and why these issues in particular?
Ralph Waldo
The Transcendentalists, despite some remaining Euro-chauvinism in thinking
that people with British and German backgrounds were more suited for
freedom than others (see some of Theodore Parker's writings, for instance, for
this sentiment), also believed that at the level of the human soul, all people
had access to divine inspiration and sought and loved freedom and knowledge
and truth.
Emily
Dickinson*
Thus, those institutions of society which fostered vast
differences in the ability to be educated, to be self-directed,
were institutions to be reformed. Women and
African-descended slaves were human beings who
deserved more ability to become educated, to fulfill their
human potential (in a twentieth-century phrase), to be
fully human.
Men like Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth
Higginson who identified themselves as Transcendentalists, also worked for
freedom of the slaves and for women's freedom.
Part II. Meet the Authors:
其他相关作家
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Margaret Fuller
[Dr.] William Ellery Channing
Theodore Parker
Amos Bronson Alcott
Jones Very
[William] Ellery Channing
Christopher Cranch
Orestes Brownson
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
Other Transcendentalists
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1. 生平介绍
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was a major American poet, philosopher and center of the
American Transcendental movement.
Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Most of his ancestors were clergymen as was his
father. He was educated in Boston and Harvard, like his father, and graduated in 1821. In 1825 he
began to study at the Harvard Divinity School and next year he was licensed to preach by the
Middlesex Association of Ministers. In 1829 Emerson married Ellen Louisa Tucker, who died in
1831 from consumption. Emerson became sole pastor at the Second Unitarian Church of Boston
in 1830. Three years later he had a crisis of faith, finding that he "was not interested" in the rite of
Communion. Emerson's controversial views caused his resignation. In 1835 Emerson married
Lydia Jackson and settled with her at the east end of the village of Concord, where he then spent
the rest of his life.
Emerson's first book, Nature, a collection of essays, appeared when he was 33. Emerson
emphasized individualism and rejected traditional authority. He also believed that people should
try to live a simple life in harmony with nature and with others. His lectures 'The American
Scholar' (1837) and 'Address at Divinity College' (1838) challenged the Harvard intelligentsia and
warned about a lifeless Christian tradition. Harvard ostracized him for many years, but his
message attracted young disciples, who joined the informal Transcendental Club (established in
1836). In 1840 Emerson helped Margaret Fuller to launch The Dial (1840-44), an open forum for
new ideas on the reformation of society.
In 1841 Emerson published a selection of his earlier lectures and writings under the title Essays. It
was followed by Essays: Second Series (1844), a collection of lectures annexed to a reprint of
Nature (1849), and Representative Men (1850). In the 1850s he started to gain success as a
lecturer. His English Traits, a summary of English character and history, appeared in 1856.Other
later works include Conduct Of Life (1860), Society And Solitude (1870), a selection of poems
called Parnassus (1874), and Letters And Social Aims, (1876). As an essayist Emerson was a
master of style. He encouraged American scholars to break free of European influences and create
a new American culture.
Emerson's health started to fail after the partial burning of his house in 1872. He made his last tour
abroad in 1872-1873, and then withdrew more and more from public life. Emerson died on April
27, 1882 in Concord. Miscellanies (1884), a collection of political speeches and Lectures And
Biographical Sketches (1884) were published posthumously.
拉尔夫·瓦尔多·爱默生（Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882）美国散文作家、思想家、诗人。
1803 年 5 月出生于马萨诸塞州波土顿附近的康考德村，1882 年 4 月 27 日在波士顿逝世。他
的生命几乎横贯 19 世纪的美国，他出生时候的美国热闹却混沌，一些人意识到它代表着某
种新力量的崛起，却无人能够清晰的表达出来。它此时缺乏统一的政体，更没有相对一致的
意识形态。在他去世的时候美国不但因为南北战争而统一，而且它的个性却逐渐鲜明起来，
除了物质力量引人注目，它的文化也正在竭力走出欧洲的阴影。1837 年爱默生以《美国学
者》为题发表了一篇著名的演讲辞，宣告美国文学已脱离英国文学而独立，告诫美国学者不
要让学究习气蔓延，不要盲目地追随传统，不要进行纯粹的摹仿。另外这篇讲辞还抨击了美
国社会的拜金主义，强调人的价值。被誉为美国思想文化领域的“独立宣言”
。一年之后，
爱默生在《神学院献辞》中批评了基督教唯一神教派死气沉沉的局面，竭力推崇人的至高无
尚，提倡靠直觉认识真理。
“相信你自己的思想，相信你内心深处认为对你合适的东西对一
切人都适用……”文学批评家劳伦斯.布尔在《爱默生传》所说，爱默生与他的学说，是美
国最重要的世俗宗教。
爱默生出身牧师家庭，自幼丧父，由母亲和姑母抚养他成人。曾就读于哈佛大学，在校期间，
他阅读了大量英国浪漫主义作家的作品，丰富了思想，开阔了视野。毕业后曾执教两年，之
后进入哈佛神学院，担任基督教唯一的神教派牧师，并开始布道。1832 年以后，爱默生到
欧洲各国游历，结识了浪漫主义先驱华滋华斯和柯尔律治，接受了他们的先验论思想，对他
思想体系的形成具有很大影响。
爱默生回到波土顿后，在康考德一带从事布道。这时他的演说更接近于亚里士多德学派风格，
重要讲演稿有《历史的哲学》
、
《人类文化》、
《目前时代》等。 爱默生经常和他的朋友梭罗、
霍桑、阿尔柯、玛格利特等人举行小型聚会，探讨神学、哲学和社会学问题。这种聚会当时
被称为“超验主义俱乐部”
，爱默生也自然而然地成为超验主义的领袖。
1840 年爱默生任超验主义刊物《日晷》的主编，进一步宣扬超验主义思想。后来他把自己
的演讲汇编成书，这就是著名的《论文集》。《论文集》第一集于 1841 年发表，包括《论自
助》
、
《论超灵》
、
《论补偿》
、
《论爱》
、
《论友谊》等 12 篇论文。三年后，
《论文集》第二集也
出版了。这部著作为爱默赢得了巨大的声誉，他的思想被称为超验主义的核心，他本人则被
冠以“美国的文艺复兴领袖”之美誉。
爱默生的《论文集》赞美了人要信赖自我的主张，这样的人相信自己是所有人的代表，因为
他感知到了普遍的真理。爱默生以一个超验主义名的口吻，平静地叙说着他对世界的看法、
超验主义结合并渗透了新柏拉图主义和类似加尔文教派的一种严肃道德观和那种能在一切
自然中发现上帝之爱的浪漫派乐观主义。
爱默生喜欢演讲，面对人群令他兴奋不已，他说他感觉到一种伟大的情感在召唤，他的主要
声誉和成就建立于此。他通过自己的论文和演说成为美国超验主义的领袖，并且成为非正式
哲学家中最重要的一个。他的哲学精神表现在对逻辑学、经验论的卓越见解上，他轻视纯理
论的探索，信奉自然界，认为它体现了上帝和上帝的法则。
除《论文集》之外，爱默生的作品还行《代表人物》
、
《英国人的特性》、
《诗集》、
《五日节及
其他诗》
。
爱默生集散文作家、思想家、诗人于一身，他的诗歌、散文独具特色，注重思想内容而没有
过份注重词藻的华丽，行文犹如格言，哲理深入浅出，说服力强，且有典型的“爱默生风格”。
有人这样评价他的文字“爱默生似乎只写警句”，他的文字所透出的气质难以形容：既充满
专制式的不容置疑，又具有开放式的民主精神；既有贵族式的傲慢，更具有平民式的直接；
既清晰易懂，又常常夹杂着某种神秘主义......一个人能在一篇文章中塞入那么多的警句实在
是了不起的，那些值得在清晨诵读的句子为什么总能够振奋人心，岁月不是为他蒙上灰尘，
而是映衬得他熠熠闪光。
2．图片
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3．爱默生名言录：
Emerson is perhaps the most widely quoted American writer and many of Emerson's essays are
simply packed with quotable quotes.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and
absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin
it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
To laugh often and much ... this is to have succeeded. Probably not from Emerson: here's the full
quotation and the story.
Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has
no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
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.
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a
merchant.
Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.
When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
To fill the hour—that is happiness.
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Hitch your wagon to a star.
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered.
There are always two parties; the establishment and the movement.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers
and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
We boil at different degrees.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of
companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone
else believes in him and is willing to trust him with his friendship.
Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone
to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your
critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same
courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win
them. (attributed, probably erroneously, to Emerson; original source is unknown)
That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is
changed, but that our power to do is increased.
There is properly no history; only biography.
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Make yourself necessary to someone.
Art is a jealous mistress.
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.
It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘Always do what you are afraid to
do.’
All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair.
In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.
The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his
neighbour, tho' he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
1. A Brief Biography
A Student Project by James Leonard & Allison Lindstrom
Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry) entered our world in Concord, Massachusetts on July
12, 1817. His father, John Thoreau, was a soft-spoken man fond of books and music. He failed
numerous times at different business ventures, until he found his calling as a pioneer in the field of
making lead pencils. His mother, Cynthia Dunbar, was disliked by some apparently because she
talked too much. It was she who persuaded Ralph Waldo Emerson to write his scathing letter to
President Van Buren on the removal of the Cherokee Indians. She loved nature, and was a
committed abolitionist. Thoreau entered Harvard in 1833, but was not without a certain level of
disdain for this institution. He declared that Harvard "taught all the branches of learning but none
of the roots" (Wagenknecht, 10). Thoreau and several of his classmates protested Harvard's
emphasis on memory work and recitation. He graduated in 1837, the same year Emerson delivered
"The American Scholar." It is uncertain whether or not Thoreau heard the oration, but it is certain
that he was influenced by Emerson's Nature. After graduation, Thoreau began teaching in Concord,
but quit when he learned of the custom of flogging his pupils that he would be forced to comply
with. He opened his own school in 1838. He continued teaching and tutoring, along with
numerous other ventures, such as gardening, farming, house-painting, carpentry, and masonry. The
majority of his writing was done in the 1840's and 50's. After a long battle with tuberculosis,
Thoreau died peacefully on May 6, 1862, at the age of 44 (Wagenknecht, 9-15).
In July of 1846, Thoreau was arrested and thrown in jail for repeatedly refusing to pay a poll tax.
He spent one night in jail before being bailed out by his aunt. Thoreau presented no resistance to
his capture, and in fact did show resistance only in his removal from prison. After being asked
incessantly by neighbors why he wanted to go to jail, Thoreau wrote an explanation of his position.
It was published under the title "Resistance to Civil Government," which would be changed to
"Civil Disobedience" four years after his death. Thoreau believed that the punishment of spending
time in jail was not nearly as undesirable as the shame of succumbing to the governmental policies
with which he disagreed so wholeheartedly. He saw the others in his town, those who obeyed so
blindly, as being prisoners themselves. "I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my
townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to
be as free as I was" (Norton, 783).
Between 1945 and 1947, Thoreau lived alone in a cabin he built himself on Emerson's property at
Walden Pond. It is from the experiences of these two years that Thoreau wrote his masterpiece,
Walden. Walden is, at its surface, simply an account of the events of these two years. But it
contains much deeper and broader implications. Many see it as a do-it-yourself guide to the simple
life, a sort of handbook for those looking to get away from it all. Thoreau saw this simple life not
as an end in itself, but as a means to living more fully the life he really wanted, a life of writing
and observing nature. Walden is also a biting criticism of the follies of mankind. There are few
popular fashions or customs that he does not question. Because of his cryptic sense of humor,
many of his contemporaries thought him misanthropic. But it is only with a reading that
recognizes this sense of humor that Walden can be appreciated fully (Norton, 771).
In recent years, critics have become particularly interested in Thoreau's style. Walden is often
considered to be the earliest example of modern American prose. But it is as a document of
American Transcendentalism that Walden truly flourishes. It is a plea for the higher life, and its
central chapter is entitled "Higher Laws." Walden is a book about spiritual rebirth. It is based upon
the cycle of the year, coming to a climax with the rebirth of nature in the spring. Thoreau is
convinced that if we only tried, we could reach a higher life here on Earth than we ever dreamed
of. It is truly a work which encompasses the essence of Thoreau and of Transcendentalism while
at the same time conveying a love of nature and the earth and the simple life.
Late in the summer of 1847, Thoreau went to live with the Emerson family while the more famous
Emerson was giving a series of lectures in England. Thoreau stayed there for a year, then went
back to living with his parents, where he would remain for the rest of his life. He continued
writing in his journal every day. More and more, this became the center of his creative interest.
Forty years after his death, Houghton Mifflin of Boston would publish the journal in fourteen
volumes. Followers of Thoreau consider this to be his true masterpiece, and it remains one of the
great monuments in American literature. Throughout the 1850's, Thoreau also wrote and presented
a number of anti-slavery lectures, directed not so much at the South for practicing slavery, but at
the North for allowing it to remain.
In early December of 1860, Thoreau caught a bad cold, which worsened into bronchitis. This
brought on a recurrence of his tuberculosis, which would ultimately lead to his death in 1862. In
his own lifetime, Thoreau was constantly overshadowed by his friend and mentor Emerson, and
achieved very little recognition of his own. Since his death, however, Thoreau has been discovered
and rediscovered numerous times, eventually carrying him past Emerson in the eyes of many
literary scholars. Thoreau remains, as the Norton Anthology puts it, "the most challenging major
writer America has produced. No good reader will ever be entirely pleased with himself or herself
or with the current state of culture and civilization while reading any of Thoreau's best works"
(Norton, 773).
