THE MOTIVATED MENTOR
Notes & Summaries of a Selection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Work
Collected & Edited by Peter G. James Sinclair
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:
In the years that I prepared myself to become a writer of motivational and inspirational
material, I spent a lot of time studying some of the greatest thinkers who have ever lived.
One of these was Ralph Waldo Emerson. He lived in the 1800’s and is well remembered as
one of America’s most influential authors and thinkers.
While reading hundreds and hundreds of motivational books, I kept discovering quotes that
were attributed to this man. I wasn’t satisfied to read hand-me-down quotes, and so I made
a point of finding the original quoter of the quotes, Emerson himself. It is quite ironical that
Emerson once wrote, ‘I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.’
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s books were not to be found on the shelves of my local bookshop or
the shelves of my local university library. I had to search through their musty archives to find
them, and it was there that I discovered copies of his original volumes. These leather bound
books were well over a hundred years old, and their pages so fragile that I had to carefully
turn each and every page in case they fell apart in the process.
Reading His Writings Was Like Drinking Honey
As I spent hour upon hour reading his wise words, in the basement of that university, I
remember sharing with a friend, that reading his writings was like drinking honey. Even
though his language had a 19th Century flavor, there was a depth in his writings that I had
rarely experienced whilst reading most contemporary motivational books. From those
volumes I chose the subjects that appealed to me, took reams of notes in pencil and then
typed them up for future reference. All in all I summarized eight of his volumes, through the
eyes of someone who had a keen interest in personal development.
Just the other day I once again dug out those old summaries and realized that these notes
have formed the very foundations of my work to this day. As I waded through the wealth of
material, I noticed that many of his writings focused on subjects that I share quite often
through my Motivational Memos. Some of the subjects Emerson covered are: discipline,
self-reliance, experience, character, power, wealth, behavior, books, courage, success,
inspiration, the sovereignty of ethics and much, much more. These summaries are probably
the most precious motivational and inspirational materials in my possession.
In my opinion, Ralph Waldo Emerson is the mentor of the mentors and I know that these
writings have been responsible for my own success as a writer and as a motivator.
Throughout the years Emerson’s writings have been quoted over and over by thousands of
motivational authors and speakers alike. Why have they done that? Because his wisdom
cuts to the core, even to this day. He has the uncanny ability to take everyday subjects and
draw from them life-changing lessons that inspire individuals into action.
In this volume I have highlighted passages that I personally found helpful, from the point of
view of someone who is interested in material relating to personal development.
The Motivated Mentor
But before you enter the world of Emerson, summarized in The Motivated Mentor, I’d like to
share just a few gems from his writings. Here is your opportunity to associate with a GIANT:
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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.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the
triumph of principles.
Like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.
Always do what you are afraid to do.
What is the hardest task in the world? To think.
Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they are executed.
Divine persons are victory organized.
Humility is the secret of the wise.
Thus the so-called fortunate man is one who…relies on his instincts, and simply
does not act where he should not, but waits his time, and without effort acts when
the need is. If to this you add a fitness to the society around him, you have the
elements of fortune.
Here are the two capital facts, genius and drill.
And a final word from Emerson:
The enthusiast always finds the master, the masters, whom he seeks. Always genius seeks
genius, desires nothing so much as to be a pupil and to find those who can lend it aid to
perfect itself.
May you benefit from this great man’s writings as much as I have? I am privileged to
introduce you to the world of Ralph Waldo Emerson. This is not his complete work, but
rather life-changing gold nuggets that I excavated for myself in that dark and dusty university
basement, and now share with you here.
Peter G. James Sinclair – Editor
www.motivationalmemo.com
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CONTENTS
VOLUME 1 – Page 6
Discipline
Spirit
Prospects
The American Scholar
VOLUME 2 – Page 10
History
Self-reliance
Compensation
Love
Friendship
Prudence
Heroism
The Over-Soul
Circles
Intellect
Art
VOLUME 3 – Page 21
The Poet
Experience
Character
Manners
VOLUME 4 – Page 26
Uses of Great Men
Shakespeare; or, The Poet
Goethe; or, The Writer
VOLUME 6 – Page 29
Fate
Power
Wealth
Culture
Worship
Considerations By The Way
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Behavior
Beauty
Illusions
VOLUME 7 – Page 37
Society & Solitude
Civilization
Art
Eloquence
Domestic Life
Farming
Works & Days
Books
Literary Club
Clubs
Courage
Success
Old Age
VOLUME 8 – Page 48
Quotation & Originality
Inspiration
Greatness
Resources
Poetry & Imagination
Social Aims
Progress Of Culture
Immortality
VOLUME 10 – Page 58
Demonology
Aristocracy
Perpetual Forces
Character
Education
The Superlative
The Sovereignty Of Ethics
The Preacher
The Man Of Letters
The Scholar
Mary Moody Emerson
Thoreau
Carlyle
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THE MOTIVATED MENTOR
VOLUME 1
DISCIPLINE:
1.
2.
‘Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be
executed!’ Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and
the sons of genius fear and hate: - debt, which consumes so much time,
which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so
base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be forgone, and is needed most
by those who suffer from it most. Moreover, property, which has been well
compared to snow, - ‘if it fall level today, it will be blown into drifts tomorrow,’
– is the surface action of internal machinery, like the index on the face of a
clock. The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and
his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have
no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. The
exercise of the Will, or the lesson of power, is taught in every event. One
after another his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all things,
until the world becomes at last only a realized will, - the double of the man.
All things are moral. Nature is ever the ally of Religion. Prophet and Priest,
David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. A thing is good
only so far as it serves; that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the
production of an end is essential to any being. Every natural process is a
version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the center of nature and
radiates to the circumference. All things with which we deal, preach to us.
What is a farm but a mute gospel? An action is the perfection and
publication of thought. ‘The wise man, in doing one thing, does all; or, in the
one thing he does rightly, he sees the likeness of all which is done rightly.’
When much intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a standard of
excellence, and has increased our respect for the resources of God who
thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal; when he has, moreover,
become an object of thought, and, whilst his character retains all its
unconscious effect, is converted in the mind into solid and sweet wisdom, it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn
from our sight in a short time.
SPIRIT:
The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship. Of that
ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most, will say least. As a
plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by
unfailing Mountains, and draws at his need inexhaustible power. Who can set
bounds to the possibilities of man? Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to
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behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access
to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This view, which
admonished me where the sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to virtue as
to:
‘The golden key
Which opes the palace of eternity,’
Carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it animates me to create
my own world through the purification of my soul. The world proceeds from the same
spirit as the body of man. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It is
not, like that, now subjected to the human will.
PROSPECTS:
A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by
announcing regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to
the torpid spirit. Out from mankind sprang the sun and the moon; from man the sun,
from woman the moon. There are innocent men who worship God after the tradition
of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of all their
faculties. Is not prayer also a study of truth, - a sally of the soul into the unfound
infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something. But when a faithful
thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations and see it in the light
of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest
affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation. It will not feed, when the
mind is prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is
to see the miraculous in the common. To the side, therefore, a fact is true poetry,
and the most beautiful of fables. Each phenomenon has its roots in the faculties and
affections of the mind. It were a wise inquiry for the closet to compare, point by point,
especially at remarkable crises in life, our daily history with the rise and progress of
ideas in the mind. Every spirit builds itself a house and beyond its house a world and
beyond its world a heaven. Know then that the world exists for you. All that Adam
had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven
and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours…Build therefore
your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind,
that will unfold its great proportions. So fast will disagreeable appearances
vanish.
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR:
1.
The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the
mind is that of nature. And, in fine, the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself’
and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at least one maxim.
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2.
3.
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. Each age, it is found, must write
for its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
The books of an older period will not fit this. Books are the best of
things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use?
They are for nothing but to inspire. The one thing in the world, of
value, is the active soul. The soul active sees absolute truth and
utters truth, or creates. In this action is genius. Genius looks forward:
the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hind head: man
hops: genius creates. There are creative manners, there are creative
actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative
of no custom or authority, but springing from the mind’s own sense of
good and fair. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says,
‘A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful.’ One must be an
inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as
creative writing. The discerning will read, - only the authentic
utterances of the oracle; - all the rest he rejects.
Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. 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 are not. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are
instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every
opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power. The actions and
events of our childhood and youth are now matters of calmest
observation. So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which
shall not, the empyrean. Of course, he who has put forth his total
strength in fit actions has the richest return of wisdom. 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 today. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the
function. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.
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. But he 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
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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. He is the world’s heart. He is the world’s eye. 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 seem something truly. Success treads on every right
step. He then learns that in going down 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 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.
Brave; for fear is a thing, which a scholar by his very function puts
behind him. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent,
is the upbuilding of a man. 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. The
literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the
street, the meaning of the 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, I embrace the common. I explore and sit
at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into today, and
you may have the antique and future worlds. The near explains the
far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. 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
Emmanuel Swedenborg. If the single man plant himself indomitable on
his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Patience, - patience. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with
our own hands; we will speak our own minds. Each believes the Divine
Soul, which also inspires all men, inspires him.
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VOLUME 2
HISTORY:
There is one mind common to all individual men. He that is once admitted to the right
of reason is mad a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may
think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen man, he can
understand. The thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history pre-exist in
the mind as laws. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a
private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must
correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as we read, must
become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must
fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn
nothing rightly. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great
discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; - because there law
was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for
us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded. We have the same
interest in condition and character. We honor the rich because they have externally
the freedom, power, and grace, which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So
all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to
each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but unattainable self. All literature
writes the character of the wise man. The student is to read history actively and not
passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. The world
exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society or mode of
action in history to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Through
the bruteness and toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will.
The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious. There is, at
the surface, infinite variety of things; at the center there is simplicity of cause. How
many are the acts of one man in which in which we recognize the same character!
Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the
old well-known air through innumerable variations.
By a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful acquisition of many manual
skills the artist attains the power of awakening other souls to a given activity. A
sparse population and want make every man his own valet, cook, butcher and
soldier, and the habit of supplying his own needs educates the body to
wonderful performances. The costly charm of the ancient tragedy of all the old
literature is that the persons speak simply, - speak as persons who have great good
sense without knowing it. A person of childlike genius and inborn energy is still a
Greek. If the man is truer to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the
dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race; remains fast by the soul and
sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple into their places; they know
their master and the meanest of them glorifies him. Hence Plato said that ‘poets utter
great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.’ History…
THOREAU:make me feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the Temple of
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Fame. Yet every history should be written in a wisdom, which divined the range of
our affinities and looked at facts as symbols.
SELF-RELIANCE:
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.
Moses, Plato and Milton spoke not what men, but what they thought. 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 or worse as his portion.
The power, which resides in him, is new in nature, and none but he knows until he
has tried. God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. 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. Nothing
is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. I ought to go upright and vital,
and speak the rude truth in all ways. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none. What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinions; 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 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 a
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. Speak what you think in hard words and
tomorrow speaks what to-morrow thinks in hard word again; though it contradict
every thing you said today. – Ah, 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. 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. Character teaches above our wills. 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 your other
genuine actions. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you
now. Greatness appeals to the future. Do right now. Always scorn appearances and
you always may. The force of character is cumulative. 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.