梭罗的出生的房屋照片：
The "Minott House" Thoreau refers to is known today
on the National Register of Historic Places as the
Wheeler-Minot Farmhouse/Henry David Thoreau Birth
House. Locally, it is also known as "Thoreau Farm."
19 世纪时的照片
"[I was] born July 12, 1817 in the Minott House, on the Virginia Road, where Father
occupied Grandmother's thirds, carrying on the farm."
20 世纪时的照片
Thoreau birth house in the early 20th-century.
Photo: Concord Free Public Library.
梭罗的母亲
Silhouette of Thoreau's mother.
Photo: Concord Free Public Library.
2. 梭罗名言录
It is never too late to give up your prejudices. Walden
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man
does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Walden
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. Walden
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but
positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. Walden
Things do not change; we change. Journal
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time,
and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future,
which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.
We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
So behave that the odor of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere, that
when we behold or scent a flower, we may not be reminded how inconsistent your deeds are with
it; for all odor is but one form of advertisement of a moral quality, and if fair actions had not been
performed, the lily would not smell sweet. The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the
decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are
immortal.
For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labour of my hands, and I found,
that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living.
On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning.
All this worldly wisdom was once the amiable heresy of some wise man. Journal
I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see
it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Civil Disobedience
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Civil Disobedience
Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they
can, constrain him to belong to their desperate oddfellow society.
It is not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
Also: Thoreau's invention of the term "mutual admiration society"
3．梭罗图片。
"His face, once seen, could not be
forgotten. The features were quite
marked: the nose aquiline or very
Roman, like one of the portraits of
Caesar (more like a beak, as was
said); large overhanging brows above
the deepest set blue eyes that could
be seen, in certain lights, and in
others gray, — eyes expressive of all
shades of feeling, but never weak or
near-sighted; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of
concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips,
pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out
when open with the most varied and unusual instructive sayings."
This description is from Thoreau's friend Ellery Channing, in
Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist. (larger photo, 206k)
The first picture on this page, and the picture on
the Thoreau Reader home page, are two of the three
daguerreotypes taken in June, 1856, when Thoreau was
39, after a Walden reader in Michigan had sent money
and requested a picture. The beard had been grown the
previous winter as a precaution against "throat
colds." The image above is owned by the Thoreau
Society, and used with permission. Thoreau's height
is thought to have been between 66 and 68 inches,
which was above average for the 1850's."
Another contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was less
kind, although also a friend. After meeting Thoreau
in 1842, he wrote: "He is a singular character — a
young man with much of wild original nature remaining
in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in
a way and method of his own. He is ugly as sin,
long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and
somewhat rustic, although courteous manners,
corresponding very well with such an exterior. But
his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion,
and becomes him much better than
beauty."
The second photograph is an
ambrotype taken in August of 1861,
when he was 44 years old. There is
a noticeable difference between
this and the first picture,
especially after only five years;
some of this was a result of the
tuberculosis that affected Henry for much of his
adult life, and was the cause of his death in May of
1862. The second image is from the Library of
Congress. (larger photo, 50k)
While Henry must have looked like the photographs
when they were taken, can we ever know how he actually
appeared to his friends? How much did his personality
overshadow his physical presence? How was his
appearance affected by the context of his time?
In 1862, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "He wore straw
hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave
shrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a
hawk's or a squirrel's nest. He waded into the pool
for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no
insignificant part of his armor." This does not sound
much like the well-dressed man in the photographs.
Emerson also wrote: "His senses were acute, his frame
well-knit and hardy, his hands strong and skillful
in the use of tools. And there was a wonderful fitness
of body and mind." Until his final illness, this
"wonderful fitness" may have contributed more to his
actual appearance than anything that could be
captured by a nineteenth century camera.
Part III. Representative Works (代表作选读)
爱默生的作品原文
The American Scholar
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837
Mr. President and Gentlemen,
I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and,
perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of
histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the
Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our cotemporaries in the British and
European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love
of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such, it is precious as the sign
of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be,
something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and
fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical
skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a
close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains
of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can
doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which
now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand
years?
In this hope, I accept the topic which not only usage, but the nature of our association, seem to
prescribe to this day, ?the AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Year by year, we come up hither to read one
more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on his
character, and his hopes.
It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that
the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as
the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.
The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, ? present to all
particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to
find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest,
and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these
functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work,
whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must
sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this
original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely
subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of
society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so
many walking monsters, ?a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into
the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees
his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm.
The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his
craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the
mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.
In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man
Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker,
or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office is contained. Him nature solicits
with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites. Is not,
indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student's behoof? And, finally, is
not the true scholar the only true master? But the old oracle said, `All things have two handles:
beware of the wrong one.' In life, too often, the scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his
privilege. Let us see him in his school, and consider him in reference to the main influences he
receives.
I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature.
Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass
grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all
men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him?
There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God,
but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose
beginning, whose ending, he never can find, ?so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors
shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without
circumference, ? in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to render account of herself to the
mind. Classification begins. To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and
by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and
so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing
anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere,
and flower out from one stem. It presently learns, that, since the dawn of history, there has been a
constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that
these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human
mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the
measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout
matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The
ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another, reduces all strange
constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on for ever to animate the last
fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.
Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested, that he and it
proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein.
And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? ?A thought too bold, ?a dream too wild. Yet
when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, ?when he has learned
to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of
its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator.
He shall see, that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and
one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind.
Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of,
so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know
thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.
II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, the mind of the Past, ?in whatever
form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of
the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth, ?learn the amount of this influence
more conveniently, ?by considering their value alone.
The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around;
brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into
him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him,
immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is
quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in
proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.
Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of transmuting life into truth. In
proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the
product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum,
so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book,
or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to
cotemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or
rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.
Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, ?the act of
thought, ?is transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth
the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book
is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes
noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to
the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it,
and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by
thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from
accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries,
believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given,
forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these
books.
Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who
value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of
Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the
bibliomaniacs of all degrees.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is
the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never
see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite
instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is
entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet
unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius;
not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is
progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some
past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, ?let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look
backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not
in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the
pure efflux of the Deity is not his; ? cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are
creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is,
indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of
good and fair.
On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another mind its truth, though it
were in torrents of light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal
disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The
literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now
for two hundred years.
Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not
be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God
directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. But
when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, ?when the sun is hid, and the stars
withdraw their shining, ?we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps
to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A
fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful."
It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with
the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great
English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy, ?with a pleasure, I
mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some
awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three
hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh
thought and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity
of all minds, we should suppose some preestablished harmony, some foresight of souls that were
to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who
lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see.
I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the
Book. We all know, that, as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled
grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and
heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information than by the printed page. I only
would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As
the proverb says, "He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of
the Indies." There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by
labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.
Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then
see, what is always true, that, as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and
months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his
Plato or Shakspeare, only that least part, ?only the authentic utterances of the oracle; ?all the rest
he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's and Shakspeare's.
Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact
science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable
office, ?to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to
create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the
concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in
which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of
towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our
American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.
III. There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, ?as
unfit for any handiwork or public labor, as a penknife for an axe. The so-called `practical men'
sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or see, they could do nothing. I have heard
it said that the clergy, ?who are always, more universally than any other class, the scholars of their
day, ?are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear,
but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, there
are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise.
Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it,
thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we
cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic
mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the
conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are
loaded with life, and whose not.
The world, ?this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys
which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this
resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and
to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order;
I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of life as I
know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I
extended my being, my dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves
and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse.
Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructers in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar
grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power.
It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process
too, this, by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin.
The manufacture goes forward at all hours.
The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now matters of calmest observation. They
lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions, ?with the business which we now
have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it.
We no more feel or know it, than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new
deed is yet a part of life, ?remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some
contemplative hour, it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the
mind. Instantly, it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is
an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the impossibility of
antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly,
without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is
there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive,
inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy,
school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries,
and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative,
profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing.
Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom. I
will not shut myself out of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to
hunger and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought,
much like those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and
smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and
discovered that they had whittled up the last of their pine-trees. Authors we have, in numbers, who
have written out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or
Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish their
merchantable stock.
If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary.
Years are well spent in country labors; in town, ?in the insight into trades and manufactures; in
frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all
their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from
any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech.
Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of
to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the
field and the work-yard made.
But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than books, is, that it is a resource. That
great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath;
in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet
more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of
Polarity, ?these "fits of easy transmission and reflection," as Newton called them, are the law of
nature because they are the law of spirit.
The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other. When the artist has exhausted
his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and
books are a weariness, ?he has always the resource to live. Character is higher than intellect.
Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul
will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truths?
He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial
act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof.
Those 'far from fame,' who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his constitution in the
doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and designed display.
Time shall teach him, that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the
sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in
strength. Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the
helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of
terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakspeare.
I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to
every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned
hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation
observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular
judgments and modes of action.
I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by action. It remains to
say somewhat of his duties.
They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in self-trust. The office of the
scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies
the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their glazed
observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid
and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous
stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, ?watching days and months,
sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; ?must relinquish display and immediate
fame. In the long period of his preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in
popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in
his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, ?how often! poverty
and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the
education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the
self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and
tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in
which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn,
what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is
one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and
illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar
prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments,
noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human
heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of
actions, ?these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her
inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day, ?this he shall hear and
promulgate.
These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to
the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest
appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or
man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this
particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which
the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a
popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence,
in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation,
patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, ?happy enough, if he can satisfy
himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every right step. For the
instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going
down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns
that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose
language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in utter
solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that,
which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his
frank confessions, ? his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, ?until he finds that he is
the complement of his hearers; ?that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own
nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds, this is
the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of
every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.
In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be, ? free and brave. Free
even to the definition of freedom, "without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own
constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing, which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear
always springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, amid dangerous times, arise
from the presumption, that, like children and women, his is a protected class; or if he seek a
temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head
like an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy
whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse. Manlike let
him turn and face it. Let him look into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin, ?see the
whelping of this lion, ?which lies no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect
comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other side, and
can henceforth defy it, and pass on superior. The world is his, who can see through its pretension.
What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by
sufferance, ?by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.
Yes, we are the cowed, ?we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into
nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands
of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint.
They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine,
the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who can alter matter,
but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give the color of their
present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their
carrying the matter, that this thing which they do, is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck,
now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great thing.
Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table. Linnaeus makes botany the most alluring
of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy, chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils.
The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men
crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the
moon.
For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, ?darker than can be enlightened. I
might not carry with me the feeling of my audience in stating my own belief. But I have already
shown the ground of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man has been
wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light, that can lead him back to his
prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day are bugs,
are spawn, and are called `the mass' and `the herd.' In a century, in a millennium, one or two men;
that is to say, ?one or two approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the
hero or the poet their own green and crude being, ?ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so that
may attain to its full stature. What a testimony, ?full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the
demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of
his chief. The poor and the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their
acquiescence in a political and social inferiority. They are content to be brushed like flies from the
path of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it is the
dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great man's light,
and feel it to be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod selves upon
the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood to make that great heart beat,
those giant sinews combat and conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.
Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as
money, ?the "spoils," so called, "of office." And why not? for they aspire to the highest, and this,
in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them, and they shall quit the false good, and
leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by
the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for
extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strown along the ground. The private life
of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, ?more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and
serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed,
comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor, has only
done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The books which once we valued
more than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is that but saying, that we have
come up with the point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one scribe; we
have been that man, and have passed on. First, one; then, another; we drain all cisterns, and,
waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The man has
never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person, who shall set a
barrier on any one side to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which,
flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily; and, now out of the throat of
Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a
thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.
But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the Scholar. I ought not to delay longer
to add what I have to say, of nearer reference to the time and to this country.
Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which predominate over successive
epochs, and there are data for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the
Reflective or Philosophical age. With the views I have intimated of the oneness or the identity of
the mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each
individual passes through all three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective. I
deny not, however, that a revolution in the leading idea may be distinctly enough traced.
Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical;
we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know
whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected
with Hamlet's unhappiness, ?
"Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should
outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class, as a
mere announcement of the fact, that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers,
and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can
swim. If there is any period one would desire to be born in, ?is it not the age of Revolution; when
the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men
are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the
rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what
to do with it.
I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they glimmer already through
poetry and art, through philosophy and science, through church and state.
One of these signs is the fact, that the same movement which effected the elevation of what was
called the lowest class in the state, assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect.
Instead of the sublime and beautiful; the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized.
That, which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and
provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than
all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street,
the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign, ?is it not?
of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands
and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what
is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the
familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds.
What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad
in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; ?show
me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual
cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every
trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough,
and the leger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; ?and the world
lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there
is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.
This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, and, in a newer time, of Goethe,
Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This idea they have differently followed and with various success. In
contrast with their writing, the style of Pope, of Johnson, of Gibbon, looks cold and pedantic. This
writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and
wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is
related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in
this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the
ancients.
There is one man of genius, who has done much for this philosophy of life, whose literary value
has never yet been rightly estimated; ?I mean Emanuel Swedenborg. The most imaginative of men,
yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical
Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such an attempt, of course, must have difficulty,
which no genius could surmount. But he saw and showed the connection between nature and the
affections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible,
tangible world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of
nature; he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul material forms, and has
given in epical parables a theory of isanity, of beasts, of unclean and fearful things.
Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is, the new
importance given to the single person. Every thing that tends to insulate the individual, ?to
surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man
shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state; ?tends to true union as well as
greatness. "I learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi, "that no man in God's wide earth is either
willing or able to help any other man." Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that
man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all
the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than
another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the
law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the
whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen,
this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all
preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.
The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and
private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.
See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats
upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the
fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by
all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, ? but are hindered from action
by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die
of disgust, ?some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of
young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if the single
man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to
him. Patience, ?patience; ?with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace,
the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, the study and the communication of
principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief
disgrace in the world, not to be an unit; ?not to be reckoned one character; ?not to yield that
peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred,
or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted
geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, ?please God, ours shall not
be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own
minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual
indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy
around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by
the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
Divinity School Address
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening, July 15, 1838
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds
burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and
sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to
the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost
spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night
bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of
nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all
creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward, has not yielded
yet one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which
our senses converse. How wide; how rich; what invitation from every property it gives to every
faculty of man! In its fruitful soils; in its navigable sea; in its mountains of metal and stone; in its
forests of all woods; in its animals; in its chemical ingredients; in the powers and path of light,
heat, attraction, and life, it is well worth the pith and heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it.
The planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the astronomers, the builders of cities, and the captains,
history delights to honor.
But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what
they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What
am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched.
Behold these outrunning laws, which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that,
but not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like, so unlike; many, yet one. I would
study, I would know, I would admire forever. These works of thought have been the
entertainments of the human spirit in all ages.
A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to
the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in what is above him. He learns that his being is
without bound; that, to the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and weakness.
That which he venerates is still his own, though he has not realized it yet. He ought. He knows the
sense of that grand word, though his analysis fails entirely to render account of it. When in
innocency, or when by intellectual perception, he attains to say, ?`I love the Right; Truth is
beautiful within and without, forevermore. Virtue, I am thine: save me: use me: thee will I serve,
day and night, in great, in small, that I may be not virtuous, but virtue;' ?then is the end of the
creation answered, and God is well pleased.
The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. It
perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details,
principles that astonish. The child amidst his baubles, is learning the action of light, motion,
gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human life, love, fear, justice, appetite, man, and God,
interact. These laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be written out on paper, or
spoken by the tongue. They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in each other's
faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse. The moral traits which are all globed into every
virtuous act and thought, ?in speech, we must sever, and describe or suggest by painful
enumeration of many particulars. Yet, as this sentiment is the essence of all religion, let me guide
your eye to the precise objects of the sentiment, by an enumeration of some of those classes of
facts in which this element is conspicuous.
The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These
laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus;
in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good
deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who
puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the
safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a
man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. A
man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward, is a
step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.
See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs, correcting appearances,
and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses,
is, at last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to
his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never
impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie, ?for example, the
taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance, ?will instantly
vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected
furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the
grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. See again the perfection of
the Law as it applies itself to the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we
associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own
volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell.
These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed, that the world is not the product of
manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray
of the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that will, is everywhere balked and
baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise. Good is positive. Evil is merely privative,
not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity.
Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For
all things proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in
its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it
washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man
seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends,
he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote channels, he
becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death.
The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious
sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to
command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine
and rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it, is
the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought may work cold and
intransitive in things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart,
gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space,
eternity, do seem to break out into joy.
This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable. Through
it, the soul first knows itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be
great by following the great, and hopes to derive advantages from another, ?by showing the
fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps
of Reason. When he says, "I ought;" when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on
high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme
Wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this
sentiment. In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never
outgrown.
This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, and successively creates all forms of worship. The
principle of veneration never dies out. Man fallen into superstition, into sensuality, is never quite
without the visions of the moral sentiment. In like manner, all the expressions of this sentiment are
sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity. The expressions of this sentiment affect us
more than all other compositions. The sentences of the oldest time, which ejaculate this piety, are
still fresh and fragrant. This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and
contemplative East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in
Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to oriental genius, its divine impulses. What
these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus
upon mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this world, is
proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion.
Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the
oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition.
It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I
can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on
his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing. On the contrary, the absence of
this primary faith is the presence of degradation. As is the flood so is the ebb. Let this faith depart,
and the very words it spake, and the things it made, become false and hurtful. Then falls the
church, the state, art, letters, life. The doctrine of the divine nature being forgotten, a sickness
infects and dwarfs the constitution. Once man was all; now he is an appendage, a nuisance. And
because the indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this
perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and
denied with fury. The doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices,
usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul. Miracles, prophecy, poetry; the ideal life, the holy life,
exist as ancient history merely; they are not in the belief, nor in the aspiration of society; but,
when suggested, seem ridiculous. Life is comic or pitiful, as soon as the high ends of being fade
out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend to what addresses the senses.
These general views, which, whilst they are general, none will contest, find abundant illustration
in the history of religion, and especially in the history of the Christian church. In that, all of us
have had our birth and nurture. The truth contained in that, you, my young friends, are now setting
forth to teach. As the Cultus, or established worship of the civilized world, it has great historical
interest for us. Of its blessed words, which have been the consolation of humanity, you need not
that I should speak. I shall endeavor to discharge my duty to you, on this occasion, by pointing out
two errors in its administration, which daily appear more gross from the point of view we have
just now taken.
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul.
Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there.
Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me.
He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of
his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, `I am divine. Through me, God acts;
through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now
think.' But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the
following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the
Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next
age, `This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.' The
idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and
churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the
poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life
was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character
ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is
Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.
He felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit tenderness at postponing their initial
revelations, to the hour and the man that now is; to the eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was he
a true man. Having seen that the law in us is commanding, he would not suffer it to be
commanded. Boldly, with hand, and heart, and life, he declared it was God. Thus is he, as I think,
the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of a man.
1. In this point of view we become very sensible of the first defect of historical Christianity.
Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion.
As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an
exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious
exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand
to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But
by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and fear have built, the friend of man
is made the injurer of man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with expressions, which
were once sallies of admiration and love, but are now petrified into official titles, kills all generous
sympathy and liking. All who hear me, feel, that the language that describes Christ to Europe and
America, is not the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good and noble heart, but is
appropriated and formal, ?paints a demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris
or Apollo. Accept the injurious impositions of our early catachetical instruction, and even honesty
and self-denial were but splendid sins, if they did not wear the Christian name. One would rather
be
`A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,'
than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into nature, and finding not names and places,
not land and professions, but even virtue and truth foreclosed and monopolized. You shall not be a
man even. You shall not own the world; you shall not dare, and live after the infinite Law that is in
you, and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely
forms; but you must subordinate your nature to Christ's nature; you must accept our interpretations;
and take his portrait as the vulgar draw it.
That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical
doctrine, Obey thyself. That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of
me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the
long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decease forever.
The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect of my strength. They admonish me,
that the gleams which flash across my mind, are not mine, but God's; that they had the like, and
were not disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I love them. Noble provocations go out from them,
inviting me to resist evil; to subdue the world; and to Be. And thus by his holy thoughts, Jesus
serves us, and thus only. To aim to convert a man by miracles, is a profanation of the soul. A true
conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made, by the reception of beautiful sentiments.
It is true that a great and rich soul, like his, falling among the simple, does so preponderate, that,
as his did, it names the world. The world seems to them to exist for him, and they have not yet
drunk so deeply of his sense, as to see that only by coming again to themselves, or to God in
themselves, can they grow forevermore. It is a low benefit to give me something; it is a high
benefit to enable me to do somewhat of myself. The time is coming when all men will see, that the
gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural
goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow.
The injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching is not less flagrant to Jesus, than to the souls which it
profanes. The preachers do not see that they make his gospel not glad, and shear him of the locks
of beauty and the attributes of heaven. When I see a majestic Epaminondas, or Washington; when
I see among my contemporaries, a true orator, an upright judge, a dear friend; when I vibrate to the
melody and fancy of a poem; I see beauty that is to be desired. And so lovely, and with yet more
entire consent of my human being, sounds in my ear the severe music of the bards that have sung
of the true God in all ages. Now do not degrade the life and dialogues of Christ out of the circle of
this charm, by insulation and peculiarity. Let them lie as they befel, alive and warm, part of human
life, and of the landscape, and of the cheerful day.
2. The second defect of the traditionary and limited way of using the mind of Christ is a
consequence of the first; this, namely; that the Moral Nature, that Law of laws, whose revelations
introduce greatness, ?yea, God himself, into the open soul, is not explored as the fountain of the
established teaching in society. Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago
given and done, as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher; and the goodliest of
institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.
It is very certain that it is the effect of conversation with the beauty of the soul, to beget a desire
and need to impart to others the same knowledge and love. If utterance is denied, the thought lies
like a burden on the man. Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told: somehow he
publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas; sometimes with chisel on stone;
sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of
indefinite music; but clearest and most permanent, in words.
The man enamored of this excellency, becomes its priest or poet. The office is coeval with the
world. But observe the condition, the spiritual limitation of the office. The spirit only can teach.
Not any profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but only he can give,
who has; he only can create, who is. The man on whom the soul descends, through whom the soul
speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his door
to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues. But the man who aims to speak as
books enable, as synods use, as the fashion guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him
hush.
To this holy office, you propose to devote yourselves. I wish you may feel your call in throbs of
desire and hope. The office is the first in the world. It is of that reality, that it cannot suffer the
deduction of any falsehood. And it is my duty to say to you, that the need was never greater of
new revelation than now. From the views I have already expressed, you will infer the sad
conviction, which I share, I believe, with numbers, of the universal decay and now almost death of
faith in society. The soul is not preached. The Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life
extinct. On this occasion, any complaisance would be criminal, which told you, whose hope and
commission it is to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached.
It is time that this ill-suppressed murmur of all thoughtful men against the famine of our churches;
this moaning of the heart because it is bereaved of the consolation, the hope, the grandeur, that
come alone out of the culture of the moral nature; should be heard through the sleep of indolence,
and over the din of routine. This great and perpetual office of the preacher is not discharged.
Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life. In how many
churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the
earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God? Where
now sounds the persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises my heart, and so affirms its own
origin in heaven? Where shall I hear words such as in elder ages drew men to leave all and
follow, ?father and mother, house and land, wife and child? Where shall I hear these august laws
of moral being so pronounced, as to fill my ear, and I feel ennobled by the offer of my uttermost
action and passion? The test of the true faith, certainly, should be its power to charm and
command the soul, as the laws of nature control the activity of the hands, ?so commanding that we
find pleasure and honor in obeying. The faith should blend with the light of rising and of setting
suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird, and the breath of flowers. But now the priest's
Sabbath has lost the splendor of nature; it is unlovely; we are glad when it is done; we can make,
we do make, even sitting in our pews, a far better, holier, sweeter, for ourselves.
Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate.
We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain
to wrap our cloaks about us, and secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not. I once heard a
preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more. Men go, thought I, where
they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow storm was falling
around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast
in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow.
He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or
in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were
none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had
not learned. Not one fact in all his experience, had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had
ploughed, and planted, and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and
drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint,
in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all. Not a line did he draw out of real history. The true
preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, ?life passed through the fire
of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be told from his sermon, what age of the world he
fell in; whether he had a father or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he
was a citizen or a countryman; or any other fact of his biography. It seemed strange that the people
should come to church. It seemed as if their houses were very unentertaining, that they should
prefer this thoughtless clamor. It shows that there is a commanding attraction in the moral
sentiment, that can lend a faint tint of light to dulness and ignorance, coming in its name and place.
The good hearer is sure he has been touched sometimes; is sure there is somewhat to be reached,
and some word that can reach it. When he listens to these vain words, he comforts himself by their
relation to his remembrance of better hours, and so they clatter and echo unchallenged.
I am not ignorant that when we preach unworthily, it is not always quite in vain. There is a good
ear, in some men, that draws supplies to virtue out of very indifferent nutriment. There is poetic
truth concealed in all the common-places of prayer and of sermons, and though foolishly spoken,
they may be wisely heard; for, each is some select expression that broke out in a moment of piety
from some stricken or jubilant soul, and its excellency made it remembered. The prayers and even
the dogmas of our church, are like the zodiac of Denderah, and the astronomical monuments of the
Hindoos, wholly insulated from anything now extant in the life and business of the people. They
mark the height to which the waters once rose. But this docility is a check upon the mischief from
the good and devout. In a large portion of the community, the religious service gives rise to quite
other thoughts and emotions. We need not chide the negligent servant. We are struck with pity,
rather, at the swift retribution of his sloth. Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the
pulpit, and not give bread of life. Everything that befalls, accuses him. Would he ask contributions
for the missions, foreign or domestic? Instantly his face is suffused with shame, to propose to his
parish, that they should send money a hundred or a thousand miles, to furnish such poor fare as
they have at home, and would do well to go the hundred or the thousand miles to escape. Would
he urge people to a godly way of living; ?and can he ask a fellow-creature to come to Sabbath
meetings, when he and they all know what is the poor uttermost they can hope for therein? Will he
invite them privately to the Lord's Supper? He dares not. If no heart warm this rite, the hollow, dry,
creaking formality is too plain, than that he can face a man of wit and energy, and put the
invitation without terror. In the street, what has he to say to the bold village blasphemer? The
village blasphemer sees fear in the face, form, and gait of the minister.