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
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center of things. Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. The
magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason
of self-trust. 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. 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. When a man lives with God,
his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of corn. 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 footprints of any other; you shall not see
the face of man; you shall not hear any name; - the way, the thought, the good, shall
be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience. You take the
way from man, not to man. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. 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. 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. The soul becomes. 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. Virtue is Height. Power is, in nature, the
essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms, which
cannot help itself. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books
and institutions by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Let our simplicity judge
them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune
beside our native riches. We must go alone. But your isolation must not be
mechanical but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. Friend, client, child, sickness,
fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closest 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. 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 courage and
constancy in our breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the
truth. 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. 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. With the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall
appear; that a man is the word made flesh. ‘To the persevering mortal, ‘ said
Zoroaster, ‘the blessed Immortals are swift.’ The soul is no traveler; the wise man
stay at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on 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. Insist
on yourself, never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the
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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. Every great man is a unique. Do that which is assigned you,
and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. Abide in the simple and noble
regions of thy life, obey thy heart and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It
undergoes continual change. The great genius returns to essential man. Society is a
wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The
persons who make up a nation today, next year die, and their experience dies with
them. 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. 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.’ 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
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. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
COMPENSATION:
Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature. Whilst the world is
thus dual, so is every one of its parts. If riches increase, they are increased that use
them. The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in
every moss and cobweb. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot
be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the
means, the fruit in the seed, In nature, nothing can be given, all things are sold. Our
action is overmastered and characterized above our will by the law of nature. A man
cannot speak but he judges himself. Experienced men of the world know very well
that it is best to pay scot and lot as they go along, and that a man pays dear for a
small frugality. The highest price he can pay for a thing is to ask for it. Always pay;
for first or last you must pay your entire debt. You must pay at last your own debt. If
you are wise you will dread a prosperity that only loads you with more. Benefit is the
end of nature. But for every benefit, which you receive, a tax is levied. He is great
who confers the most benefits. Beware of too much good staying in your hand.
Pay it away quickly in some sort. Cheapest, say the prudent, is the dearest labor. For
the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs.
Knowledge and virtue cannot be counterfeited or stolen. The law of nature is, Do the
thing, and you shall have the power; but they who do not the things have not the
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power. As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it,
so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or talents of men until
he has suffered from the one and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of
the same. Has he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is
driven to entertain himself alone and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like
the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl. Our strength grows out of
our weakness. A great man is always willing to be little. When he is pushed,
tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on
his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured
of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill. The wise man
throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to
find his weak triumph, lo! He has passed on invulnerable. Blame is safer than praise.
As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel certain assurances of success.
But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me I feel as one that lies
unprotected before his enemies. As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength
and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself so we gain the strength of the
temptation we resist. But it is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but
himself as for a thing to be and not to be at the same time. If you serve an
ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in your debt. Every stroke
shall be repaid. The longer the payment is withholden, the better for you; for
compound interest on compound interest is the rate and asage of this
exchequer. I learn to be content. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The
soul is. There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when
these attributes are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and
always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism. There is no tax on the good of
virtue, for that is the incoming of God himself or absolute existence, without any
comparative. Wisdom of St. Bernard…’Nothing can work me damage except myself,
the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my
own fault.’
LOVE:
Love is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom,
caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart glows and enlarges until
it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of
all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames. Every
thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen
as experience. All mankind love a lover. In giving him to another it still more gives
to himself. He is a new man, with new perceptions, new and keened purposes, and a
religious solemnity of character and aims. The lover sees no resemblance except to
summer evening and diamond mornings, to rainbow and the song of birds.
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FRIENDSHIP:
I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the
wise, the lovely and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who
hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, - a possession for all time. My
friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. A man who
stands united with his thought conceives magnificently of himself I knew a man who
under a certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment and
commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that
with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was
mad. But persisting – as indeed he could not help doing – for some time in this
course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into
true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting
him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But a friend is a sane man who
exercises not my ingenuity, but me. In good company there is never such discourse
between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. Among
those who enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue. To my friend I write a letter
and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a
spiritual gift worthy of him to give and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these
warm lines the heart will trust itself as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the
prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good.
We must be our own before we can be another’s. There can never be deep peace
between two spirits, never mutual respect, until in their dialogue each stands for the
whole world. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to
be one. Love is the only reflection of a man’s own worthiness from other men I do
then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them,
but I seldom use them. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with
them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. Friends…I will receive from them
not what they have but what they are.
PRUDENCE:
There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is sufficient to our
present purpose to indicate three. One class live to the utility of the symbol,
esteeming health and wealth a final good. Another class live above this mark to the
beauty of the symbol, as the poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A
third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified;
these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the
third, spiritual perception. Prudence takes the laws of the world whereby man’s being
is conditioned, as they are, and keeps these laws that it may enjoy their proper good.
It respects space and time, climate, want, sleep the law of polarity, growth and death.
He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little. That what he sows he
reaps. He who wishes to walk in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity
must screw himself up to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst
apprehension, and his stoutness will commonly make his fear groundless. The
Latin proverb says, ‘In battles the eye is first overcome.’ Entire self-possession may
make a battle very little more dangerous to life than a match at foils or at football.
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Examples are cited by soldiers of men who have seem the cannon pointed and the
fire given to it, and who have stepped aside from the path of the ball. You are afraid
of Grim; but Grim also is afraid of you. The sturdiest offender of your peace and of
the neighborhood, if you rip up his claims, is as thin and timid as any, and the peace
of society is often kept, because, as children say, one is afraid and the other dares
not. Far off, men swell, bully and threaten; bring them hand to hand, and they are a
feeble folk. It is a proverb that ‘courtesy costs nothing’; but calculation might come to
value love for its profit. Love is fabled to be blind, but kindness is necessary to
perception. Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an unfriendly
footing. This truth, frankness, courage, love, humility and all the virtues range
themselves on the side of prudence, or the art of securing a present well being.
HEROISM:
The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but
pleasantly, and as it were merrily he advances to his own music, alike in frightful
alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness. Heroism feels and never
reasons, and therefore is always right. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse
of an individual’s character. Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It persists; it is of an
undaunted boldness and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. The magnanimous
know very well that they who give time, or money, or shelter, to the stranger, - so it
be done for love and not for ostentation, - do, as it were, put God under obligation to
them, so perfect are the compensations of the universe. Hospitality must be for
service and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The characteristic of heroism is
its persistency. When you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try
to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the
common the heroic. It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person,
‘Always do what you are afraid to do.’ I see not any road of perfect peace, which a
man can walk, but after the counsel of his own bosom.
THE OVER-SOUL:
Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. The soul is the perceiver and
revealer of truth, ‘It is no proof of a man’s understanding to be able to affirm
whatever he pleases; but to be able to discern that what is true is true, and that
what is false is false, - this is the mark and character of intelligence.’
Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. We are all
discerners of spirits. The intercourse of society, its trade, its religion, its friendship, its
quarrels, is one wide judicial investigation of character. In full court or in small
committee, or confronted face to face, accuser and accused, men offer themselves
to be judged. Against their will they exhibit those decisive trifles by which character is
read. But who judges? And what? Not our understanding. We do not read them by
learning or craft. No: the wisdom of the wise man consists herein, that he does not
judge them; he lets them judge themselves and merely reads and records their own
verdict. Character teaches over our head. The great distinction between teachers
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sacred or literary is that one class speak from within, or from experience, as parties
and possessors of the fact; and the other class from without, as spectators merely,
or perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third persons. It is of no
use to preach me from without. Jesus speaks always from within, and in a degree
that transcends all others. In that is the miracle. Much of the wisdom of the world is
not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary
fame, and are not writers. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity, which is
superior to any talents they exercise. The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser
than any of its works. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written. Sincerity is
more excellent than flattery. Deal so plainly with man and woman as to constrain the
utmost sincerity and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the highest compliment
you can pay. Their ‘highest praising,’ said Milton, ‘is not flattery, and their plainest
advice is a kind of praising.’ The simplest person who in his integrity worships God,
becomes God; yet forever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new
and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. The things that are really for
thee gravitate to thee. You are preparing with eagerness to go and render a service
to which your talent and your taste invite you, the love of men and the hope of fame.
Has it occurred to you that you have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to
be prevented from going? O, believe, as thou lives, that every sound that is spoken
over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, for aid or comfort, shall surely
come home through open or winding passages. Every proverb, every book, every
byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come through open or
winding passages. Every friend, whom not thy fantastic will but the great and tender
heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this because the heart in
thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere
in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men,
as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one. Let man then
learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the
Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind, if the
sentiment of duty is there. But if he would know what the great God speaketh, he
must ‘go into his closet and shut the door,’ as Jesus said. God will not make himself
manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself withdrawing himself from all
the accents of other men’s devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful to him, until he
have made his own. Great is the soul and plain. It believes in itself. The soul
gives itself alone, original and pure, to the Lonely, original and Pure, who, on that
condition, gladly inhibits. Leads and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young and
nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is
innocent. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the
imperfect, adore my own Perfect. The world is the perennial miracle that the soul
worketh. All history is sacred; the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of
time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live
with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life and be
content with all places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front the
morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it and so hath already
the whole future in the bottom of the heart.
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CIRCLES:
The eye is the first circle; the horizon, which it forms, is the second; and throughout
nature this primary figure is repeated without end. St. Augustine described the nature
of God as a circle whose center was everywhere and its circumference nowhere.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has
the helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He
can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own. Our
moods do not believe in each other. Today I am full of thoughts and can write what I
please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of
expression, tomorrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in
the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so
much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so
many continuous pages. A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his
friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better. How often
must we learn this lesson? Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.
The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man’s limitations, it is
all over with him. Has he talents? Has he enterprise? Has he knowledge? It boots
not. Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, and a sea
to swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care not if you
ever see it again. Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot
have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will. He
stands. This ca only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth, and
his alert acceptance of it from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws,
his relations to society, his Christianity, his world, may at any time be superseded
and decease. Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. Therefore we
value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is found in the sonnet or the play.
There is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate and
spring. This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is
new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing
is secure but life, transition, and the energizing spirit. People wish to be settled; only
as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for then. Life is a series of surprises.
We do not guess today the mood, the pleasure, and the power of tomorrow, when
we are building up our being. For ‘so to be’ is the sole inlet of ‘so to know.’ The
difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the old and
trodden round, and power and courage to make a new road to new and better
goals. Character makes an overpowering present; a cheerful, determined hour,
which fortifies all the company by making them see that much is possible and
excellent that was not thought of. When we see the conqueror we do not think
much of any battle or success. We see that we had exaggerated the difficulty.
It was easy to him. True conquest is the causing the calamity to fade and disappear
as an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and advancing. The one
thing, which we seek with insatiable desire, is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out
of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without
knowing how or why: in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever
achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.
The great moments of history are the facilities of performance through the strength of
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ideas, as the works of genius and religion. ‘A man’ said Oliver Cromwell ‘never rises
so high as when he knows not whither he is going.’
INTELLECT:
Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands below it. Intellect lies
behind genius, which is intellect constructive. Intellect is the simple power anterior to
all action or construction. Our spontaneous action is always the best. All our
progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an
opinion, then knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to the
end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it
shall ripen into truth and you shall know why you believe. Each mind has its own
method. A true man never acquires after college rules. What you have aggregated in
a natural manner surprises and delights when it is produced. For we cannot oversee
each other’s secret. What is the hardest task in the world? To think. Let him
intend his mind without respite, without rest, in one direction. We are all wise. The
difference between people is not in wisdom but in art. In the intellect constructive,
which we popularly designate by the word Genius, we observe the same balance of
two elements as in intellect receptive. The constructive intellect produces thoughts,
sentences, poems, plans, designs, and systems. It is the generation of the mind, the
marriage of thought with nature. To genius must always go two gifts, the thought and
the publication. The first is revelation, always a miracle, which no frequency of
occurrence or incessant study can ever familiarize. To be communicable it must
become picture or sensible object. We must learn the language of fact. When the
spiritual energy is directed on something outward, then it is a thought. The circle of
the green earth he must measure with his shoes to find the man who can yield him
truth. He shall then know that there is somewhat more blessed and great in
hearing than in speaking. Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking
man. As long as I hear truth I am bathed by a beautiful element and am not
conscious of any limits to my nature. The suggestions are thousandfold that I hear
and see. Silence is solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great
and universal. Every man’s progress is through a succession of teacher’s, each
of whom seems at the time to have a superlative influence, but it at last gives
place to a new. Frankly let him accept it all. Jesus says, ‘Leave father, mother,
house and lands, and follow me.’ Who leaves all, received more. Entire selfreliance belongs to the intellect. The truth and grandeur of their thought is proved
by its scope and applicability, for it commands the entire schedule and inventory
of things for its illustration.
ART:
In landscapes the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation than we
know. In a portrait he must inscribe the character and not the features. All great
actions have been simple, and all great pictures are. Art has not yet come to its
maturity if it do not put itself abreast with the most potent influences of the world, if it
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is not practical and moral, if it do not stand in connection with the conscience, if it do
not make the poor and uncultivated feel that it addresses them with a voice of lofty
cheer. There is higher work for Art than the arts. Art is the need to create; but in its
essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands,
and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing
less than the creation of man and nature is its end. The sweetest music is not in the
oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of
tenderness, truth, or courage. Men are not well pleased with the figure they make in
their own imaginations, and they flee to art, and convey their better sense in an
oratorio, a statue, or a picture.
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VOLUME 3
THE POET:
The highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or
shall I say the quadruple or the centuple or much more manifold meaning, of every
sensuous fact; Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante,
Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. He is isolated among
his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits,
that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need
of expression. Every man should be so much an artist that he could report in
conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses
have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick and
compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom
these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles
that which others cream of traverses the whole scale of experience, and is
representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.
For the Universe has three children, both at one time, which reappear under different
names in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and
effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or theologically, the Father, the
Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call her the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer.
These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of
beauty. These three are equal. The poet is the sayer, the namer and represents
beauty. Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words
are also actions, and actions are a kind of words. Talent may frolic and juggle;
genius realizes and adds. Every line we can draw in the sand has expression; and
there is no body without its spirit or genius.
EXPERIENCE:
Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual treating and reference.
So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that
the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of
literature is a sum of very few ideas and of very few original tales: all the rest being
variation of these. The only thing grief has taught me is to show how shallow it is.
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods
like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored
lenses that paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.
From the mountain you see the mountain. Into every intelligence there is a door that
is never closed, through which the creator passes. A deduction must be made from
the opinion that even the wise express on a new book or occurrence. Their opinion
gives me tidings of their mood, and some vague guess at the new fact, but is nowise
to be trusted as the lasting relation between that intellect and that thing. Our friends
early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas that they never pass or exceed.
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They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take the
single step that would bring then there. There is no adaptation or universal
applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful
men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be
oftenest to be practiced. To fill the hour, - that is happiness: to fill the hour and leave
no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of
life is to skate well on them. Under the oldest mouldiest conventions a man of native
force prospers just as well as in the newest world, and that by skill of handling and
treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and
will not bear the least excess of either. To finish the moment, to find the journey’s
end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. We should not postpone and refer
and wish, but do broad justice where we are. Contentment, which is the last
victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo to the heart than the voice of poets
and the casual sympathy of admirable persons. I am thankful for small
mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the
universe and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I
begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for
moderate goods. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have
heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the
highway. I think I will never read any but the commonest books, - the Bible, Homer,
Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. Dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line
every hour, and between whiles add a line. Heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be
missed in the scorning and skepticism; there are enough of them; stay there in thy
closet and toil until the rest are agreed what to do about it. Thy sickness, they say,
and thy puny habit require that thou do this or avoid that, but know that thy life is a
flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. Human life is
made up of the two elements, power and form, and the proportion must be invariably
kept if we would have it sweet and sound. Common sense is as rare as genius, is the basis of genius, and experience is hands and feet to every enterprise.
Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.
Every man is an impossibility until he is born: every thing impossible until we see a
success. I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital
force supplied from the Eternal. When I converse with a profound mind, or if at any
time being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as
when, being thirsty, I drink water; or go to the fire, being cold; no! But I am at first
apprised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read or
to think, this region gives further sign of itself. But every insight from this realm of
thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there, and
behold what was there already. I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement. And
what a future it opens! I feel a new hear beating with the love of the new beauty. I am
ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet approachable idea or
life. I exert the same quality of power in all places. We believe in ourselves as we do
not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in
others is experiment for us. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can
never say anything but what we are; Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton,
Bonaparte, are the mind’s ministers. Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter
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a great man, let us treat the newcomer like a traveling geologist who passes through
our estate and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.
The partial action of each strong mind in one direction is a telescope for the objects
on which it is pointed. The life of truth is cold. It does not attempt another’s work, nor
adopt another’s facts. It is a main lesson of wisdom to know your own from another’s.
I have learned that I cannot dispose of other people’s facts; but I possess such a key
to my own as persuades me, against all their denials, that they also have a key to
theirs. A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning
men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger they will
drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their
vices. A wise and hardy physician will say, ‘Come out of that’, as the first condition of
advice. A man should not be able to look other than directly and forthright. The god
is surcharged with his divine destiny. Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface,
Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness, - these are threads on the loom of time; these are
the lords of life. I observe that in the history of mankind there is never a solitary
example of success – taking their own tests of success. Patience and patience, we
shall win at the last. In the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a
sanity and revelations that in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him.
Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat; up again, old heart – it seems to say,
- there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to
realize will be the transformation of genius into practical power.
CHARACTER:
Character, - a reserved force, which acts directly by presence and without means. It
is conceived of as a certain – undemonstrable force, a Familiar or Genius, by whose
impulses the man is guided but whose counsels he cannot impart; which is company
for him, so that such men are often solitary, or if they chance to be social, do not
need society but can entertain themselves very well alone. The purest literary talent
appears at one time great, at another time small, but character is of stellar and
undiminishable greatness. What others effect by talent or by eloquence, this man
accomplishes by some magnetism. His victories are by demonstration of superiority,
and not by crossing of bayonets. He conquers because his arrival alters the face of
affairs. The people know that they need in their representative much more than
talent, namely the power to make his talent trusted. They cannot come at their ends
by sending to Congress a learned, acute, and fluent speaker, if he be not one who,
before he was appointed by the people to represent them, was appointed by
Almighty God to stand for a fact, - invincibly persuaded of that fact in himself – so
that the most confident and the most violent persons learn that here is resistance on
which both impudence and terror are wasted, namely faith in a fact. A genius in
trade…in his parlor I see very well that he has been hard at work this morning, with
that knitted brow and that settled humor, which all his desire to be courteous cannot
shake off. I see plainly how many firm acts have been done; how many valiant no’s
have this day been spoken, when others would have uttered ruinous yeas. I see,
with the pride of art and skill of masterly arithmetic and power of remote combination,
the consciousness of being an agent and playfellow of the original laws of the world.
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He too believes that none can supply him, and that a man must be born to trade or
he cannot learn it. Character is this moral order seen through the medium of an
individual nature. Men of character are the conscience of the society to which they
belong. Character may be ranked as having its natural place in the north. Men of
character like to hear of their faults; the other class do not like to hear of faults; they
worship events; secure to them a fact, a connection, a certain chain of
circumstances, and they will ask no more. The hero see that the event is ancillary; it
must follow him. Rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries of joy but by
serenity, which is joy; fixed or habitual. Character is centrality, the impossibility of
being displace or overset. The wise man not only leaves out of his thought the
many, but also leaves out the few. Fountains, the self-moved, the absorbed, and the
commander because he is commanded, the assured, the primary, - they are good:
for these announce the instant presence of supreme power. It is only on reality that
any power of action can be based. No institution will be better than the institutor.
Love is inexhaustible, and if its estate is wasted, its granary emptied, still cheers and
enriches, and the man, though he sleep, seems to purify the air and his house to
adorn the landscape and strengthen the laws. There is a class of men, individuals of
which appear at long intervals, so eminently endowed with insight and virtue that
they have been unanimously saluted as divine, and who seem to be an
accumulation of that power we consider. Divine persons are character born, or, to
borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory organized. They are usually
received with ill will, because they are new and because they set a bound to the
exaggeration that has been made of the personality of the last divine person. When
we see a great man we fancy a resemblance to some historical person, and predict
the sequel of his character and fortune; a result that he is sure to disappoint.
Character wants room; must not be crowded on by persons nor be judged from
glimpses got in the press of affairs or on few occasions. It may not probably does not,
form relations rapidly; and we should not require rash explanation, either on the
popular ethics, or on our own, of its action. I know nothing which life has to offer so
satisfying as the profound good understanding which can subsist, after much
exchange of good offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of
himself and sure of his friend. For when men shall meet as they ought, each a
benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with
accomplishments, it should be the festival of nature, which all things announce. Of
such friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are symbols
of love. Those relations to the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned the
romances of youth, become, in the progress of the character, the most solid
enjoyment. Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by
some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause;
our beat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause; now possession required, and
power to swell the moment from the resources of the heart. The moment is all, in all
noble, relations. A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of
the heart. We shall one day see that the most private is the most public energy, that
quality atones for quantity, and grandeur of character acts in the dark, and
succors them who never saw it. What greatness has yet appeared its beginnings and
encouragements to us in this direction. The history of those gods and saints, which
the world has written and then worshipped, are documents of character. The mind
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requires a victory to the senses; a force of character which will convert judge, jury,
soldier, and king; which will rule animal and mineral virtues and blend with the
courses of sap, of rivers, of winds, of starts, and of moral agents.
MANNERS:
An element that unites all the most forcible persons of every country makes them
intelligible and agreeable to each other…must be an average result of the character
and faculties universally found in men. Comme il faut, is the Frenchman’s description
of good society: as we must be. It is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of
precisely that class who have the most vigor, who take the lead in the world of this
hour, and though far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest and highest tone of
human feeling, it is as good as the whole society permits it to be. It is made of the
spirit, more than of the talent of men, and is a compound result into which every
great force enters as an ingredient, namely virtue, with beauty, wealth and power.
The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that
lordship in his behavior: not in any manner dependent and servile, either on persons,
or opinions, or possessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word
denotes good nature or benevolence: manhood first and then gentleness. The
popular notion certainly adds a condition of ease and fortune; but that is a natural
result of personal force and love, that they should possess and dispense the goods
of the world. God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door; but whenever
used in strictness and with any emphasis, the name will be round to point at original
energy. It describes a man standing in his own right and working after untaught
methods. My gentleman gives the law where he is; he will outpray saints in chapel,
outgeneral; veterans in the field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good
company for pirates and good with academicians; so that it is useless to fortify
yourself against him; he has the private entrance to all minds, and I could as easily
exclude myself as him. If the aristocrat is only valid in fashionable circles and not
with truckmen, he will never be a leader in fashion; and if the man of the people
cannot speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentleman shall
perceive that he is already really of his own order he is not to be feared. Manners
aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments and bring the man pure to energize.
They aid our dealing and conversation as a railway aids traveling, by getting rid of all
avoidable obstructions of the road and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure
space. Good sense and character make their own forms every moment, and speak
or abstain, take wine or refuse it, stay or go, sit in a chair or sprawl with children on
the floor, or stand on their head, or what else soever, in a new and aboriginal way;
and that strong will is always in fashion, let who will be unfashionable. All that
fashion demands is composure and self-content.