Let me not taint the sincerity of this plea by any oversight of the claims of good men. I know and
honor the purity and strict conscience of numbers of the clergy. What life the public worship
retains, it owes to the scattered company of pious men, who minister here and there in the
churches, and who, sometimes accepting with too great tenderness the tenet of the elders, have not
accepted from others, but from their own heart, the genuine impulses of virtue, and so still
command our love and awe, to the sanctity of character. Moreover, the exceptions are not so much
to be found in a few eminent preachers, as in the better hours, the truer inspirations of all, ?nay, in
the sincere moments of every man. But with whatever exception, it is still true, that tradition
characterizes the preaching of this country; that it comes out of the memory, and not out of the
soul; that it aims at what is usual, and not at what is necessary and eternal; that thus, historical
Christianity destroys the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration of the moral
nature of man, where the sublime is, where are the resources of astonishment and power. What a
cruel injustice it is to that Law, the joy of the whole earth, which alone can make thought dear and
rich; that Law whose fatal sureness the astronomical orbits poorly emulate, that it is travestied and
depreciated, that it is behooted and behowled, and not a trait, not a word of it articulated. The
pulpit in losing sight of this Law, loses its reason, and gropes after it knows not what. And for
want of this culture, the soul of the community is sick and faithless. It wants nothing so much as a
stern, high, stoical, Christian discipline, to make it know itself and the divinity that speaks through
it. Now man is ashamed of himself; he skulks and sneaks through the world, to be tolerated, to be
pitied, and scarcely in a thousand years does any man dare to be wise and good, and so draw after
him the tears and blessings of his kind.
Certainly there have been periods when, from the inactivity of the intellect on certain truths, a
greater faith was possible in names and persons. The Puritans in England and America, found in
the Christ of the Catholic Church, and in the dogmas inherited from Rome, scope for their austere
piety, and their longings for civil freedom. But their creed is passing away, and none arises in its
room. I think no man can go with his thoughts about him, into one of our churches, without
feeling, that what hold the public worship had on men is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the
affection of the good, and the fear of the bad. In the country, neighborhoods, half parishes are
signing off, ?to use the local term. It is already beginning to indicate character and religion to
withdraw from the religious meetings. I have heard a devout person, who prized the Sabbath, say
in bitterness of heart, "On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church." And the motive, that holds
the best there, is now only a hope and a waiting. What was once a mere circumstance, that the best
and the worst men in the parish, the poor and the rich, the learned and the ignorant, young and old,
should meet one day as fellows in one house, in sign of an equal right in the soul, ?has come to be
a paramount motive for going thither.
My friends, in these two errors, I think, I find the causes of a decaying church and a wasting
unbelief. And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation, than the loss of worship? Then all
things go to decay. Genius leaves the temple, to haunt the senate, or the market. Literature
becomes frivolous. Science is cold. The eye of youth is not lighted by the hope of other worlds,
and age is without honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die, we do not mention them.
And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these desponding days can be done by us? The
remedy is already declared in the ground of our complaint of the Church. We have contrasted the
Church with the Soul. In the soul, then, let the redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes,
there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. When a man comes, all books are legible, all things
transparent, all religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the wonderworker. He is seen amid
miracles. All men bless and curse. He saith yea and nay, only. The stationariness of religion; the
assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the
character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of
our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not
spake. The true Christianity, ?a faith like Christ's in the infinitude of man, ?is lost. None believeth
in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone.
All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot
see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society wiser than their soul, and know
not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world. See how nations and races flit by
on the sea of time, and leave no ripple to tell where they floated or sunk, and one good soul shall
make the name of Moses, or of Zeno, or of Zoroaster, reverend forever. None assayeth the stern
ambition to be the Self of the nation, and of nature, but each would be an easy secondary to some
Christian scheme, or sectarian connection, or some eminent man. Once leave your own knowledge
of God, your own sentiment, and take secondary knowledge, as St. Paul's, or George Fox's, or
Swedenborg's, and you get wide from God with every year this secondary form lasts, and if, as
now, for centuries, ?the chasm yawns to that breadth, that men can scarcely be convinced there is
in them anything divine.
Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are
sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough
you shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets.
Thank God for these good men, but say, `I also am a man.' Imitation cannot go above its model.
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to
him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves
himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, ?cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at
first hand with Deity. Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money,
are nothing to you, ?are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see, ?but live with the
privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all families and each
family in your parish connection, ?when you meet one of these men or women, be to them a
divine man; be to them thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their
trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have
doubted, and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own heart, you shall gain
more confidence in other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to
habit, it is not to be doubted, that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real
hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We
mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and
of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we
knew; that gave us leave to be what we inly were. Discharge to men the priestly office, and,
present or absent, you shall be followed with their love as by an angel.
And, to this end, let us not aim at common degrees of merit. Can we not leave, to such as love it,
the virtue that glitters for the commendation of society, and ourselves pierce the deep solitudes of
absolute ability and worth? We easily come up to the standard of goodness in society. Society's
praise can be cheaply secured, and almost all men are content with those easy merits; but the
instant effect of conversing with God, will be, to put them away. There are persons who are not
actors, not speakers, but influences; persons too great for fame, for display; who disdain eloquence;
to whom all we call art and artist, seems too nearly allied to show and by-ends, to the exaggeration
of the finite and selfish, and loss of the universal. The orators, the poets, the commanders encroach
on us only as fair women do, by our allowance and homage. Slight them by preoccupation of mind,
slight them, as you can well afford to do, by high and universal aims, and they instantly feel that
you have right, and that it is in lower places that they must shine. They also feel your right; for
they with you are open to the influx of the all-knowing Spirit, which annihilates before its broad
noon the little shades and gradations of intelligence in the compositions we call wiser and wisest.
In such high communion, let us study the grand strokes of rectitude: a bold benevolence, an
independence of friends, so that not the unjust wishes of those who love us, shall impair our
freedom, but we shall resist for truth's sake the freest flow of kindness, and appeal to sympathies
far in advance; and, ?what is the highest form in which we know this beautiful element, ?a certain
solidity of merit, that has nothing to do with opinion, and which is so essentially and manifestly
virtue, that it is taken for granted, that the right, the brave, the generous step will be taken by it,
and nobody thinks of commending it. You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but
you would not praise an angel. The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the
world, is the highest applause. Such souls, when they appear, are the Imperial Guard of Virtue, the
perpetual reserve, the dictators of fortune. One needs not praise their courage, ?they are the heart
and soul of nature. O my friends, there are resources in us on which we have not drawn. There are
men who rise refreshed on hearing a threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes
the majority, ?demanding not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension,
immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice, ?comes graceful and beloved as a bride. Napoleon said
of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead
began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and
victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put
sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown. But these are heights that we can scarce
remember and look up to, without contrition and shame. Let us thank God that such things exist.
And now let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched fire on the altar. The
evils of the church that now is are manifest. The question returns, What shall we do? I confess, all
attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes
us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as
the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason, ?to-day, pasteboard and
fillagree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder. Rather let the breath of new life be
breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find they
shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is, first, soul, and second, soul, and
evermore, soul. A whole popedom of forms, one pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify. Two
inestimable advantages Christianity has given us; first; the Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole world;
whose light dawns welcome alike into the closet of the philosopher, into the garret of toil, and into
prison cells, and everywhere suggests, even to the vile, the dignity of spiritual being. Let it stand
forevermore, a temple, which new love, new faith, new sight shall restore to more than its first
splendor to mankind. And secondly, the institution of preaching, ?the speech of man to
men, ?essentially the most flexible of all organs, of all forms. What hinders that now, everywhere,
in pulpits, in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men or your own
occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the
waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation?
I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty, which ravished the souls of those eastern men, and
chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West
also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that have been bread of life to
millions. But they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary; are not shown in their order to the
intellect. I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so far those shining laws, that he shall see
them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror
of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that
the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.
Self-Reliance
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;棗 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.
思考题：
How is Emerson's idea of Self-Reliance different from and similar to the common use of the term
(take care of your own needs and don't depend on others outside yourself)?
Is Emerson really saying "Believe anything you want to believe and do anything you want to do"?
Is he really saying "Nothing outside yourself matters"?
In what ways is Emerson speaking religiously -- that is, about our relationship to the divine?
Emerson's religious ideas are claimed today by groups as diverse as the Unitarian Universalists
and the Mormons. Does this make sense? How have such different religious groups made use
of Emerson's ideas, especially those in "Self-Reliance"?
How do Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and Thoreau's ideas (in "Walden" and elsewhere) inspire the
environmental and sustainable growth movements today?
What would Emerson think of the survivalist movement?
What would Emerson think of 21st century American capitalism?
Would Emerson's ideas as expressed in this essay result in a stronger or weaker government?
More or less democracy?
Was Emerson a liberal or conservative -- and in what ways? (You might also want to read
Emerson's essay "The Conservative.")
What would Emerson think about today's libertarianism?
If you're familiar with the work of Ayn Rand, how is Emerson alike, how is he different?
What would Emerson say about the human capacity for good and for evil?
How have Emerson's ideas helped shape our concept of the American Dream?
Should students read more essays of Emerson, or just this one? Is this the best selection from
Emerson for a high school or college student?
Walden
by Thoreau
A small pond (about 64 acres [26 hectares]) in Concord town (township), Middlesex
county, eastern Massachusetts, U.S. It lies just south of the village of Concord in
Walden Pond State Reservation (304 acres [123 hectares]). The pond was
immortalized by Henry David Thoreau, who retreated there (1845–47) from society
prior to writing Walden; or, Life in the Woods. In “Where I Lived, and What I Lived
For,” the second chapter of the book, Thoreau wrote:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts
of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor
did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and
suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that
was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it
to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine
meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by
experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it
appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God,
and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God
and enjoy him forever.”
Ａ Summary of Walden
In his first chapter, "Economy," Thoreau introduces his purpose in writing the book, saying he
intends to answer questions people have asked about his reasons for living alone in a cabin in the
woods near Walden Pond for two years. He explains that most people live their lives as if sleeping,
blindly following the ways of their parents, and become trapped into these lives by owning
property and slaving in jobs to maintain their way of life. In contrast, he sought to discover the
true necessities of life and built a cabin, for the cost of $28. 12 _ near Walden Pond, where he
lived for two years, beginning in the summer of 1845. Making a profit of $8.71 _ by selling the
beans he grew and working occasionally at odd jobs, he found he was able to support himself with
very little work and much time for contemplation of himself and nature.
Thoreau, in the second chapter, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," talks about how he once
considered buying the Hollowell farm for himself but the purchase fell through. Instead, he
created a new existence for himself at Walden, where he found joy and fulfillment in nature, truly
awakening in his mornings there, while most of society remains perpetually asleep, living mean
lives when the possibility of a much better life is possible. The key to achieving such a life, he
says, is simplicity. In the third chapter, "Reading," Thoreau describes how he derives
enlightenment from reading Homer and other great writers, men who spoke of the truth and speak
of life in terms too noble for most to understand. Most of society, however, is not content to strive
after such truths and instead wastes their time reading popular fiction and newspapers, when they
should instead be dedicated to improving the intellectual culture, making the village of Concord
become a university.
However, as Thoreau relates in the fourth chapter, "Sounds," he spent his time during his first
summer at Walden hoeing beans, rather than reading, or sitting all morning watching and listening
to the birds. That reverie is broken by the whistle and rumble of the passing train, which reminds
Thoreau of the destruction of nature and country life by progress and industrialization. In the
evening, the hoots of the owls make him melancholy, reminding him of human cries of sorrow. In
the fifth chapter, "Solitude," Thoreau feels so much a part of nature that he scoffs at the suggestion
of one of his townsmen that he might be lonely at Walden. Instead, he relates his distaste at village
life, where people see too much of each other, so that human interaction becomes trivial. In the
sixth chapter, "Visitors," Thoreau is pleased that those who would bother him with trivial matters
don't visit him at Walden. Instead, his visitors are Canadian woodcutter, whose straightforward
thinking and love of life please Thoreau. Other visitors include half-wits from the almshouse, who
Thoreau thinks are more intellectual than most overseers, and men of business, who no longer
really enjoy nature. The happiest people to visit the pond are children and young women.
In chapter seven, "The Bean-field," Thoreau describes how he hoed and tended two acres of beans,
some of which he sold, for a profit of $8.71 _. Though passing farmers criticized him for not using
a plow or fertilizer, having to work so long and hard made him grow close to the soil, truly
enjoying his work rather than seeing it as a means of profit, like most farmers. The eighth chapter,
"The Village," recounts Thoreau's discomfort in visiting town every few days, where people's
stares and thirst for gossip are invasive and where the attractions of pubs, stores, and shops are a
temptation. He is always relieved to return home to his cabin but worries that society will seek one
out wherever he goes. One day, he went to the village to go to the cobbler and was arrested for not
paying taxes to a government which supports slavery. He spent a night in jail. (The experience
would prompt Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience.")