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VOLUME 4
USES OF GREAT MEN:
Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The search after the great men is the dream
of youth and the most serious occupation of manhood. Other men are lenses
through which we read our own minds. Man is that noble endogenous plant which
grows, like the palm, from within outward. I count him a great man who inhabits a
higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty. It costs
no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men. He is great who is what
he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others. But he must be related to us,
and our life receive from him some promise of explanation. What is good is effective,
generative; makes for itself room, food and allies. A sound apple produces seed, - a
hybrid does not. Is a man in his place, he is constructive, fertile, magnetic, inundating
armies with his purpose, which is thus executed. The river makes its own shores,
and each legitimate idea makes its own channels and welcome, - harvest for food,
institutions for expression, weapons to fight with and disciples to explain it. Man is
endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is
mechanical compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is
delightful in the doing, and the effect remains. Serving others is serving us. As
plants convert the minerals into food for animals, so each man converts some raw
material in nature to human use. Every novel is a debtor to Homer. We must extend
the area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a new
property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet. Looking where others look,
and conversing with the same things, we catch the charm that lured them. Napoleon
said, ‘You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art
of war.’ Talk much with any man of vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit
of looking at things in the same light, and on each occurrence we anticipate his
thought. Men are helpful through the intellect and the affections. The saying of the
Chinese Mencius: ‘A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the manners of
Loo are heard of the stupid become intelligent, and the wavering, determined.’ This
is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to touch the quick like our
own companions, whose names may not last as long. There is a power in love to
diving another’s destiny better than that other can, and, by heroic encouragements,
hold him to his task. Plato: ‘to choose those who can, without aid from the eyes or
any other sense, proceed to truth and to being.’ Imagination. When this wakes, a
man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times his force. We are as elastic as
the gas or gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in conversation,
sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet
tread the floor of the Pit. And this benefit is real because we are entitled to these
enlargements, and once having passed the bounds shall never again be quite the
miserable pedants we were. True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate, and
add new senses. If a wise man should appear in our village he would create, in those
who conversed with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to
unobserved advantage; he would establish a sense of immovable equality, calm us
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with assurances that we could not be cheated; as every one would discern the
cheeks and guaranties of condition. The rich would see their mistakes and poverty,
the poor their escapes and their resources. Nature brings all this about in due time.
Rotation is her remedy. Rotation is the law of nature. When nature removes a great
man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His
class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field the next man
will appear. Mankind have in all ages attached themselves to a few persons who
either by the quality of that idea they embodied or by the largeness of their reception
were entitled to the position of leaders and lawgivers. With each new mind, a new
secret of nature transpires; nor can the Bible be closed until the last great man is
born. If there should appear in the company some gentle soul who knows little of
persons or parties but who announces a law that disposes these particulars, and so
certifies me of the equity which checkmates every false player, bankrupts every selfseeker, and apprises me of my independence on any conditions of country, or time,
or human body, - that man liberates me; I forget the clock. I pass out of the sore
relation to persons. I am healed of my hurts. I am made immortal by apprehending
my possession of incorruptible goods. I admire great men of all classes, those who
stand for facts, and for thoughts. I applaud a sufficient man. We learn of our
contemporaries what they know, without effort and almost through the pores of the
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife arrives at the intellectual and moral
elevations of her husband. But we stop where they stop. Very hardly can we take
another step. The great or such as hold of nature and transcend fashions by their
fidelity to universal ideas, are saviors from these federal errors, and defend us from
our contemporaries. They are the exceptions that we want, where all grows alike.
The best discovery the discoverer make for himself, the law of individuality collects
its secret strength: you are you, and I am I, and so we remain. Men who know the
same things are not long the best company for each other. But bring to each an
intelligent person of another experience, and it is as if you let off water from a lake by
cutting a lower basin. Each is uneasy until he has produced his private ray unto the
concave sphere and beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation. The
heroes of the hour are relatively great; of a faster growth; or they are such in whom,
at the moment of success, a quality is ripe which is then in request. Other days will
demand other qualities. Ask the great man if there be none greater. His companions
are; and not the less great but the more that society cannot see them. Nature never
sends a great man into the planet without confiding the secret to another soul.
Famous men are an exhibition, in some quarter, of new possibilities. The destiny of
organized nature is amelioration, and who can tell its limits? It is for man to tame the
chaos; on every side, whilst he lives, to scatter the seeds of science and of song,
that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder, and the germs of love and benefit
may be multiplied.
SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET:
Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that plays over
the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another
than for meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things
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bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and
conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life.
GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER:
‘I have guesses enough of my own; if a man write a book, let him set down only what
he knows.’ Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the
book; a personality which by birth and quality is pledged to the doctrines there ser
forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise; holding things
because they are things. Goethe does not speak from talent, but the truth shines
through: he is very wise, though his talent often veils his wisdom. We too must write
Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world. The secret of genius is to
suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of
modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality and a
purpose; and first, last, midst and without end, to honor every truth by use.
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VOLUME 6
FATE:
Read the description in medical books of the four temperaments and you will think
you are reading your own thoughts that you had not yet told. A part of fate is the
freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul.
Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. The right use of fate is to
bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature. Let him hold his purpose as with the
tug of gravitation. You are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. The revelation of
thought takes man out of servitude into freedom. We rightly say of ourselves, we
were born and afterward we were born again and many times. He whose thought is
deepest will be the strongest character. Fate then is the name for facts not yet
passed under the fire of thought. A man’s fortunes are the fruit of his character. A
man’s friends are his magnetisms. The tendency of every man to enact all that is in
his constitution is expressed in the old belief that the efforts which we make to
escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it: and I have noticed a man likes
better to be complimented on his position, as the proof of the last or total excellence,
than on his merits.
POWER:
Life is a search after power. All successful men have agreed in one thing, - they are
causationists. The most valiant men are the best believers in the tension of the laws.
For performance of great mark, it needs extraordinary health. The first wealth is
health. ‘On the neck of the young man,’ said Hafiz, ‘sparkles no gem so gracious as
enterprise.’ The instinct of the people is right. ‘March without the people,‘ said a
French deputy from the tribune, ‘and you march into night: their instincts are a finger
pointing of Providence, always turned toward real benefit.’ ‘Enlarge not thy destiny,’
said the oracle, ‘endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge.’ You must
elect your work; you shall take what your brain can, and drop all the rest. Only so
can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to
doing. The poet Campbell said, ‘a man accustomed to work, was equal to any
achievement he resolved on, and that for himself, necessity, not inspiration was the
prompter of his muse.’ Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in
trade, in short in all management of human affairs. Rothschild about his children…I
wish them to give mind, soul, heart and body to business, - that is the way to be
happy. It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make
a fortune, and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it.
If I were to listen to all the projects proposed to me, I should ruin myself very soon.
Stick to one business, young man. There are twenty ways of going to a point,
and one is the shortest; but set out at once on one. The second substitute for
temperament is drill, the power of use and routine. Practice is nine tenths. The way
to learn German is to read the same dozen pages over and over a hundred times, till
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you know every word and particle in them and can pronounce and repeat them by
heart. The masters say that they know a master in music, only by seeing the pose of
the hands on the keys; - so difficult and vital an act is the command of the instrument.
WEALTH:
Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution
expensive, and needs to be rich. The mind acts in bringing things from where they
abound to where they are wanted. Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and
the art of getting rich consists in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right
spot. Nature requires that each man should feed himself. He is born to be rich. The
manly part is to do with might and main what you can do. Men of sense esteem
wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves. Power is what they want, not
candy: - power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and
actuality to their thought. The world is his who has money to go over it. Goethe said,
‘Nobody should be rich but those who understand it.’ They should own who can
administer, they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is
a rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people
are poor. Man was born to be rich, or inevitable grows rich by the use of his faculties:
by the union of thought with nature. The game requires coolness, right reasoning,
promptness and patience in the players. The right merchant has commonsense; a
man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen.
He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. Good luck is another name for
tenacity of purpose. He insures himself in every transaction, and likes small and sure
gains. Success consists in close appliance to the laws of the world and since those
laws are intellectual and moral, an intellectual and moral obedience. A dollar is not
value, but representative of value, and, at last, of moral values. Wealth is mental,
wealth is moral. Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of
political economy is non-interference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting
meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate. Open the doors of opportunity to
talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad
hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile
to the industrious, brave and persevering. Our nature and genius force us to respect
ends, whilst we use means. That is the good head, which serves the end and
commands the means.
1.
The first of these measures is that each man’s expenses must proceed from
his character. Nature arms each man with some faculty that enables him to
do easily some feat impossible for any other, and thus makes him
necessary to society. This native determination guides his labor and his
spending. He wants an equipment of means and tools proper to his talent.
Do your work, respecting the excellence of the work, and not its
acceptableness. A society can never prosper and must always be
bankrupt, until every man comes that which he was created to do. It is a
large stride to independence, when a man, in the discovery of his proper
talent, has sunk the necessity for false expenses. The man who has found
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2.
3.
4.
5.
what he can do, can spend on that and leave all other spending. Let
the realist not mind appearances. Let him delegate to others the costly
courtesies and decorations of social life. Art is a jealous mistress, and if a
man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he
makes a bad husband and an ill provider, and should be wise in season
and not fetter himself with duties that will embitter his days and spoil him for
his proper work. Scholarship and practical farming (with one’s own hands)
cannot be united. The genius of reading and gardening are antagonistic.
How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation
and rapt concentration and almost a going out of the body to think!
Spend after your genius, and by system. The secret of success lies
never in the amount of money, but in the relation of income and
outgo; as, after expense has been fixed at a certain point, then new
and steady rills of income though never so small being added, wealth
begins. Nor is any investment so permanent that it can be allowed to
remain without incessant watching, as the history of each attempt to lock
up an inheritance through trio generations for an unborn inheritor may show.
The rule is to learn practically the secret spoken from all nature, that things
themselves refuse to be mismanaged, and will show to the watchful their
own law. There is a system that we always need to follow.
Look for the seed of the same kind as you sow.
All things ascend, and the royal rule of economy is that it should ascend
also, or, whatever we do must always have a higher aim. The best use of
money is to pay debts. The right investment is in the tools of your trade.
Spend for power and not for pleasure. Invest income. Absorb and invest;
be capitalist; the scraps and filings must be gathered back into the crucible;
the gas and smoke must be burned, and earnings must not go to
increase expense, but to capital gain. The true thrift is always to
spend on the higher plane: to invest and invest, with keener avarice,
that he may spend in spiritual creation and not in augmenting animal
existence.
CULTURE:
He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. A great man should be a
good reader, or in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating
power. Good criticism is very rare and always precious. ‘A good rider on a good
horse is as much above himself and others as the world can make him,’ states Lord
Herbert of Cherbury. He that does not fill a place at home cannot abroad. For
some men travel may be useful e.g. missionaries. Of the six or seven teachers
whom each man wants among his contemporaries, it often happens that one
or two of them live on the other side of the world. A man should live in or near a
large town, because, let his own genius be what it may, it will repel quite as much of
agreeable and valuable talent as it draws, and, in a city, the total attraction of all the
citizens is sure to conquer, first or last, every repulsion, and drag the most
improbable hermit within its walls some day in the year. Cities give us collision. A
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great part of our education is sympathetic and social. Let us learn to live coarsely,
dress plainly, and lie hard. Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is, to genius,
the stern friend, and the cold, obscure shelter where molt the wings that shall
bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must
be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing,
reading and writing in the daily, timeworn yoke of their opinions. ‘In the morning, solitude,’ said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does
never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine
strengths that disclose them to serious and abstracted thought. Plato, Plotinus,
Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but
descended into it from time to time as benefactors; and the wise instructor will press
this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the
arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude. We say solitude, to mark the
character of the tone of thought; but if it can be shared between two or more than
two, it is happier and not less noble. A cultivated man is one who as he sides with his
critic against himself can do so with joy. The calamities are our friends. Try the
rough water as well as the smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth
knowing. Fear not a revolution that will constrain you to live five years in one. Don’t
be so tender at making an enemy new and then. Forget spite. He has neither friends
nor enemies, but values men only as channels of power. Popularity is for dolls. The
longer we live the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and
women; and every brave heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to
dictate. The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his
opinion twenty years later. I find too that the chance for appreciation is much
increased by being the son of an appreciator. I think it a presentable motive to a
scholar, that, as in an old community a well-born proprietor is usually found, after the
first heats of youth, to be a careful husband, and to feel a habitual desire that the
estate shall suffer no harm by his administration, but shall be delivered down to the
next heir in as good condition as he received it. He is to convert all impediments into
instruments, all enemies into power.
WORSHIP:
God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions. Forget your
books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour. Let us replace
sentimentalism, and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they
seen or unseen, pervade and govern. What a day dawns when we have taken to
heart the doctrine of faith! To prefer, as a better investment, being to doing; being to
seeming; logic to rhythm and to display; the year to the day; the life to the year;
character to performance; - and have come to know that justice will be done us; and
if genius is slow, the term will be long. All the great ages have been ages of belief. I
mean, when there was any extraordinary power of performance, when great national
movements began, when arts appeared, when heroes existed, when poems were
made, - the human soul was in earnest, and had fixed its thoughts on spiritual
verities with as strict a grasp as that of the hands on the sword, or the pencil, or the
trowel. It is true that genius takes its rise out of the mountains of rectitude. Any
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extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm. Holiness
confers a certain insight. The bias of errors of principle carries away men into
perilous courses as soon as their will does not control their passion or talent. The
remedy for all blunders…the cure…is love. The superiority that has no superior: the
redeemer and instructor of souls, as it is their primal essence, is love. If your eye is
on the eternal, your intellect will grow, and your opinions and actions will have
a beauty which no learning or combined advantages of other men can rival.
Religion or worship is the attitude of those who see that against all appearances the
nature of things works for truth and right forever. Strongmen believe in cause and
effect. What comes out, that was put in. We are the builders of our fortunes. Hindu
scriptures define law as ‘Law it is, which is without name, or color, or hands, or feet;
which is smallest of the least, and largest of the large; all, and knowing all things;
which hears without ears, sees without eyes, moves without feet, and seizes without
hands.’ He is a strong man who can hold down his opinion. I look on that man as
happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply,
not into the market, not into opinion, not into patronage. Work is victory.
Wherever work is done, victory is obtained. Young people admire talents and
particular excellences. As we grow older we value total powers and effects, as the
spirit or quality of the man. We have another sight, and a new standard; an insight
that disregards what is done for the eye, and pierces to the doer; and a new
standard; an insight that disregards what is done for the eye, and pierces to doer; an
ear that hears not what men say. But hears what they do not say. There is no
miracle if there is no humility. That only which we have within, can we see without.
Fear God, and where you go, men shall think they walk in hallowed cathedrals. So I
look on those sentiments that make the glory of the human being, love, humility, and
faith. As being also the intimacy of Divinity in the atoms. The conviction that his work
is dear to God and cannot be spared defends him. A high aim reacts on the means,
on the days, on the organs of the body. A high aim is curative.
CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY:
Mirabeau said, ‘Why should we feel ourselves to be men, unless it be to
succeed in everything, everywhere. You must say nothing, ‘that is beneath me’,
nor feel that anything can be out of our power. Nothing is impossible to the
man who can will. Is it necessary? That shall be: this is the only law of
success.’ Mankind divides itself into two classes: benefactors and malefactors.
The second class is vast, the first a handful. Shall we then judge a country by the
majority, or by the minority? Masses need to be schooled. I wish not to concede
anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide and break them up, and draw individuals
out of them. I wish honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only.
Napoleon was called by his men Cent Mille. Add honesty to him, and they might
have called him Hundred Million. In mankind she is contented if she yields one
master in a century. The more difficulty there is in creating good men, the more they
are used when they come. The good men are employed for private centers of use,
and for larger influence. All revelations are made to single persons. All the feats,
which make our civility, were the thoughts of a few good heads. The rule is, we are
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used as brute atoms until we think: then we use all the rest. If he is, he is wanted,
and has precise properties that are required. The majority are unripe, and have not
yet come to themselves. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire
the strength we have overcome. Without war, no soldiers; without enemies, no
hero. The glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity to draw
thence new nobilities of power. ‘The more trouble, the more lion; that’s my
principle.’ God hangs the greatest weights on the smallest wires. There are many
failures to a good escape. Mirabeau said, ‘There are non but men of strong passions
capable of goin to greatness; none but such capable of meriting the public gratitude.’
Any absorbing passion has the effect to deliver from the little coils and cares of every
day. The wise workman will not regret the poverty or the solitude that brought out his
working talents. All great men come out of the middle classes. ‘Human nature is
prone to indulgence, and the most meritorious public services have always been
performed by persons in a condition of life removed from opulence.’ Charles James
Fox. By humiliations, by defeats, by loss of sympathy, by gulfs of disparity, learn a
wider truth and humanity than that of a fine gentleman. Yet he who is wise for many
must not be protected. He must know the huts where poor men lie and the chores
that poor men do. The first-class minds, Aesop, Socrates, Cervantes, Shakespeare,
Franklin, had the poor man’s feelings and mortification. Bad times have a scientific
value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss. The first rule of
economy is to get health. And so of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is
spent, the more of it remains. An English proverb translates, ‘Be merry and wise.’
Power dwells with cheerfulness; hope puts us in a working mood. A man would
make life and Nature happier to us, or he had better never been born. There are
three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something
more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who
says, ‘Anywhere but here.’ The crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a
bias to some pursuit that finds him in employment and happiness – whether it
be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes. Or songs. Slow,
slow to learn the lesson that there is but one depth, but one interior, and that is – HIS
PURPOSE. Conversation is a main function of life. One wise man in a company
and all are wise. Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what
we can. This is the service of a friend. With him we are easily great. There is a
sublime attraction in him to whatever virtue is in us. How he flings wide the doors of
existence. What questions we ask of him! What an understanding we have! How few
words are needed! Hafiz…’Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship,
since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters.’ Life would be twice or ten
times life if spent with wise and fruitful companions. If you deal generously, the
other, though selfish and unjust, will make an exception in your favor, and deal truly
with you. Life brings to each his task, and whatever art you select, algebra… - all are
attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, on the same terms of selecting that for
which you are apt; begin at the beginning, proceed in order, step by step. Youthful
aspirations are find things, your theories and plans of life are fair and commendable:
- but will you stick? Not one, I fear, in that Common full of people, or in a thousand,
but one. The hero is he who is immovable centered. The man, - it is his attitude, not feats, but forces, - not on set days and public occasions, but, at all hours, and in
repose alike as in energy, still formidable and not to be disposed of. Horne Tooke
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says, ‘If you would be powerful, pretend to be powerful.’ ‘Seekest thou great things?
Seek them not:’ -, or what was said of a Spanish prince, ‘The more you took from
him, the greater he looked.’ The secret of culture is to learn that a few great
points steadily reappear; - the escape from false ties; courage to be what we
are, and love of what is simple and beautiful; independence and cheerful
relation, these are the essentials, - these, and the wish to serve, to add
somewhat to the well-being of men.
BEHAVIOR:
The soul that animates Nature is not less significantly published in the figure,
movement and gesture of animated bodies, than in its vehicle of articulate speech.
This silent and subtile language is Manners: not what, but how. Life expresses.
Manners are the happy way of doing things: each, once a stroke of genius or of love
now repeated and hardened into usage. Manners are very communicable; men
catch them from each other. Genius invents fine manners. There are certain
manners that are learned in good society. Give a boy address and accomplishments
and you give him the mastery of palaced and fortune where he goes. Your manners
are always under examination. We wish for those we can be at ease with; those who
will go where we go, whose manners do not offend us, whose social tones chimes
with ours. Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait
and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The telltale body
is all tongues. Men are like Geneva Watches with crystal faces that expose the
whole movement. The face and eyes reveal what the spirit is doing, how old it is,
what aims it has. The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul, or through how many
forms it has already ascended. The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind. When
a thought strikes us, the eyes fix and remain gazing at a distance. When the eyes
say one thing and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the
first. If the man is off center, the eyes show it. You can read in the eyes of your
companion whether your argument hits him, though his tongue will not confess it.
The reason why men don’t obey us is because they see the mud at the bottom of our
eye. Balzac: ‘The look, the voice, the respiration, and the attitude or walk, are
identical. But, as it has not been given to man the power to stand guard at once over
these four different simultaneous expressions of his thought, watch that one which
speaks out the truth, and you will know the whole man.’ Thus it is a point of pride
with kings to remember faces and names. The basis of good manners is self-reliance.
Manners require time. Manners impress as they indicate real power. A man, who is
sure of his point, carries a broad and contented expression, which everybody reads.
Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect is seen to be done
for effect; what is done for love is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection
and honor because he was not lying in wait for these. A little integrity is better
than any career. One would say that the persuasion of their speech is not in what
they say, - or that men do not convince by their argument, but by their personality, by
who they are, and what they said and did heretofore. A man already strong is
listened to, and everything he says is applauded. Self-reliance is the basis of
behavior. Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are their
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literature. The best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or
perfect understanding between sincere people. ‘Tis a French definition of
friendship…good understanding. The highest compact we can make with our fellow,
is, - ‘Let there be truth between us two forevermore.’ Heroes mutually understand,
from the first, and deal loyally and with profound trust in each other. In all the
superior people I have met I notice directness, truth spoken more truly, as if
everything of obstruction, of malformation, had been trained away. It is good to
give a stranger a meal, or a night’s lodging. It is better to be hospitable to his good
meaning and thought, and give courage to companion. An old man said, ‘When you
come into the room, I think I will study how to make humanity beautiful to you.’
BEAUTY:
All our science lacks a human side. ‘Tis curious that we only believe as deep as we
live. A deep man believes in miracles, waits for them, believes in magic, believes
that the orator will decompose his adversary; believes that the evil eye can wither,
that the heart’s blessing can heal; that love can exalt talent; can overcome all odds.
From a great heart secret magnetisms flow incessantly to draw great events.
Knowledge of men, knowledge of manners, the power of form, and our sensibility to
personal influence never go out of fashion. It is necessary in music, when you strike
a discord, to let down the ear by an intermediate note or two to the accord again; and
many a good experiment, born of good sense and destined to succeed, fails only
because it is offensively sudden. In rhetoric, this art of omission is a chief secret of
power, and in, general, it is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the
simplest way. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without
expression tires. We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities shine.
If command, eloquence, art or invention exists in the most deformed person, all the
accidents that usually displease, please, and raise esteem and wonder higher.
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the
imagination, not yet beautiful. Character gives splendor to youth and awe to wrinkled
skin and gray hairs.
ILLUSIONS:
Life is a succession of lessons that must be lived to be understood. We make from
one dream into another dream. The attributes of God were two – power and risibility.
The visions of good men are good; it is the undisciplined will that is whipped with bad
thoughts and bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we lose our hold on the central
reality. I look upon the simple and childish virtues of veracity and honesty as the root
of all that is sublime in character. Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your
debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good
as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all
the éclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry
and art. It is what we really are that avails, with friends, with strangers, and with all
humanity. There is no chance and no anarchy in the universe. All is system and
gradation.
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VOLUME 7
SOCIETY & SOLITUDE:
The necessity of isolation which genius feels. The ministers of beauty are rarely
beautiful in coaches and saloons. But the necessity of solitude is deeper than we
have said, and is organic. If you would learn to write, it is in the street you must
learn it. The people, and not the college, are the writer’s how. Conversation will
not corrupt us if we come to the assembly in our own garb and speech and with the
energy of health to select what is ours and reject what is not. Nature delights to put
us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep
the diagonal line. Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. We must keep our
head in the one and our hands in the other.
CIVILIZATION:
‘Tis wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier. Dr Johnson said
that ‘men are seldom more innocently employed than when they are making money.’
Wherever snow falls there is usually civil freedom. Kant: ‘act always so that the
immediate motive of thy will may become a universal rule for all intelligent beings.’
The way to be strong is by borrowing the might of the elements. We cannot bring the
heavenly powers to us, but if we will only choose our jobs in directions in which they
travel, they will undertake them with the greatest pleasure. A puny creature, walled in
on every side, as Daniel wrote, - ‘Unless above himself he can erect himself, how
poor a thing is man!’ but when his will leans on a principle, when he is the vehicle of
ideas, he borrows their omnipotence. Gibraltar may be strong but ideas are
impregnable, and bestow on the hero their invincibility. Work rather for those
interest which the divinities honor and promote, - justice, love, freedom, knowledge,
and utility. Montesquieu says: ‘Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile,
but as they are free.’