Living in the woods, Thoreau devotes his time to experiencing nature, as he describes in chapter
nine, "The Ponds" - sometimes fishing with an elderly man who is hard-of-hearing and sometimes
floating about in his boat playing his flute. He gives detailed descriptions of surrounding bodies of
water - Flint's Pond, White Pond, Goose Pond, and Fair-Haven Bay - but finds Walden, with its
pure clear water, to be the epitome of nature's offerings. In chapter ten, "Baker Farm," Thoreau
describes a visit to go fishing at Baker Farm. When caught in a rain shower, he takes refuge in the
hut of Irish "bogger" John Field and his family. Though he tries to convince Field that a simpler,
easier life could be attained with far less work, Field cannot conceive of such a possibility. When
the rain stops, he even does extra work to catch fewer fish than Thoreau.
In the book's eleventh chapter, "Higher Laws," Thoreau describes a feeling of animality that
occasionally comes across him, making him want to devour a woodchuck raw. He sees in himself
duelling impulses, to animality and to spirituality, and seeks to strengthen his spiritual self,
refraining from hunting or eating meat. He hopes that boys who hunt will grow to be men who
appreciate nature on spiritual level. Chapter twelve, "Brute Neighbors," opens with a dialogue
between Hermit, who represents Thoreau's contemplative nature, and Poet, who tempts him to
abandon his meditations and fish instead. He goes on to describe his animal neighbors, including
friendly mice and partridges, as well as a war he witnessed between red and black ants and a loon
who he followed around the pond in his boat but could never catch.
Chapter thirteen, "House-warming," begins Thoreau's description of the winter months. As the
weather grows colder in October and November, he builds a chimney and plasters the inside of his
walls. When the pond freezes, he studies the bottom of the lake and the formation of ice bubbles
within the ice itself. In the fourteenth chapter, "Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors," nature is
all but silent and snow prevents Thoreau from venturing out much. He instead reflects on the
former inhabitants of the woods, including former slaves, Cato Ingraham, Zilpha, and Brister and
Fenda Freeman, and an Irishman Hugh Quoil. Only a few remnants of their houses - chimney
stones and covered wells - remain. Sometimes Thoreau ventures out for walks, once seeing a
seemingly-inactive owl who suddenly flies away, and returns home to find visitors, including a
farmer, a poet, and a peddlar-philosopher.
In chapter fifteen, "Winter Animals," Thoreau describes looking at the transformed landscape from
the centers of lakes and seeing it in a new light and hearing animals, including owls and foxes
chased by hounds. One day, he sees a rabbit which looks miserable to him until it leaps away,
clearly a strong and worthy part of nature. In chapter sixteen, "The Pond in Winter," he awakens
one morning after a night of questioning to realize that nature is serene and asks no questions. He
cuts holes in the ice of Walden, measuring the depth of the pond, which some people have called
bottomless. In January, Irish laborers working for a rich man arrive to cut and cart away the ice to
sell. This upsets Thoreau, until he realizes people all over the world will have a taste of Walden.
The lake soon refreezes. In chapter seventeen, "The Thaw," the lake gradually begins to crack and
groan and break apart. Thoreau describes in great detail the sand which breaks through the snow
and flows like foliage down the banks of the railroad. The birds begin to return and the trees
become greener. Soon, summer comes, and after two years at Walden, Thoreau leaves.
In his "Conclusion," Thoreau explains he left Walden because he had many more lives to live. He
urges his readers to turn inward on immense spiritual journeys of self-discovery; to find
fulfillment in nature rather than riches; and to avoid conformity and live his own life as he must.
He concludes with the story of a bug which emerged from the wood of a table after sixty years and
hopes that human beings will likewise awaken and emerge into a new life.
沃尔登湖的照片：
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
by
Henry David Thoreau
I heartily accept the motto, -- "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to
see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which
also I believe, -- "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared
for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an
expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty,
and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing
army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode
which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted
before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively
a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would
not have consented to this measure.
This American government -- what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to
transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the
vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of
wooden gun to the people themselves. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must
have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government
which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose
on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow. Yet this government
never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does
not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in
the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat
more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedient by
which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most
expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of
India rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually
putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions, and
not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those
mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads.
But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I
ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known
what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining
it.
After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority
are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in
the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the
strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice,
even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not
virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? -- in which majorities decide only those
questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in
the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I
think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect
for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at
any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a
corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit
more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents
of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of
soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable
order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and
consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.
They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all
peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the
service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a
man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts -- a
mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one
may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be
"Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O'er the grave where our hero we buried."
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They
are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there
is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a
level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will
serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.
They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly
esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and
office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral
distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as
heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their
consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as
enemies by it. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be "clay," and "stop
a hole to keep the wind away," but leave that office to his dust at least:--
"I am too high-born to be propertied,
To be a secondary at control,
Or useful serving-man and instrument
To any sovereign state throughout the world."
He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who
gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.
How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he
cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political
organization as my government which is the slave's government also.
All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the
government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that
such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of '75. If one were to
tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its
ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All
machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At
any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine,
and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In
other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of
liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and
subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.
What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but
ours is the invading army.
Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the "Duty of
Submission to Civil Government," resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds
to say that "so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the
established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconveniency, it is the will
of God... that the established government be obeyed, and no longer.... This principle being
admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the
quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of
redressing it on the other." Of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself. But Paley appears
never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a
people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a
plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to
Paley, would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. This
people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence
as a people.
In their practice, nations agree with Paley; but does any one think that Massachusetts does exactly
what is right at the present crisis?
"A drab of state, a cloth-o'-silver slut,
To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt."
Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand
politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more
interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do
justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those
who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the
latter would be harmless. We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but
improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many. It is not so
important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness
somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are in opinion opposed
to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming
themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and
say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to
the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from
Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an
honest man and patriot to-day? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but
they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the
evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble
countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and
ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man; but it is easier to deal with the real possessor of
a thing than with the temporary guardian of it.
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a
playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The
character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally
concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation,
therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is
only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the
right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but
little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition
of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery
left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the
abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.
I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the
Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think,
what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to?
Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon
some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend
conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his
position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He
forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he
is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of
any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought. Oh for a man who is a
man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through!
Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a
square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one. Does not America offer any inducement for
men to settle here? The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow -- one who may be known by
the development of his organ of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful
self-reliance; whose first and chief concern, on coming into the world, is to see that the
almshouses are in good repair; and, before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to collect a
fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be; who, in short ventures to live only by
the aid of the Mutual Insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently.
It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the
most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty,
at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his
support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do
not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue
his contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my
townsmen say, "I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the
slaves, or to march to Mexico; -- see if I would go"; and yet these very men have each, directly by
their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. The soldier is
applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust
government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he
disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge
it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment. Thus, under the name
of Order and Civil Government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own
meanness. After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it
were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.
The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. The
slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to
incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it
their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently
the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to
disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves -- the union
between themselves and the State -- and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? Do not they
stand in the same relation to the State, that the State does to the Union? And have not the same
reasons prevented the State from resisting the Union, which have prevented them from resisting
the State?
How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in
it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor,
you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or
even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the
full amount, and see that you are never cheated again. Action from principle -- the perception and
the performance of right -- changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does
not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides
families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.
Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and
obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under
such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to
alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is
the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is
it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority?
Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the
alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify
Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin
rebels?
One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority was the only offence never
contemplated by government; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and
proportionate, penalty? If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the
State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the
discretion of those who placed him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from
the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again.
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go;
perchance it will wear smooth -- certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring,
or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the
remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the
agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop
the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I
condemn.
As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such
ways. They take too much time, and a man's life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I
came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or
bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not
necessary that he should do something wrong. It is not my business to be petitioning the Governor
or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they should not hear my petition,
what should I do then? But in this case the State has provided no way; its very Constitution is the
evil. This may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory; but it is to treat with the utmost
kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. So is an change for
the better, like birth and death which convulse the body.
I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually
withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and
not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I
think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover,
any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.
I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to
face, once a year -- no more -- in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a
man situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it then says distinctly, Recognize me; and the
simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of
treating with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it
then. My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with -- for it is, after all,
with men and not with parchment that I quarrel -- and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of
the government. How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government,
or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he
has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and
see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous
thought or speech corresponding with his action? I know this well, that if one thousand, if one
hundred, if ten men whom I could name -- if ten honest men only -- ay, if one HONEST man, in
this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this
copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in
America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is
done forever. But we love better to talk about it: that we say is our mission. Reform keeps many
scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man. If my esteemed neighbor, the State's
ambassador, who will devote his days to the settlement of the question of human rights in the
Council Chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of Carolina, were to sit down the
prisoner of Massachusetts, that State which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister
-- though at present she can discover only an act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with
her -- the Legislature would not wholly waive the subject the following winter.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less
desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as
they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the
Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them;
on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not
with her, but against her -- the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with
honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the
ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how
much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat
injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper
merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is
not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is
to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to
choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and
bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed
innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If
the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall I do?" my
answer is, "If you really wish to do anything, resign your office." When the subject has refused
allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even
suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded?
Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an
everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.
I have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender, rather than the seizure of his goods -though both will serve the same purpose -- because they who assert the purest right, and
consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time in
accumulating property. To such the State renders comparatively small service, and a slight tax is
wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if they are obliged to earn it by special labor with their
hands. If there were one who lived wholly without the use of money, the State itself would hesitate
to demand it of him. But the rich man -- not to make any invidious comparison -- is always sold to
the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for
money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and it was certainly no
great virtue to obtain it. It puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to
answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it.
Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet. The opportunities of living are diminished in
proportion as what are called the "means" are increased. The best thing a man can do for his
culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he
was poor. Christ answered the Herodians according to their condition. "Show me the
tribute-money," said he; -- and one took a penny out of his pocket; -- if you use money which has
the image of Caesar on it, and which he has made current and valuable, that is, if you are men of
the State, and gladly enjoy the advantages of Caesar's government, then pay him back some of his
own when he demands it; "Render therefore to Caesar that which is Caesar's, and to God those
things which are God's" -- leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which; for they did
not wish to know.
When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive that, whatever they may say about the
magnitude and seriousness of the question, and their regard for the public tranquillity, the long and
the short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and
they dread the consequences to their property and families of disobedience to it. For my own part,
I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, if I deny the authority
of the State when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass
me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly,
and at the same time comfortably in outward respects. It will not be worth the while to accumulate
property; that would be sure to go again. You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small
crop, and eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself always tucked up
and ready for a start, and not have many affairs. A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will
be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish government. Confucius said, "If a state is governed
by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by
the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame." No: until I want the
protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty
is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I
can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me
less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should
feel as if I were worth less in that case.
Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the Church, and commanded me to pay a certain
sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never I myself.
"Pay," it said, "or be locked up in the jail." I declined to pay. But, unfortunately, another man saw
fit to pay it. I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the
priest the schoolmaster: for I was not the State's schoolmaster, but I supported myself by voluntary
subscription. I did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the State to
back its demand, as well as the Church. However, at the request of the selectmen, I condescended
to make some such statement as this in writing:-- "Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry
Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not
joined." This I gave to the town clerk; and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not
wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since;
though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. If I had known how to name
them, I should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I
did not know where to find a complete list.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and,
as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a
foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the
foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be
locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could
put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was
a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or
break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined,
and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had
paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are
underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my
chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how
industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let
or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had
resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they
have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone
woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my
remaining respect for it, and pitied it.
Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body,
his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was
not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What
force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to
become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to have this way or that by masses of
men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, "Your
money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and
not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to
snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am
not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one
does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and
grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a
plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
The night in prison was novel and interesting enough. The prisoners in their shirt-sleeves were
enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway, when I entered. But the jailer said, "Come,
boys, it is time to lock up"; and so they dispersed, and I heard the sound of their steps returning
into the hollow apartments. My room-mate was introduced to me by the jailer as "a first-rate
fellow and a clever man." When the door was locked, he showed me where to hang my hat, and
how he managed matters there. The rooms were whitewashed once a month; and this one, at least,
was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest apartment in the town. He
naturally wanted to know where I came from, and what brought me there; and, when I had told
him, I asked him in my turn how he came there, presuming him to be an honest man, of course;
and, as the world goes, I believe he was. "Why," said he, "they accuse me of burning a barn; but I
never did it." As near as I could discover, he had probably gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and
smoked his pipe there; and so a barn was burnt. He had the reputation of being a clever man, had
been there some three months waiting for his trial to come on, and would have to wait as much
longer; but he was quite domesticated and contented, since he got his board for nothing, and
thought that he was well treated.
He occupied one window, and I the other; and I saw that if one stayed there long, his principal
business would be to look out the window. I had soon read all the tracts that were left there, and
examined where former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate had been sawed off, and
heard the history of the various occupants of that room; for I found that even here there was a
history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only
house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but
not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men
who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.
I pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as I could, for fear I should never see him again; but at length
he showed me which was my bed, and left me to blow out the lamp.
It was like travelling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there for one
night. It seemed to me that I never had heard the town-clock strike before, nor the evening sounds
of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. It was to see my
native village in the light of the Middle Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream,
and visions of knights and castles passed before me. They were the voices of old burghers that I
heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in
the kitchen of the adjacent village-inn -- a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer
view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions before. This is
one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants
were about.
In the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the door, in small oblong-square tin
pans, made to fit, and holding a pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron spoon. When
they called for the vessels again, I was green enough to return what bread I had left; but my
comrade seized it, and said that I should lay that up for lunch or dinner. Soon after he was let out
to work at haying in a neighboring field, whither he went every day, and would not be back till
noon; so he bade me good-day, saying that he doubted if he should see me again.