ART:
The man not only thinks, but also speaks and acts. Every thought that arises in the
mind, in its rising aims to pass out of the mind into act. Thought is the seed of
action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. The
conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end, is Art. Art is the
spirit creative. Aristotle: ‘The reason of the thing, without the matter.’ The universal
soul is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful; therefore to make anything
useful or beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the universal mind. The first
and last lesson of the useful arts is that Nature tyrannizes over our works. They must
be conformed to her law, or they will be ground to powder by their omnipresent
activity. It is only within narrow limits that the discretion of the Artist may range. But if
we work within this limit, she yields us all her strength. All-powerful action is
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performed by bringing the forces of nature to bear upon our objects. Music,
Eloquence, Poetry, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture. This is a rough enumeration of
the Fine Arts. The artist is to be the organ through which the universal mind acts.
The feeling of all great poets has accorded with this. They found the verse, not made
it. A study of admirable works of art sharpens our perceptions of the beauty of
Nature; the contemplation of a work of great art draws us into a state of mind, which
may be called religious. Painting was called ‘speaking poetry’ and poetry ‘speaking
painting’. It was never in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into
being. They came to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy. The miracles
of music all sprang out of some genuine enthusiasm.
ELOQUENCE:
Taking sovereign possession of the audience. Him we call an artist who shall play on
an assembly of men as a master on the keys of a piano. He will have them pleased
and humored as he chooses; and they shall carry and execute that which he bids
them. Of chief importance: a certain robust and radiant physical health. The virtue of
books is to be readable, and of orators to be interesting; and this is a gift of Nature.
‘Whoso can speak well,’ said Luther, ‘is a man.’ If the talents for speaking exist and
there be a personality to go with it the audience is thrown into the attitude of pupil,
follows like a child its preceptor, and hears what he has to say. By making them wise
in that which he knows, he has the advantage of the assembly every moment. The
orator must be a substantial personality. Then, first, he must have power of
statement, - must have the fact, and know how to tell it. Him who has the facts and
can and will state them, people will listen to. The orator must be, to a certain extent,
a poet. Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol, and an audience is
electrified. Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, and the cause is
half won. In cases where profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is
he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It
agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articulation.
Then it rushes from him as in short, abrupt screams, in torrents of meaning.
Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. It must still be at bottom a
biblical statement of fact. The orator keeps his feet ever on a fact. If you would lift me
you must be on higher ground. If you would liberate me you must be free. If you
would you would correct my false views of facts, - hold up to me the same facts in
the true order of thought, and I cannot go back from the new conviction. He is not to
neutralize their opposition, but he is to convert them into fiery apostles and
publishers of the same wisdom. The highest platform of eloquence is the moral
sentiment. It is what is called affirmative truth. In this dominion of chance we find a
principle of permanence. ‘Virtue secures its own success.’ Grave men, who preferred
their integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they toiled…as
above the whole world, and themselves also.
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DOMESTIC LIFE:
A man’s money should not follow the direction of his neighbor’s money, but should
represent to him the things he would willingly do with it. Let him never buy anything
else than what he wants. What idea predominates in our houses? Thrift first, then
convenience and pleasure. The desire of gold is the means of freedom and benefit.
The great depend on their heart, not their purse. Let us understand then that a
house should bear witness in all its economy that human culture is the end to which
it is built and garnished. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel
poor. The intellect is awake and reads the laws of the universe, the soul worships
truth and love, honor and courtesy flow into all deeds. There is many a humble
house in every city, in every town, where talent and taste and sometimes genius
dwell with poverty and labor. I honor a man whose ambition it is to be a mast of living
well, and to administer the offices of master or servant, of husband, father, and friend.
The vice of government, the vice of education, the vice of religion, is one with that of
private life. How seldom do we behold tranquility! We see on the lip of our
companion the presence or absence of the great masters of thought and poetry to
his mind. We read in his brow, on meeting him after many years, that he is where we
left him, or that he has made great strides. Happy will that house be in which the
relations are formed from character. The ornament of a house is the friend who
frequents it. Landor: his definition of the great man, ‘It is he who can call together the
most select company when it pleases him.’ The fountain of beauty is the heart, and
every generous thought illustrates the walls of your chamber. The house will come to
be esteemed a Sanctuary. He who shall show men how to lead a clean,
handsome, and heroic life amid the beggarly elements of our cities and
villages; whoso shall teach me how to eat my meat and take my repose and
deal with men, without any shame following, will restore the life of man to
splendor, and make his own name dear to all history.
FARMING:
The farmer times himself to Nature, and acquires that livelong patience which
belongs to her. It is the rich man in a true sense, that is to say, not the man of large
income and large expenditure, but solely the man whose outlay is less than his
income and is steadily kept so. Nature works on a method of all for each and each
for all.
WORKS & DAYS:
The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the
models from which every hint was taken. One definition of man is ‘intelligence served
by organs.’ There does not seem any limit to these new information’s of the same
Spirit that made the elements at first, and now, through man, works them. Art and
power will go on as they have done, - will make day out of night, time out of space,
and space out of time. Invention breeds invention. The science of power is forced to
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remember the power of science. Civilization mounts and climbs. Malthius, when he
stated that the mouths went on multiplying geometrically and the fool arithmetically,
forgot to say that the human mind was also a factor in political economy, and that the
augmenting wants of society would be met by an augmenting power of invention.
The new study of the Sanskrit has shown us the origin of the old names of God, Dyaus, Deus, Zeus, Zeu pater, Jupiter, - names of the sun, still recognizable through
the modifications of our vernacular words, importing that the Day is the Divine Power
and Manifestation, and indicating that those ancient men, in their attempts to express
by all the tribes. He only is rich who owns the day. They come and go like muffled
and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we
do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away. At school, life was
then calendared by moments, threw itself into nervous knots of glittering hours, even
as now, and not it spread itself abroad an equable felicity. In solitude and in the
country, what dignity thousands of years, when this hallowed hour dawns out of the
deep, - a clean page, which the wise may inscribe with truth… the cathedral music of
history breathes through it a psalm to our solitude. I used formerly to choose my time
with some nicety for each favorite book. There are days when the great are near us,
when there is no frown on their brow, no condescension even; when they take us by
the hand, and we share their thought. Who is he that does not always find himself
doing something less than his best task? He is a strong man who can look them in
the eye, see through this juggle, feel their identity, and keep his own; who can know
surely that one will be like another to the end of the world, nor permit love, or death,
or politics, or money, war, or pleasure, to draw him from his task. One illusion is that
the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every
day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows
that every day is Doomsday. ‘Tis the very principle of science that nature shows
herself best in leasts. In the Christian graces, humility stands highest of all, in life;
this is the secret of the wise. In daily life, what distinguishes the master is the using
those materials he has, instead of looking about for what are more renowned, or
what others have used well. Do not refuse the employment that the hour brings you,
for on more ambitions. The highest heaven of wisdom is alike near from every point,
and thou must find it, if at all, by methods native to thyself alone. Honor the present
moment. There is time enough for your work. God works in moments, - ‘En peu
d’heure Dies labeure.’ We ask for long life, but t’is deep life, or grand moments
that signify. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, - what
ample borrowers of eternity they are! I am of the opinion of the poet Wordsworth that
‘there is no real happiness in this life but in intellect and virtue.’ I am of the opinion of
Pliny, that ‘whilst we are musing on these things, we are adding to the length of our
lives.’ I am of the opinion of Glauco, who said, ‘the measure of life, O Socrates, is,
with the wise, the speaking and hearing such discourse as yours.’ ‘’Tis the measure
of a man, his apprehension of a day. You must treat the days respectfully, you must
be a day yourself. There can be no greatness without abandonment. Fill my hour, ye
gods, so that I shall not say, whilst I have done this, ‘Behold, also, an hour of my life
is gone.’ – but rather, ‘I have lived an hour.’ What has been best done in the world, the works of genius, - cost nothing. The poet is never the poorer for his song. A song
is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. Those only can sleep who do not
care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the
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writing or the speaking. It is the depth at which we live and not at all the surface
extension that imports. Character… the highest name at which philosophy has
arrived. ‘Tis not important how the hero does this or this, but what he is. It flows from
character, that sublime health which values one moment as another, and makes us
great in all conditions, and as the only definition we have of freedom and power.
BOOKS:
Books I think, we often owe to them the perception of immortality. The world is a
proud place. Peopled with men of positive quality, with heroes and demigods
standing around us, who will not let us sleep. The colleges, whilst they provide us
with libraries. Furnish no professor of books; and I think no chair is so much wanted.
It seems as if some charitable soul would do a right act in naming those that have
been bridges or ships to carry him safely over dark morasses and barren oceans,
into the heart of sacred cities, into palaces and temples. This would be best done by
those great masters of books who from time to time appear, - the Fabricii, the
Seldons, Magliabecchis, Scaligers, Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose eyes
sweep the whole horizon of learning. I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I
can seldom go there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is already
within the four walls of my study at home. The crowds and centuries of books are
only commentary and elucidation, echoes, and weakeners of these few great voices
of time. The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a mechanical
one of hours and pages. It holds each student to a pursuit of his native aim. Let him
read what is proper to him, and not waste his memory on a crowd of
mediocrities. Great books…the Bible, Hafiz was the eminent genius of the Persians,
Confucius of the Chinese, Cervantes of the Spaniards…Shakespeare, Milton, and
Bacon. With this pilot of his own genius, let the student read one, or let him read
many, he will read advantageously. Dr Johnson said, ‘Whilst you stand
deliberating which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both:
read anything five hours a day, and you will soon be learned.’ There is always a
selection in writers, and then a selection from the selection. There has already been
a scrutiny and choice from many hundreds of young pens before the pamphlet or
political chapter, which you read in a fugitive journal, comes to your eyes. All these
are young adventurers, ho produce their performance to the wise ear of Tim, who
sits and weighs, and, ten years hence, and out of a million of pages reprints one.
Again it is judged, it is winnowed by all the winds of opinion; - and reprinted after a
century! ‘Tis therefore an economy of time to read old and famed books… Pindar,
Martial, Terence, Galen, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Erasmus, More, will be superior to
the average intellect. Be sure then to read no mean books. Dr Johnson said, ‘he
always went into stately shops;’ and good travelers stop at the best hotels; for
though they cost more, they do not cost much more, and there is the good company
and the best information. In like manner the scholar knows that the famed books
contain, first and last, the best thoughts and facts. In the best circles is the best
information. The three practical rules…
1.
Never read any book that is not a year old.
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2.
3.
Never read any but famed books.
Never read any but what you like.
I find certain books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was: he shuts
the book a richer man. I would never willingly read any others than such. Of the old
Greek books, I think there are five that we cannot spare: Homer, Herodotus,
Aeschylus, Plato & Plutarch. Greek History…Mr. Grote’s voluminous annals, the
popular summary of Goldsmith or Gillies. Aristophanes is now very accessible with
much valuable commentary through the labors of Mitchell and Cartwright. An
excellent popular book is J.A. St Johns ‘Ancient Greece’; the ‘Life & Letter’. If we
come down a little by natural steps from the master to the disciples, we have, six or
seven centuries later, the Platonist, who also cannot be skipped, - Plotinus, Porphry,
Proclus, Synesius, Jamblichus. I do not hesitate to read all the books I have named,
and all good books, in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable, any real insight or broad human sentiment. For history there is great choice of ways
to bring the student through early Rome. Livy, Goldsmith or Ferguson. The poet
Horace, Tacitus, the wisest of historians, Martial will give him Roman manners. Now
having our idler safe down as far as the fall of Constantinople in 1453… there is
Dante’s poem, Boccaccios ‘Life of Dante’, perhaps a volume or two of M. Simmondis
‘Italian Republics’. Michael Angelo, his sonnets and letters must be read, with his
Life by Visari or in our day by Herman Grimm. For the church and the Feudal
Institution, Mr. Hallams ‘Middle Ages’. The ‘Life of the Emperor Charles V’ by
Robertson. Ximenes, Columbus, Loyola, Luther, Erasmus, Melanchthon, Francis I,
Henry VLLL, Elizabeth and Henry IV of France are his contemporaries. On then to
Snorro Sturleson, Mallet, Ellis, Asser and Venerable Bede and to the researches of
Sharon Turner and Palgrave. Hume will serve him for an intelligent guide, and in the
Elizabethan era he is at the richest period of the English mind. Here he has
Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Bacon, Chapman, Jonson, Ford, Beaumont,
and Fletcher, Herbert, Donne, Herrick: and Milton, Marvell and Dryden, not long after.
Also Walter Scott has celebrated the persons and places of Scotland. Walton,
Chapman, Herrick, and Sir Henry Wotton write also to the times. Among the best
books are certain AUTOBIOGRAPHIES: as, St Augustine’s Confessions; Benvenuto
Cellini’s Life; Montaigne’s Essays; Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Memoirs; Memoirs of
the Cardinal de Retz; Rousseau’s Confessions; Linnaeus’s Diary; Gibbon’s, Hume’s,
Franklin’s Burns’s Alfieri’s, Goethe’s and Haydon’s Autobiographies. Another class of
books may be called TABLE-TALKS: Saadi’s Gulistan; Luther’s Table-Talk; Aubrey’s
Lives; Spencer’s anecdotes; Seldon’s Table-Talk; Boswell’s Life of Johnson;
Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe; Coleridge’s Table-Talk; and Hazlitt’s Life
of Northcote. FAVORITES: Froissart’s Chronicles; Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid;
Cervantes; Sully’s Memoirs; Rabelais; Montaigne; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas
Browne; Aubrey; Sterne; Horace Walpole; Lord Clarendon; Doctor Johnson; Burke,
shedding floods of light on his times; Lamb; Landor; and De
Quincey…VOCABULARIES: Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’. Cornelius Agrippa
‘On the Vanity of Arts and Sciences.’ IMAGINATIVE: Byron, Scott, Disraeli, Dumas,
Sand, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and Reade. Novel reading is a passion for
results. Every good fable, every mythology, every biography from a religious age,
every passage of love, and even philosophy and science, when they proceed from
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an intellectual integrity and are not detached and critical, have the imaginative
element. The Greek fables, the Persian history (Firdusi), the ‘Younger Eddal of the
Scandinavians, the ‘Chronicle of the Cid’, the poem of Dante, the Sonnets of Michael
Angelo, the English drama of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ford, and
even the prose of Bacon and Milton, - in our time the Ode of Wordsworth, and the
poems and the prose of Goethe, have this enlargement, and inspire hope and
generous attempts. The Bibles of the world, or the sacred books of each nation,
which express for each the supreme result of their experience. After the Hebrew and
Greek Scriptures, which constitute the sacred books of Christendom, these are, the
Desatir of the Persians, and the Zoroastrian Oracles; the Vedas and Laws of Menu;
the Upanishads, the Vishnu Purana, the Bhagvat Geeta, of the Hindus; the boos of
the Buddhists; the ‘Chinese Classic’, of four books, containing the wisdom of
Confucius and Mencius. Other books are the ‘Hermes Trismegistus,’ pretending to
the Egyptian remains; the ‘Sentences’ of Epictetus; of Marcus Antoninus; the ‘Vishnu
Sarma’ of the Hindus; the ‘Gulistan’ of Saadi; the ‘Imitation of Christ’, of Thomas a
Kempis; and the ‘Thoughts’ of Pascal. All these books are the majestic expressions
of the universal conscience, and are more to our daily purpose than this year’s
almanac of this day’s newspaper. They are for the closet, and to be read on the
bended knee. It takes millenniums to make a Bible.
LITERARY CLUB:
Who has time to read everything? Each shall undertake a single work or series for
which he is qualified. One of our company shall undertake it, shall study and master
it, and shall report on it as under oath; shall give us the sincere result as it lies in his
mind, adding nothing, keeping nothing back. Each shall give us the grains of gold,
after the washing; and every other shall then decide whether this is a book
indispensable to him also.
CLUBS:
The wish to speak of another mind assists to clear your own. So I prize the good
invention whereby everybody is provided with somebody who is glad to see him.
Things are in pairs: a natural fact has only half its value until a fact in moral nature,
its counterpart, is stated. Then they confirm and adorn each other; a story is
matched by another story. And that may be the reason why, when a gentleman has
told a good thing, he immediately tells it again. Nothing seems so cheap as the
benefit of conversation; nothing is more rare. ‘Tis wonderful how you are balked and
baffled. There is plenty of intelligence, reading, curiosity; but serious, happy
discourse, avoiding personalities, dealing with results, is rare: and I seldom meet
with a reading and thoughtful person but he tells me, as if it were his exceptional
mishap, that he has no companion. The lover of letters love power too. How
delightful is the one whose conversation is all pictures: he can produce whatever he
has seen; he tells the best story in the county, and is of such genial temper that he
disposes all others irresistibly to good-humor and discourse. Diderot said of the Abbe
Galiani: ‘He was a treasure in rainy days; and if the cabinet-makers made such
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things, everybody would have one in the country.’ He that can define, he that can
answer a question so as to admit of no further answer, is the best man. Jesus
spent his life in discoursing with humble people on life and duty, in giving wise
answers, showing that he saw at a larger angle of vision, and at least silencing those
who were not generous to accept his thoughts. Conversation is the vent of character
as well as of thought. Best is he who gives an answer that cannot be answered
again. Every scholar is surrounded by wiser men than he – if they cannot write as
well. Now this want of adapted society is mutual. The man of thought, the man of
letters, the man of science, the administrator skilful in affairs, the man of manners
and culture, whom you so much wish to find, - each of these is wishing to be found.
Each wishes to open his thought, his knowledge, his social skill to the daylight in
your company and affection, and to exchange his gifts for yours; and the first hint of
a select and intelligent company is welcome. It requires people who are not
surprised and shocked, who do and let do and let be, who sink trifles and know solid
values, and who take a great deal for granted. We must have loyalty and character.
A club met for conversation is a good basis, as it disarms all parties and puts
pedantry and business to the door. All are in good humor and at leisure, which are
the first conditions of discourse; the ordinary reserves are thrown off, experienced
men meet with the freedom of boys, and. Sooner or later, impart all that is singular in
their experience. I need only hint the value of the club for bringing masters in their
several arts to compare and expand their views, to come to an understanding on
these points, and so that their united opinion shall have its just influence on public
questions of education and politics. More information is mutually and effectually
communicated, in a few hours, than in many months of ordinary correspondence and
the printing and transmission of ponderous reports. A principal purpose also is the
hospitality of the club, as a means of receiving a worthy foreigner with mutual
advantage. Every man brings into society some partial thought and local culture. We
need range and alternation of topics and variety of minds. Wisdom is like electricity.
There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom. Who, being put into
certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as
glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while. Discourse, when it rises highest
and searchest deepest, when it lifts us into that mood out of which thoughts come
that remains as starts in our firmament, is between two.
COURAGE:
There are three qualities that conspicuously attract the wonder and reverence of
mankind: 1.Disinterestedness, as shown in indifference to the ordinary bribes and influences of
conduct, - a purpose so sincere and generous that it cannot be tempted aside by any
prospects of wealth or other private advantage. Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out
of which all the reported miracles grew.
2.Practical power.Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts
in stone, wood, steel and brass…the man that know more does of the man that
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knows less, and leads them in glad surprise to the very point where they would be:
this man is followed with acclamation.
3.Courage, the perfect will, which no terrors can shake, which is attracted by frowns
or threats or hostile armies, nay, needs these to awake and fan its reserved energies
into a pure flame. And is never quite itself until the hazard is extreme; then it is
serene and fertile, and all its powers play well. ‘Tis said courage is common, but the
immense esteem in which it is held proves it to be rare. I need not show how much it
is esteemed for the people give it the first rank. They forgive everything to it. Any
man who puts his life in peril in a cause that is esteemed becomes the darling of all
men. Cowardice shuts the eyes. Fear is cruel and mean. What cannot stand must
fall; and the measure of our sincerity and therefore of the respect of men, is the
amount of health and wealth we will hazard in the defense of our right. Knowledge is
the antidote to fear, - Knowledge, Use, and Reason, with its higher aids. Each
surmounts the fear as fast as he precisely understands the peril and learns the
means of resistance. Each is liable to panic, which is, exactly, the terror of ignorance
surrendered to the imagination. Knowledge is the encourager, knowledge that takes
fear out of the heart, knowledge and use, which is knowledge in practice. They can
conquer who believe they can. It is he who has done the deed once who does not
shrink from attempting it again. It is the veteran soldier who, seeing the flash of the
cannon, can step aside from the path of the ball. Use makes a better soldier than the
most urgent considerations of duty, - familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate
the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination. The
sailor loses fear as fast as he acquires command of sails and spars and steam; the
frontiersman, when he has a perfect rifle and has acquired a sure aim. To the sailor’s
experience every new circumstance suggests what he must do. Courage consists in
equality to the problem before us. Courage is equality to the problem, consists in the
conviction that the agents with whom you content are not superior in strength of
resources or spirit to you. Knowledge, yes; for the danger of dangers is illusion.
Captain John Brown said…’one good, believing, strong-minded man is worth a
hundred, nay, a thousand men without character.’ ‘Tis the quiet, peaceable men, the
men of principle, that make the best soldiers.’ For it is not the means on which we
draw, as health or wealth, practical skill or dexterous talent, or multitude of followers,
that count, but the aims only. A great aim aggrandizes the means. There is a
persuasion in the soul of man that he is here for cause, that he was put down
in this place by the Creator to do the work for which he inspires him, that thus
he is an overmatch for al antagonists that could combine against him. Sacred
courage indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world; that he
is aiming neither at pelf or comfort, but will venture all to put in act the invisible
thought in his mind. He wishes to break every yoke all over the world that hinders his
brother from acting after his thought. Let us say then frankly that the education of the
will is the object of our existence. We must think with courage. He has not learned
the lesson of life, who does not every day surmount a fear. Have the courage
not to adopt another’s courage. There is scope and cause and resistance enough for
us in our proper work and circumstance. Be brave, because there is one good
opinion that must always be of consequence to you, namely, your own.
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SUCCESS:
Columbus said, ‘There is a mode of reckoning derived from astronomy, which is sure
and safe to any one who understands it.’ For success, to be sure we esteem it a test
in other people, since we do first in ourselves. We respect ourselves more if we
have succeeded. The passion for sudden success is rude and puerile…always to
the damage of the conquerors. Michael Angelo wrote, ‘confide in one’s self, and
become something of worth and value, is the best and safest course.’ In my first
rule of success: to confide in one’s self, and be something of worth and value.
Each man has an aptitude born with him. Do your work. He is to dare to do
what he can do best; not help others as they direct him, but as he knows his helpful
power to be. It is rare to find a man who believes his own thought or who speaks that
which he was created to say. As nothing astonishes men so much as
commonsense and plain dealing, so nothing is more rare in any man than an
act of his own. Any work looks wonderful to him, except that which he can do. We
do not believe our own thought; we must serve somebody; we must quote somebody’
every man is a borrower and a mimic; life is theatrical and literature a quotation.
Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief that if you are here, the
authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or with some task
strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so long as your work a t that
you are well and successful. It is enough if you work in the right direction. So far
from the performance being the real success, it is clear that the success was much
earlier than that, namely, when all the feats that make our civility were the thoughts
of good heads. Cannot we please ourselves with performing our work, or gaining
truth and power, without being praised for it? I gain my point; I gain all points, if I
can reach my companion with any statement that teaches him his own worth.