When I came out of prison -- for some one interfered, and paid that tax -- I did not perceive that
great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in a youth and
emerged a tottering and gray-headed man; and yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene -the town, and State, and country -- greater than any that mere time could effect. I saw yet more
distinctly the State in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be
trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they
did not greatly propose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me by their prejudices and
superstitions, as the Chinamen and Malays are; that in their sacrifices to humanity, they ran no
risks, not even to their property; that after all they were not so noble but they treated the thief as he
had treated them, and hoped, by a certain outward observance and a few prayers, and by walking
in a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls. This may be to
judge my neighbors harshly; for I believe that many of them are not aware that they have such an
institution as the jail in their village.
It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his
acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the
grating of a jail window, "How do ye do?" My neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at
me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was
going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I
proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party,
who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was
soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off,
and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
This is the whole history of "My Prisons."
I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor
as I am of being a bad subject; and as for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my
fellow-countrymen now. It is for no particular item in the tax-bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply
wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. I do not care
to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with -- the
dollar is innocent -- but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. In fact, I quietly
declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make what use and get what
advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases.
If others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a sympathy with the State, they do but what
they have already done in their own case, or rather they abet injustice to a greater extent than the
State requires. If they pay the tax from a mistaken interest in the individual taxed, to save his
property, or prevent his going to jail, it is because they have not considered wisely how far they let
their private feelings interfere with the public good.
This, then, is my position at present. But one cannot be too much on his guard in such a case, lest
his action be biased by obstinacy or an undue regard for the opinions of men. Let him see that he
does only what belongs to himself and to the hour.
I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well; they are only ignorant; they would do better if
they knew how: why give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to? But I
think, again, This is no reason why I should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much greater
pain of a different kind. Again, I sometimes say to myself, When many millions of men, without
heat, without ill-will, without personal feeling of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only,
without the possibility, such is their constitution, of retracting or altering their present demand,
and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other millions, why expose yourself to
this overwhelming brute force? You do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus
obstinately; you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. You do not put your head into the
fire. But just in proportion as I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force,
and consider that I have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere
brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the
Maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves. But, if I put my head deliberately into the
fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the Maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame. If I could
convince myself that I have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them
accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of what they
and I ought to be, then, like a good Mussulman and fatalist, I should endeavor to be satisfied with
things as they are, and say it is the will of God. And, above all, there is this difference between
resisting this and a purely brute or natural force, that I can resist this with some effect; but I cannot
expect, like Orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts.
I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not wish to split hairs, to make fine
distinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbors. I seek rather, I may say, even an excuse
for conforming to the laws of the land. I am but too ready to conform to them. Indeed, I have
reason to suspect myself on this head; and each year, as the tax-gatherer comes round, I find
myself disposed to review the acts and position of the general and State governments, and the
spirit of the people, to discover a pretext for conformity.
"We must affect our country as our parents,
And if at any time we alienate
Our love or industry from doing it honor,
We must respect effects and teach the soul
Matter of conscience and religion,
And not desire of rule or benefit."
I believe that the State will soon be able to take all my work of this sort out of my hands, and then
I shall be no better a patriot than my fellow-countrymen. Seen from a lower point of view, the
Constitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and the courts are very respectable; even this
State and this American government are, in many respects, very admirable and rare things, to be
thankful for, such as a great many have described them; but seen from a point of view a little
higher, they are what I have described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall
say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?
However, the government does not concern me much, and I shall bestow the fewest possible
thoughts on it. It is not many moments that I live under a government, even in this world. If a man
is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to
be to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.
I know that most men think differently from myself; but those whose lives are by profession
devoted to the study of these or kindred subjects, content me as little as any. Statesmen and
legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it.
They speak of moving society, but have no resting-place without it. They may be men of a certain
experience and discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for
which we sincerely thank them; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide
limits. They are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency. Webster
never goes behind government, and so cannot speak with authority about it. His words are wisdom
to those legislators who contemplate no essential reform in the existing government; but for
thinkers, and those who legislate for all time, he never once glances at the subject. I know of those
whose serene and wise speculations on this theme would soon reveal the limits of his mind's range
and hospitality. Yet, compared with the cheap professions of most reformers, and the still cheaper
wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general, his are almost the only sensible and valuable
words, and we thank Heaven for him. Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, above all,
practical. Still, his quality is not wisdom, but prudence. The lawyer's truth is not truth, but
consistency or a consistent expediency. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not
concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing. He well deserves to be
called, as he has been called, the Defender of the Constitution. There are really no blows to be
given by him but defensive ones. He is not a leader, but a follower. His leaders are the men of '87.
"I have never made an effort," he says, "and never propose to make an effort; I have never
countenanced an effort, and never mean to countenance an effort, to disturb the arrangement as
originally made, by which the various States came into the Union." Still thinking of the sanction
which the Constitution gives to slavery, he says, "Because it was a part of the original compact -let it stand." Notwithstanding his special acuteness and ability, he is unable to take a fact out of its
merely political relations, and behold it as it lies absolutely to be disposed of by the intellect -what, for instance, it behooves a man to do here in America to-day with regard to slavery, but
ventures, or is driven, to make some such desperate answer as the following, while professing to
speak absolutely, and as a private man -- from which what new and singular code of social duties
might be inferred? "The manner," says he, "in which the governments of those States where
slavery exists are to regulate it is for their own consideration, under their responsibility to their
constituents, to the general laws of propriety, humanity, and justice, and to God. Associations
formed elsewhere, springing from a feeling of humanity, or any other cause, have nothing
whatever to do with it. They have never received any encouragement from me, and they never
will."
They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and
wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility;
but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once
more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head.
No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the
world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not
yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day. We
love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may
inspire. Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and of freedom, of
union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no genius or talent for comparatively humble
questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufacturers and agriculture. If we were left
solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable
experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank
among the nations. For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the
New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent
enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?
The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to -- for I will cheerfully obey
those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can
do so well -- is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the
governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The
progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a
progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough
to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last
improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing
and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the
State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own
power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a
State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a
neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live
aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors
and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it
ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have
imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.
5。爱默生眼中的梭罗：
Thoreau - Part 1
Ralph Waldo Emerson's Eulogy of May 9th, 1862
Published in the Atlantic Monthly, 1862
Note: While Emerson must have had the best intentions, some of the things he wrote are not
entirely accurate. In this text, each hypertext annotation number that is followed by an asterisk
indicates an item that could be misleading, with further information in the annotation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------It seemed as if the breezes brought him,
It seemed as if the sparrows taught him,
As if by secret sign he knew
Where in far fields the orchis grew.(1)
[1]
Henry David Thoreau was the last male descendant of a French ancestor who came to
this country from the Isle of Guernsey.(2) His character exhibited occasional traits drawn from this
blood in singular combination with a very strong Saxon genius.
[2]
He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on the 12th of July, 1817. He was graduated at
Harvard College in 1837, but without any literary distinction.(3) An iconoclast in literature, he
seldom thanked colleges for their service to him, holding them in small esteem,(4*) whilst yet his
debt to them was important. After leaving the University, he joined his brother in teaching a
private school, which he soon renounced.(5*) His father was a manufacturer of lead-pencils, and
Henry applied himself for a time to this craft, believing he could make a better pencil that was
then in use.(6) After completing his experiments, he exhibited his work to chemists and artists in
Boston, and having obtained their certificates to its excellence and to its quality with the best
London manufacturer, he returned home contented. His friends congratulated him that he had now
opened his way to fortune. But he replied, that he should never make another pencil. "Why should
I? I would not do again what I have done once." He resumed his endless walks and miscellaneous
studies, making every day some new acquaintance with Nature, though as yet never speaking of
zoology or botany, since, though very studious of natural facts, he was incurious of technical and
textual science.(7*)
[3]
At this time, a strong, healthy youth, fresh from college, while all his companions were
choosing their profession, or eager to begin some lucrative employment, it was inevitable that his
thoughts should be exercised on the same conditions, and it required rare decision to refuse all the
accustomed paths, and keep his solitary freedom at the cost of disappointing the natural
expectations of his family and friends: all the more difficult that he had a perfect probity, was
exact in securing his own independence, and in holding every man to the like duty. But Thoreau
never faltered. He was a born protestant. He declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge
and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the
art of living well. If he slighted and defied the opinions of others, it was only that he was more
intent to reconcile his practice with his own belief. Never idle or self-indulgent, he preferred,
when he wanted money, earning it by some piece of manual labor agreeable to him, as building a
boat or a fence, planting, grafting, surveying,(8*) or other short work, to any long engagement.
With his hardy habits and few wants, his skill in wood-craft, and his powerful arithmetic, he was
very competent to live in any part of the world. It would cost him less time to supply his wants
than another. He was therefore secure of his leisure.
[4]
A natural skill for mensuration, growing out of his mathematical knowledge, and his
habit of ascertaining the measures and distances of objects which interested him, the size of trees,
the depth and extent of ponds and rivers, the height of mountains, and the air-line distance of his
favorite summits, — this, and his intimate knowledge of the territory about Concord, made him
drift into the profession of land-surveyor. It had the advantage for him that it led him continually
into new and secluded grounds, and helped his studies of Nature. His accuracy and skill in this
work were readily appreciated, and he found all the employment he wanted.
[5]
He could easily solve the problems of the surveyor, but he was daily beset with graver
questions, which he manfully confronted. He interrogated every custom, and wished to settle his
practice on an ideal foundation. He was a protestant a outrance,(9) and few lives contain so many
renunciations. He was bred to no profession; he never married;(10) he lived alone; he never went
to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine,
he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. He chose,
wisely, no doubt, for himself, to be bachelor of thought and Nature. He had no talent for wealth,
and knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance. Perhaps he fell into his
way of living without forecasting it much, but approved it with later wisdom. "I am often
reminded," he wrote in his journal, "that, if I had bestowed on me the wealth of Croesus, my aims
must be still the same, and my means essentially the same." He had no temptations to fight against,
— no appetites, no passions,(11*) no taste for elegant trifles. A fine house, dress, the manners and
talk of highly cultivated people were all thrown away on him. He much preferred a good
Indian,(12) and considered these refinements as impediments to conversation, wishing to meet his
companion on the simplest terms. He declined invitations to dinner-parties, because there each
was in every one's way, and he could not meet the individuals to any purpose. "They make their
pride," he said, "in making their dinner cost much; I make my pride in making my dinner cost
little." When asked at table what dish he preferred, he answered, "The nearest." He did not like the
taste of wine, and never had a vice in his life. He said, — "I have a faint recollection of pleasure
derived from smoking dried lily-stems, before I was a man. I had commonly a supply of these. I
have never smoked anything more noxious."
[6]
He chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself. In his travels,
he used the railroad only to get over so much country as was unimportant to the present purpose,
walking hundreds of miles, avoiding taverns, buying a lodging in farmers and fishermen's houses,
as cheaper, and more agreeable to him, and because there he could better find the men and the
information he wanted.
[7]
There was something military in his nature not to be subdued, always manly and able,
but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose,
a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his
powers into full exercise. It cost him nothing to say No; indeed, he found it much easier than to
say Yes. It seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so impatient
was he of the limitations of our daily thought. This habit, of course, is a little chilling to the social
affections; and though the companion would in the end acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet it
mars conversation. Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure
and guileless. "I love Henry," said one of his friends, "but I cannot like him; and as for taking his
arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree."(13*)
[8]
Yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really fond of sympathy, and threw himself
heartily and childlike into the company of young people whom he loved, and whom he delighted
to entertain, as he only could, with the varied and endless anecdotes of his experiences by field
and river. And he was always ready to lead a huckleberry party or a search for chestnuts or grapes.
Talking, one day, of a public discourse, Henry remarked, that whatever succeeded with the
audience was bad. I said, "Who would not like to write something which all can read, like
Robinson Crusoe? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right
materialistic treatment, which delights everybody?" Henry objected, of course, and vaunted the
better lectures which reached only a few persons. But, at supper, a young girl, understanding that
he was to lecture at the Lyecum, sharply asked him, "whether his lecture would be a nice,
interesting story, such as she wished to hear, or whether it was one of those old philosophical
things that she did not care about." Henry turned to her, and bethought himself, and, I saw, was
trying to believe that he had matter that might fit her and her brother, who were to sit up and go to
the lecture, if it was a good one for them.
[9]
He was a speaker and actor of the truth, — born such, — and was ever running into
dramatic situations from this cause. In any circumstance, it interested all bystanders to know what
part Henry would take, and what he would say; and he did not disappoint expectation, but used an
original judgment on each emergency. In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores
of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study.(14*) This action was
quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him with affection. He was more
unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. As soon as he had exhausted the advantages
of that solitude, he abandoned it. In 1847, not approving some uses to which the public
expenditure was applied, he refused to pay his town tax, and was put in jail. A friend paid the tax
for him, and he was released. The like annoyance was threatened the next year. But, as his friends
paid the tax, notwithstanding his protest, I believe he ceased to resist. No opposition or ridicule
had any weight with him. He coldly and fully stated his opinion without affecting to believe that it
was the opinion of the company. It was of no consequence, if every one present held the opposite
opinion. On one occasion he went to the University Library to procure some books. The librarian
refused to lend them. Mr. Thoreau repaired to the President, who stated to him the rules and
usages, which permitted the loan of books to resident graduates, to clergymen who were alumni,
and to some other residents within a circle of ten miles radius from the College. Mr. Thoreau
explained to the President that the railroad had destroyed the old scale of distances, — that the
library was useless, yes, and President and College useless, on the terms of his rules, — that the
one benefit he owed to the College was its library, — that, at this moment, not only his want of
books was imperative, but he wanted a large number of books, and assured him that he, Thoreau,
and not the librarian, was the proper custodian of these. In short, the President found the petitioner
so formidable, and the rules getting to look so ridiculous, that he ended by giving him a privilege
which in his hands proved unlimited thereafter.
[10]
No truer American existed than Thoreau. His preference of his county and condition
was genuine, and his aversation from English and European manners and tastes almost reached
contempt. He listened impatiently to news or bonmots gleaned from London circles; and though
he tried to be civil, these anecdotes fatigued him. The men were all imitating each other, and on a
small mould. Why can they not live as far apart as possible, and each be man by himself? What he
sought was the most energetic nature; and he wished to go to Oregon, not to London. "In every
part of Great Britain," he wrote in his diary, "are discovered traces of the Romans, their funereal
urns, their camps, their roads, their dwellings. But New England, at least, is not based on any
Roman ruins. We have not to lay the foundations of our houses on the ashes of a former
civilization."
[11]
But, idealist as he was, standing for abolition of slavery, abolition of tariffs, almost for
abolition of government, it is needless to say he found himself not only unrepresented in actual
politics, but almost equally opposed to every class of reformers. Yet he paid the tribute of his
uniform respect to the Anti-Slavery Party. One man, whose personal acquaintance he had formed,
he honored with exceptional regard. Before the first friendly word had been spoken for Captain
John Brown, after the arrest, he sent notices to most houses in Concord, that he would speak in a
public ball on the condition and character of John Brown, on Sunday evening, and invited all
people to come. The Republican Committee, the Abolitionist Committee, sent him word that it
was premature and not advisable. He replied, — "I did not send to you for advice, but to announce
that I am to speak." The hall was filled at an early hour by people of all parties, and his earnest
eulogy of the hero was heard by all respectfully, by many with a sympathy that surprised
themselves.
[12]
It was said of Plotinus (15) that he was ashamed of his body, and 'tis very likely he had
good reason for it, — that his body was a bad servant, and he had not skill in dealing with the
material world, as happens often to men of abstract intellect. But Mr. Thoreau was equipped with
a most adapted and serviceable body. He was of short stature, firmly built, of light complexion,
with strong, serious blue eyes, and a grave aspect, — his face covered in the late years with a
becoming beard. His senses were acute, his frame well-knit and hardy, his hands strong and
skillful in the use of tools. And there was a wonderful fitness of body and mind. He could pace
sixteen rods (16) more accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain. He
could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes. He could
estimate the measure of a tree very well by his eyes; he could estimate the weight of a calf or a pig,
like a dealer. From a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his
hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp. He was a good swimmer, runner, skater,
boatman, and would probably outwalk most countrymen in a day's journey. And the relation of
body to mind was still finer than we have indicated. He said he wanted every stride his legs made.
The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house, he did not
write at all.
[13]
He had a strong common sense, like that which Rose Flammock,(17) the weaver's
daughter, in Scott's romance, commends in her father, as resembling a yardstick, which, whilst it
measures dowlas and diaper,(18) can equally well measure tapestry and cloth of gold. He had
always a new resource. When I was planting forest-trees, and had procured half of a peck of
acorns, he said that only a small portion of them would be sound, and proceeded to examine them,
and select the sound ones. But finding this took time, he said, "I think, if you put them all into
water, the good ones will sink;" which experiment we tried with success. He could plan a garden,
or a house, or a barn; would have been competent to lead a "Pacific Exploring Expedition"; could
give judicious counsel in the gravest private or public affairs.
[14]
He lived for the day, not cumbered and mortified by his memory. If he brought you
yesterday a new proposition, he would bring you to-day another not less revolutionary. A very
industrious man, and setting, like all highly organized men, a high value on his time, he seemed
the only man of leisure in town, always ready for any excursion that promised well, or for
conversation prolonged into late hours. His trenchant sense was never stopped by his rules of daily
prudence, but was always up to the new occasion. He liked and used the simplest food, yet, when
some one urged a vegetable diet, Thoreau thought all diets a very small matter, saying that "the
man who shoots the buffalo lives better than the man who boards at the Graham House."(19) He
said, — "You can sleep near the railroad, and never be disturbed: Nature knows very well what
sounds are worth attending to, and has made up her mind not to hear the railroad-whistle. But
things respect the devout mind, and a mental ecstasy was never interrupted." He noted, what
repeatedly befell him, that, after receiving from a distance a rare plant, he would presently find the
same in his own haunts. And those pieces of luck which happen only to good players happened to
him. One day, walking with a stranger, who inquired where Indian arrow-heads could be found, he
replied, "Everywhere," and, stooping forward, picked one on the instant from the ground. At
Mount Washington,(20) in Tuckerman's Ravine, Thoreau had a bad fall, and sprained his foot. As
he was in the act of getting up from his fall, he saw for the first time the leaves of the Arnica
mollis.(21)
[15]
His robust common sense, armed with stout hands, keen perceptions, and strong will,
cannot yet account for the superiority which shone in his simple and hidden life. I must add the
cardinal fact, that there was an excellent wisdom in him, proper to a rare class of men, which
showed him the material world as a means and symbol. This discovery, which sometimes yields to
poets a certain casual and interrupted light, serving for the ornament of their writing, was in him
an unsleeping insight; and whatever faults or obstructions of temperament might cloud it, he was
not disobedient to the heavenly vision. In his youth, he said, one day, "The other world is all my
art; my pencils will draw no other; my jack-knife will cut nothing else; I do not use it as a means."
This was the muse and genius that ruled his opinions, conversation, studies, work, and course of
life. This made him a searching judge of men. At first glance he measured his companion, and,
though insensible to some fine traits of culture, could very well report his weight and calibre. And
this made the impression of genius which his conversation often gave.
[16]
He understood the matter in hand at a glance, and saw the limitations and poverty of
those he talked with, so that nothing seemed concealed from such terrible eyes. I have repeatedly
known young men of sensibility converted in a moment to the belief that this was the man they
were in search of, the man of men, who could tell them all they should do. His own dealing with
them was never affectionate, but superior, didactic. — scorning their petty ways, — very slowly
conceding, or not conceding at all, the promise of his society at their houses, or even at his own.
"Would he not walk with them?" "He did not know. There was nothing so important to him as his
walk; he had no walks to throw away on company." Visits were offered him from respectful
parties, but he declined them. Admiring friends offered to carry him at their own cost to the
Yellow-Stone River, — to the West Indies, — to South America. But though nothing could be
more grave or considered than his refusals, they remind one in quite new relations of that fop
Brummel's (22) reply to the gentlemen who offered him his carriage in a shower, "But where will
you ride, then?" — and what accusing silences, and what searching and irresistible speeches,
battering down all defences, his companions can remember!
[17]
Mr. Thoreau dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills, and waters
of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all reading Americans, and to
people over the sea. The river on whose banks he was born and died (23) he knew from its springs
to its confluence with the Merrimack. He had made summer and winter observations on it for
many years, and at every hour of the day and the night. The result of the recent survey of the
Water Commissioners appointed by the State of Massachusetts he had reached by his private
experiments, several years earlier. Every fact which occurs in the bed, on the banks, or in the air
over it; the fishes, and their spawning and nests, their manners, their food; the shad-flies which fill
the air on a certain evening once a year, and which are snapped at by the fishes so ravenously that
many of these die of repletion; the conical heaps of small stones on the river-shallows, one of
which heaps will sometimes overfill a cart, — these heaps the huge nests of small fishes; the birds
which frequent the stream, heron, duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey; the snake, musk-rat, otter,
woodchuck, and fox, on the banks; the turtle, frog, hyla, and cricket, which make the banks vocal,
— were all known to him, and, as it were, townsmen and fellow-creatures; so that he felt an
absurdity or violence in any narrative of one of these by itself apart, and still more of its
dimensions on an inch-rule, or in the exhibition of its skeleton, or the specimen of a squirrel or a
bird in brandy. He liked to speak of the manners of the river, as itself a lawful creature, yet with
exactness, and always to an observed fact. As he knew the river, so the ponds in this region.
[18]
One of the weapons he used, more important than microscope or alcohol-receiver to
other investigators, was a whim which grew on him by indulgence, yet appeared in gravest
statement, namely, of extolling his own town and neighborhood as the most favored centre for
natural observation. He remarked that the Flora of Massachusetts embraced almost all the
important plants of America, — most of the oaks, most of the willows, the best pines, the ash, the
maple, the beech, the nuts. He returned Kane's "Arctic Voyage" to a friend of whom he had
borrowed it, with the remark, that "most of the phenomena noted might be observed in Concord."
He seemed a little envious of the Pole, for the coincident sunrise and sunset, or five minutes day
after six months: a splendid fact, which Annursnuc had never afforded him. He found red snow in
one of his walks, and told me that he expected to find yet the Victoria regia in Concord. He was
the attorney of the indigenous plants, and owned to a preference of the weeds to the imported
plants, as of the Indian to the civilized man, — and noticed, with pleasure, that the willow
bean-poles of his neighbor had grown more than his beans. "See these weeds," he said, "which
have been hoed at by a million farmers all spring and summer, and yet have prevailed, and just
now come out triumphant over all lanes, pastures, fields, and gardens, such is their vigor. We have
insulted them with low names, too, — as Pigweed, Wormwood, Chickweed, Shad-Blossom." He
says, "They have brave names, too, — Ambrosia, Stellaria, Amelanchia, Amaranth, etc."
[19]
I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord did not grow out
of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes, but was rather a playful
expression of his conviction of the indifferency of all places, and that the best place for each is
where he stands. He expressed it once in this wise: — "I think nothing is to be hoped from you, if
this bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than any other in this world, or in any
world."
[20]
The other weapon with which he conquered all obstacles in science was patience. He
knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish,
which had retired from him, should come back, and resume its habits, nay, moved by curiosity,
should come to him and watch him.
(continued)
Notes
1. From Emerson's poem "Woodnotes" - back
2. Jean Thoreau, Henry's grandfather, arrived in America after a shipwreck, served for a time
under Paul Revere, and became a merchant in Boston. Jean Anglicized his first name to John, and
at some point, in an apparent attempt to Anglicize his last name, the accent was moved to the first
syllable. - back
3. Thoreau graduated 19th in a class of 44, and studied classical literature, French, Italian, and
German, as well as math, geology, zoology, botany, and natural and intellectual philosophy. - back
4. It was not just Henry who held Harvard in low esteem; Harvard's conditions led to a student riot
in Thoreau's freshman year - back
5. Emerson does not mention that the Thoreaus' school closed because Henry's brother John died. back
6. Henry Thoreau, working in the family pencil business, was the first American to develop a
pencil that was comparable to European pencils. His primary contributions were the mixing of
graphite and clay to create a functional pencil lead, and the discovery that the hardness of the lead
could be regulated by varying the proportions of graphite and clay. He continued to work in the
family business, and often traveled to Sturbridge, Massachusets to buy graphite. - back
7. Emerson appears not to have noticed that Thoreau had developed a serious interest in botany,
especially after meeting Louis Agassiz, an influential Swiss-born naturalist at Harvard, with whom
Thoreau corresponded, and for whom he later collected wildlife specimens. Over a ten year period
Thoreau was able to identify more than 800 species in Middlesex County. - back
8. Emerson describes surveying as manual labor, but very few surveyors would agree with this.
Thoreau became an excellent surveyor, and travelled as far as New Jersey to survey for a proposed
residential community. - back
9. "Combat à outrance" is a fight to the end, or to the death; Emerson is describing Thoreau as a
protestant in the extreme. - back
10. He did propose marriage once, to Elllen Sewall, but was rejected. - back
11. Thoreau's enduring passion was Nature, especially botany. - back
12. Thoreau was fascinated by Indians, traveled with them in Maine, and compiled extensive notes
on them. Had he lived longer, he almost certainly would have written more about them - back
13. Henry had some close friends, and was part of a very close family. Without his friends and
family, he would have been an obscure writer today - back
14. Henry was not at all alone for two years; he walked into town, and his friends often walked out
to the pond. - back
15. Plotinus (ca. 205–270), Greek philosopher, considered the father of Neoplatonism. - back
16. A linear rod is 16.5 feet long; sixteen rods is 1,640 feet. - back
17. Rose Flammock is a character in "The Betrothed" by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). - back
18. types of linen fabric - back
19. The name of Dr. Sylvester Graham, a vegetarian and proponent of healthy eating, lives on in
the Graham cracker, made from whole wheat flour. - back
20. Mount Washington in New Hampshire is the tallest mountain in the northeastern United States.
The Arnica mollis is a plant with yellow flowers that grows well at high altitudes. - back
21. Named after botanist Edward Tuckerman, Tuckerman's Ravine attracated early visitors to the
White Mountains. Thoreau visited in 1858. - back
22. George Bryan Brummell (1778-1840), also known as "Beau" Brummell, an arbiter of fashion
in Regency England - back
23. The Concord River, which flows into the Merrimack – back
Thoreau - Part 2
Ralph Waldo Emerson's Eulogy of May 9th, 1862
Atlantic Monthly, 1862
[1]
It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a
bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on
the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. One must submit abjectly to such a
guide, and the reward was great. Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants; in his
pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. He wore
straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave shrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for
a hawk's or a squirrel's nest. He waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were
no insignificant part of his armor. On the day I speak of he looked for the Menyanthes,(1) detected
it across the wide pool, and, on examination of the florets, decided that it had been in flower five
days. He drew out of his breast-pocket his diary, and read the names of all the plants that should
bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as a banker when his notes fall due. The Cypripedium
not due till to-morrow. He thought, that, if waked up from a trance, in this swamp, he could tell by
the plants what time of the year it was within two days. The redstart was flying about, and
presently the fine grosbeaks, whose brilliant scarlet "makes the rash gazer wipe his eye," and
whose fine clear note Thoreau compared to that of a tanager which has got rid of its hoarseness.
Presently he heard a note which he called that of the night-warbler, a bird he had never identified,
had been in search of twelve years, which always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving down
into a tree or bush, and which it was vain to seek; the only bird that sings indifferently by night
and by day. I told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing
more to show him. He said, "What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon
all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey."
[2]
His interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was connected with
Nature, — and the meaning of Nature was never attempted to be defined by him. He would not
offer a memoir of his observations to the Natural History Society. "Why should I? To detach the
description from its connections in my mind would make it no longer true or valuable to me: and
they do not wish what belongs to it." His power of observation seemed to indicate additional
senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a
photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the
fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in
his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole. His determination on Natural History was
organic. He confessed that he sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if born among Indians,
would have been a fell hunter. But, restrained by his Massachusetts culture he played out the game
in this mild form of botany and ichthyology. His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas
Fuller records of Butler the apiologist,(2) that "either he had told the bees things or the bees had
told him." Snakes coiled round his leg; the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of the
water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protection
from the hunters. Our naturalist had perfect magnanimity; he had no secrets; he would carry you
to the heron's haunt, or even to his most prized botanical swamp, — possibly knowing that you
could never find it again, yet willing to take his risks.
[3]
No college ever offered him a diploma,(3) or a professor's chair; no academy made him
its corresponding secretary, its discoverer, or even its member. Perhaps these learned bodies feared
the satire of his presence. Yet so much knowledge of Nature's secret and genius few others
possessed, none in a more large and religious synthesis. For not a particle of respect had he to the
opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to the truth itself; and as he discovered
everywhere among doctors some leaning of courtesy, it discredited them. He grew to be revered
and admired by his townsmen, who had at first known him only as an oddity. The farmers who
employed him as a surveyor soon discovered his rare accuracy and skill, his knowledge of their
lands, of trees, of birds, of Indian remains, and the like, which enabled him to tell every farmer
more than he knew before of his own farm; so that he began to feel as if Mr. Thoreau had better
rights in his land than he. They felt, too, the superiority of the character which addressed all men
with a native authority.
[4]
Indian relics abound in Corcord, — arrow-heads, stone chisels, pestles, and fragments
of pottery; and on the river-bank, large heaps of clam-shells and ashes mark spots which the
savages frequented. These, and every circumstance touching the Indian, were important in his eyes.
His visits to Maine were chiefly for love of the Indian. He had the satisfaction of seeing the
manufacture of the bark-canoe, as well as of trying his hand in its management on the rapids. He
was inquisitive about the making of the stone arrow-head, and in his last days charged a youth
setting out for the Rocky Mountains to find an Indian who could tell him that: "It was well worth a
visit to California to learn it." Occasionally, a small party of Penobscot Indians would visit
Concord, and pitch their tents for a few weeks in summer on the river-bank. He failed not to make
acquaintance with the best of them; though he well knew that asking questions of Indians is like
catechizing beavers and rabbits. In his last visit to Maine he had great satisfaction from Joseph
Polis,(4) an intelligent Indian of Oldtown, who was his guide for some weeks.
[5]
He was equally interested in every natural fact. The depth of his perception found
likeness of law throughout Nature, and I know not any genius who so swiftly inferred universal
law from the single fact. He was no pedant of a department. His eye was open to beauty, and his
ear to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. He thought the best
of music was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the
telegraph-wire.
[6]
His poetry might be bad or good; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility and technical skill;
but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual perception. He was a good reader and critic, and his
judgment on poetry was to the ground of it. He could not be deceived as to the presence or
absence of the poetic element in any composition, and his thirst for this made him negligent and
perhaps scornful of superficial graces. He would pass by many delicate rhythms, but he would
have detected every live stanza or line in a volume, and knew very well where to find an equal
poetic charm in prose. He was so enamored of the spiritual beauty that he held all actual written
poems in very light esteem in the comparison. He admired Æschylus (5) and Pindar;(6) but, when
some one was commending them, he said that "Æschylus and the Greeks, in describing Apollo (7)
and Orpheus,(8) had given no song, or no good one. They ought not to have moved trees, but to
have chanted to the gods such a hymn as would have sung all their old ideas out of their heads,
and new ones in." His own verses are often rude and defective. The gold does not yet run pure, is
drossy and crude. The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey. But if he want lyric fineness and
technical merits, if he have not the poetic temperament, he never lacks the causal thought,
showing that his genius was better than his talent. He knew the worth of the Imagination for the
uplifting and consolation of human life, and liked to throw every thought into a symbol. The fact
you tell is of no value, but only the impression. For this reason his presence was poetic, always
piqued the curiosity to know more deeply the secrets of his mind. He had many reserves, an
unwillingness to exhibit to profane eyes what was still sacred in his own, and knew well how to
throw a poetic veil over his experience. All readers of "Walden" will remember his mythical
record of his disappointments: —
[7]
"I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many
are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks, and what calls they
answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even
seen the dove disappear behind a cloud; and they seemed an anxious to recover them as if they had
lost them themselves."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------[8]
His riddles were worth the reading, and I confide, that, if at any time I do not
understand the expression, it is yet just. Such was the wealth of his truth that it was not worth his
while to use words in vain. His poem entitled "Sympathy" reveals the tenderness under that triple
steel of stoicism, and the intellectual subtilty it could animate. His classic on "Smoke" suggests
Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides. His biography is in his verses. His habitual
thought makes all his poetry a hymn to the Cause of causes, the Spirit which vivifies and controls
his own: —
"I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before;
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore."
And still more in these religious lines: —
"Now chiefly is my natal hour,
And only now my prime of life;
I will not doubt the love untold,
Which not my worth or want hath bought,
Which wooed me young, and woos me old,
And to this evening hath me brought."(8)
[9]
Whilst he used in his writings a certain petulance of remark in reference to churches or
churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender, and absolute religion, a person incapable of any
profanation, by act or by thought. Of course, the same isolation which belonged to his original
thinking and living detached him from the social religious forms. This is neither to be censured
nor regretted. Aristotle long ago explained it, when he said, "One who surpasses his fellow-citizen
in virtue is no longer a part of the city. Their law is nor for him, since he is a law to himself."
[10]
Thoreau was sincerity itself, and might fortify the convictions of prophets in the
ethical laws by his holy living. It was an affirmative experience which refused to be set aside. A
truth-speaker he, capable of the most deep and strict conversation; a physician to the wounds of
any soul; a friend, knowing not only the secret of friendship, but almost worshipped by those few
persons who resorted to him as their confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind
and great heart.(9) He thought that without religion or devotion of some kind nothing great was
ever accomplished; and he thought that the bigoted sectarian had better bear this in mind.
[11]
His virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. It was easy to trace to the
inexorable demand in all for exact truth that austerity which made this willing hermit more
solitary even than he wished. Himself of a perfect probity, he required not less of others. He had a
disgust at crime, and no worldly success could cover it. He detected paltering as readily in
dignified and prosperous persons as in beggars, and with equal scorn. Such dangerous frankness
was in his dealing that his admires called him "that terrible Thoreau," as if he spoke when silent,
and was still present when he had departed. I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive
him of a healthy sufficiency of human society.
[12]
The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put
every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings, — a trick
of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and thought its
diametrical opposite. He praised wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic, air, in snow
and ice he would find sultriness, and commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris.
"It was so dry, that you might call it wet."
[13]
The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one object
or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do not share the philosopher's
perception of identity. To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the
Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though he meant
to be just, he seemed haunted by a certain chronic assumption that the science of the day
pretended completeness, and he had just found out that the savans had neglected to discriminate a
particular botanical variety, had failed to describe the seeds or count the sepals. "That is to say,"
we replied, "the blockheads were not born in Concord; but who said they were? It was their
unspeakable misfortune to be born in London, or Paris, or Rome; but, poor fellows, they did what
they could, considering that they never saw Bateman's Pond, or Nine-Acre Corner, or
Becky-Stow's Swamp. Besides, what were you sent into the world for, but to add this
observation?"
[14]
Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his
energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and for command; and I so much
regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had
no ambition.(10*) Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a
huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but
if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!
[15]
But these foibles, real or apparent, were fast vanishing in the incessant growth of a
spirit so robust and wise, and which effaced its defeats with new triumphs. His study of Nature
was a perpetual ornament to him, and inspired his friends with curiosity to see the world through
his eyes, and to hear his adventures. They possessed every kind of interest.
[16]
He had many elegances of his own, whilst he scoffed at conventional elegance. Thus,
he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, the grit of gravel; and therefore never
willingly walked in the road, but in the grass, on mountains and in woods. His senses were acute,
and he remarked that by night every dwelling-house gives out bad air, like a slaughter-house. He
liked the pure fragrance of melilot. He honored certain plants with special regard, and, over all, the
pondlily, — then the gentian, and the Mikania scandens, and "life-everlasting," and a bass-tree
which he visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of July. He thought the scent a more
oracular inquisition than the sight, — more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals
what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness. He delighted in echoes, and
said they were almost the only kind of kindred voices that he heard. He loved Nature so well, was
so happy in her solitude, that he became very jealous of cities, and the sad work which their
refinements and artifices made with man and his dwelling. The axe was always destroying his
forest. "Thank God," he said, "they cannot cut down the clouds!" "All kinds of figures are drawn
on the blue ground with this fibrous white paint."
[17]
I subjoin a few sentences taken from his unpublished manuscripts, not only as records
of his thought and feeling, but for their power of description and literary excellence.
[18]
"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk."
[19]
"The chub is a soft fish, and tastes like boiled brown paper salted."
[20]
"The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a
palace
or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to built a
wood-shed with them."
[21]
"The locust z-ing."
[22]
"Devil's-needles zigzagging along the Nut-Meadow brook."
[23]
"Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear."
[24]
"I put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich salt crackling of their leaves was like
mustard to the ear, the crackling of uncountable regiments. Dead trees love the fire."
[25]
"The bluebird carries the sky on his back."
[26]
"The tanager flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the leaves."
[27]
"If I wish for a horse-hair for my compass-sight, I must go to the stable; but the
hair-bird, with her sharp eyes, goes to the road."
[28]
"Immortal water, alive even to the superficies."
[29]
"Fire is the most tolerable third party."
[30]
"Nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that line."
[31]
"No tree has so fair a bole and so handsome an instep as the beech."
[32]
"How did these beautiful rainbow-tints get into the shell of the fresh-water clam,
buried in the mud at the bottom of our dark river?"
[33]
"Hard are the times when the infant's shoes are second-foot."
[34]
"We are strictly confined to our men to whom we give liberty."
[35]
"Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be popular with
God himself."
[36]
world."
"Of what significance the things you can forget? A little thought is sexton to all the
[37]
"How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of character?"
[38]
"Only he can be trusted with gifts who can present a face of bronze to expectations."
[39]
"I ask to be melted. You can only ask of the metals that they be tender to the fire that
melts them. To nought else can they be tender."
[40]
There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer plant
called "Life-Everlasting," a Gnaphalium like that, which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of
the Tyrolese mountains, where the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by
its beauty, and by his love, (for it is immensely valued by the Swiss maidens,) climbs the cliffs to
gather, and is sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in his hand. It is called by
botanists the Gnaphalium leontopodium, but by the Swiss Edelweisse,(11) which signifies Noble
Purity. Thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of
right. The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were
the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not yet, or in the least part,
how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task,
which none else can finish, — a kind of indignity to so noble a soul, that it should depart out of
Nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he is. But he, at least, is content.
His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this
world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will
find a home.
Notes
1. Menyanthes trifoliata grows in the wetlands of North America. Its common names are bog-bean
and buckbean.
2. Charles Butler (1565–1647) English author, philologist, apiarist, wrote The Feminine
Monarchie, Or The Historie of Bees, in 1609, identified the monarch as a female and the drone as
a male.
3. Thoreau graduated from Harvard in 1937, recieved his diploma, and took part in the graduation
- back
4. Æschylus (525 BC-456 BC), a playwright of Ancient Greece.
5. Pindar (522 BC-443 BC), lyric poet of ancient Greece
6. In Greek mythology, Apollo was the god of the sun.
7. In Greek mythology, Orpheus was the god of the arts.
8. From Thoreau's poem "Inspiration"
9. This may be most obvious in Letters to a Spritual Seeker, a collection of letters to Thoreau's
friend Harrison Blake, compiled and annotated by Bradley P. Dean
10. Emerson appears to have seriously misunderstood the scope of Thoreau's ambitions, perhaps
because Thoreau was a writer and a naturalist, in a day when neither were recognized careers.
11. Edelweisse may be best known to Americans from the song at the end of The Sound of Music.