The sum of wisdom is, that the time is never lost that is devoted to work. The good
workman never says, ‘There that will do.’ But, ‘there, that is it – try it, and come again,
it will last always.’ The time your rival spends in dressing up his work for effect,
hastily, and for the market, you spend in study and experiments towards real
knowledge and efficiency. He has thereby sold his picture or machine, or won the
prize, or got the appointment; but you have raised yourself into a higher school of art,
and a few years will show the advantage of the real master over the short popularity
of the showman. In the scale of powers it is not talent but sensibility that is
best: talent confines, but the central life puts us in relation to all. ‘Tis the good
reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss, in every
book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all
else and unmistakable meant for his ear. There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or
great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home you will find rooted in a
thought of some individual man. We are not strong by our power to penetrate, but by
our relatedness. The world is enlarged for us, not by new objects, but by finding
more affinities and potencies in those we have. Fontonelle said: ‘There are three
things about which I have curiosity, though I know nothing of them, - music, poetry,
and love.’ Every man has a history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could
draw it from him. Character and wit have their own magnetism. Send a deep man
into any town, and he will find another deep man, there, unknown hitherto to his
46
neighbors. That is the great happiness of life, - to add to our high acquaintances.
The very law of averages might have assured you that there will be in every hundred
heads, say ten or five good heads. All beauty warm the heart, is a sign of health,
prosperity, and the favor of God. What delights, what emancipates, not what scares
and pains us is wise and good in speech and in the arts. One more trait of true
success. The good mind chooses what is positive, what is advancing, - embraces
the affirmative. A man is a man only as he makes his life and nature happier to us.
Set down nothing that will not help somebody; - The affirmative is love. Love
enlarges, and so empowers it. Good will makes insight, as one finds his way to the
sea by embarking on a river. To awake a min man and to raise the sense of worth, to
educate his feeling and judgment so that he shall scorn himself for a bad action, that
is the only aim. To help the young soul, add energy, inspire hope and blow the coals
into a useful flame; to redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy,
that is the work of divine men. We live on different planes or platform. There is an
external life, urging him to put himself forward. To make himself useful and
agreeable in the world, to ride, run, argue and contend, infold his talents, shine,
conquer and possess. But the inner life sits at home. ‘Tis a quiet, wise perception.
We have grown to manhood. It lives in the great present; it makes the present great.
A person of this temper once said to a man of much activity, ‘I will pardon you that
you do so much, and you me that I do nothing,’ And Euripides says that, ‘Zeus hates
busybodies and those who do too much.’
OLD AGE:
Wherever there is power there is age. We postpone our literary work until we have
more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was
a youthful effervescence that we have now lost. Life and art are cumulative; and he
who has accomplished something in any department alone deserves to be
heard on that subject. Skill to do comes of doing; knowledge comes by eyes
always open, and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.
Beranger said, ‘ Almost all the good workmen live long.’ What to the youth is only a
guess and a hope is in the veteran a digested statute. Age sets its house in order,
and finishes its works, which to every artist is a supreme pleasure. The instinct of
classifying marks the wise and healthy mind. An old scholar finds keen delight in
verifying the impressive anecdotes and citations he has met with in miscellaneous
reading and hearing, in all the years of youth. Time; yes that is the finder, the
unweariable explorer, not subject to casualties, omniscient at last. But the central
wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and, dropping off
obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard that
whoever loves is in no condition old.
VOLUME 8
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QUOTATION & ORIGINALITY:
In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known
its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity. In every man’s memory,
with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books that met his
views. Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature. If we
encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read. We
expect a great man to be a good reader. ‘He that borrows the aid of an equal
understanding,’ said Burke, ‘doubles his own; he that uses that of a superior elevates
his own to the stature of that he contemplates.’ We prize books, and they prize them
most who are themselves wise. There is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and
new make the warp and woof of every moment. The highest statement of a new
philosophy complacently caps itself with some prophetic maxim from the oldest
learning. The originals are not original. There is imitation, model, and suggestion, to
the very archangels, if we knew their history. The Bible is like an old Cremona; it has
been played upon by the devotion of thousands of years until every word and
particle is public and tunable. A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his
invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills
with his own voice and humor, and the whole cyclopedia of his table talk is presently
believed to be his own. Mr. Webster’s three rules: first, never to do today what he
could defer till tomorrow; secondly, never to do himself what he could make another
do for him; and thirdly, never to pay any debt today. Mr. Webster’s advice to
students… when he opened a new book, he turned to the table of contents,
took a pen, and sketched a sheet of matters and topics, what he knew and
what he thought, before he read the book. The Earl of Strafford it was said: When
he met with a well-penned oration or tract upon any subject, he framed a speech
upon the same argument, inventing and disposing what seemed fit to be said upon
that subject, before he read the book; then, reading, compared his own with the
author’s art and fullness; whereby he drew all that ran in the author more strictly, and
might better judge of his wants to supply them. The Duke of Wellington: there is
nothing so dreadful as a great victory – excepting a great defeat. Schiller: Tell him to
reverence the dreams of his youth. Antiphanes, one of Plato’s friends, laughingly
compared his writings to a city where the words froze in the air as soon as they were
pronounced, and the next summer, when they were warmed and melted by the sun,
the people heard what had been spoken in the winter. In literature, quotation is good
only when the writer whom I follow goes my way, and, being better mounted than I,
gives me a cast, as we say; but if I like the gay equipage so well as to go out of my
road, I had better have gone afoot. Certainly it only needs two well-placed and well
tempered for co-operation, to get somewhat far transcending any private enterprises.
Each man of thought is surrounded by wiser men than he, if he cannot write as well.
Whatever we think and say is wonderfully better for our spirits and trust, in another
mouth. There is none so eminent and wise but he knows minds whose opinion
confirms or qualifies his own, and men of extraordinary genius acquire an almost
absolute ascendant over their nearest companions. Original power is usually
accompanied with assimilating power. Next to the originator of a good sentence is
the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage.
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As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west. Then there are
great ways of borrowing. Genuine borrows nobly. Shakespeare: yet he was more
original than his originals. He breather upon dead bodies and brought them into life.
Wordsworth, as soon as he heard a good thing, caught it up, meditated upon it, and
very soon reproduced it in his conversation and writing. Montmartel’s principle, ‘I
pounce on what is mine, wherever I find it:’ and on Bacon’s rule, ‘I take all knowledge
to be my province.’ Truth is the property of no individual, but is the treasure of
all men. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others, as it is to invent. We
are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he
originates. We read the quotation with his eyes. And find new and fervent sense: as
a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the
rendering. The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The
profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind, and heart
finds and publishes it. A writer appears to more advantage in the pages of another
book than in his own. In his own he waits as a candidate for your approbation; in
another’s he is a lawgiver. It is a familiar expedient of brilliant writers…to an
imaginary person, in order to give it weight. It is a curious reflex effect of this
enhancement of our thought by citing it from another, that many men can write better
under a mask than for themselves. It is inevitable that you are indebted to the past.
You are fed and formed by it. The profound apprehension of the Present is Genius,
which makes the Past forgotten. Genius believes its faintest presentiment against
the testimony of all history; for it knows that facts are not ultimates, but that a state of
mind is the ancestor of everything. What is originality? It is being, being one’s
self, and reporting accurately what we see and are. Originals never lose their
value. Pindar: ‘There are many swift darts within my quiver, which have a voice for
those with understanding: but to the crowd they need interpreters.’ He is gifted with
genius who knoweth much by natural talent. Only an inventor knows how to borrow,
and every man is or should be an inventor. The divine gift is ever the instant life,
which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency
with which Nature decomposed al her harvest for recomposition.
INSPIRATION:
A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us. Thought
let us into realities. What is man good for without enthusiasm? ‘I am not,’ says the
man, ‘at the top of my condition today, but the favorable hour will come when I
command all my powers, and when that will be easy to do which is at this moment
impossible.’ Jacob Behmen said, ‘Art has not wrote here, nor was there any time to
consider how to set it punctually down according to the right understanding of the
letters, but all was ordered according to the direction of the spirit, which often went
on haste, - so that the penman’s hand, by reason he was not accustomed to it, did
often shake. And though, I could have written in a more accurate, fair, and plain
manner, the burning fire often forced forward with speed, and the hand and pen must
hasten directly after it, for it cows and goes as a sudden shower. In one quarter of an
hour I saw and knew more than if I had many years together at an university.’
Aristotle said, ‘No great genius was ever without some mixture of madness, nor can
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anything grand or superior to the voice of common mortals be spoken except by the
agitated soul.’ How many sources of inspiration can we count?

Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air, landscape,
and bodily exercise, on the mind. Plato thought, ‘exercise would almost
cure a guilty conscience.’ Sydney Smith said: ‘You will never break down in
a speech on the day when you have waked twelve mile.’ I honor health as
the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly
by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped. Life is
in short cycles or periods; we are quickly tired, but we have rapid rallies.
The perfection of writing is when mind and body are both in key: when the
mind finds perfect obedience in the body. So of all the particulars of health
and exercise and fit nutriment and tonics.

The experience of writing letters is one of the keys to the modus of
inspiration. When we have ceased for a long time to have any fullness
of thoughts that once made a diary of joy as well as a necessity, and
have come to believe that an image or a happy turn of expression is
no longer at you command, in writing a letter to a friend we may find
that we rise to thought and to a cordial power of expression that costs
no effort and it seems to us that this facility may be indefinitely
applied and resumed.

There is diurnal and secular rest. After a season of decay or eclipse,
darkening months or years, the faculties revive to their fullest force.
Herbert’s poem ‘The Flower’ says: ‘And now in age I bud again, After so
many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain, And relish
versing: O my only light, It cannot be that I am he on whom thy tempests fell
all night.’

The power of the will is sometimes sublime; and what is will for, if it cannot
help us in emergencies? Goethe: ‘I work more easily when the barometer is
high than when it is low. Since I know this, I endeavor, when the barometer
is low, to counteract the injurious effect by great exertion, and my attempt is
successful. To the persevering mortal the blessed immortals are swift. Yes,
for they know how to give you in one moment the solutions of the riddle you
have pondered for months.’

Plutarch affirms that ‘souls are naturally dowed with the faculty of
prediction, and the chief cause that excites this faculty and virtue is a
certain temperature of air and winds.’ My anchorite thought it ‘sad that
atmospheric influences should bring to our dust the communion of the soul
with the Infinite.’ The fine influence of the morning few can explain, but all
will admit. President Quincy told me that he never went to bed at night until
he had laid out the studies for the next morning. I believe that in our good
days a well-ordered mind has a new thought awaiting it every morning.
Hence, eminently thoughtful men, from the time of Pythagoras down, have
insisted on an hour of solitude every day, to meet their own mind and learn
what oracle it has to impart. If a new view of life or mind gives us joy, so
does new arrangement. I don’t know but we take as much delight in finding
the right place for an old observation, as in a new thought.

Solitary converse with nature: for thence are ejaculated sweet and
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


dreadful words never uttered in libraries.
But the solitude of nature is not so essential as solitude of habit. I have
found my advantage in going in summer to a country inn, in winter to a city
hotel, with a task that would not prosper at home. I thus secured a more
absolute seclusion; for it is almost possible for a housekeeper who is in the
country a small farmer, to exclude interruptions and even necessary orders,
though I bar out by system all I can, and resolutely omit, to my constant
damage, all that can be omitted. At home, the day is cut short into short
strips. In the hotel, I have no hours to keep, no visits to make or receive,
and I command an astronomic leisure. I forget rain, wind, cold and heat. At
home, I remember in my library the wants of the farm, and have all too
much sympathy. I envy the abstraction of some scholars I have known, who
would sit on a curbstone in State Street, put up their back, and solve a
problem. Certain localities, as mountaintops, the seaside, the shores of
rivers and rapid brooks, natural parks of oak and pine, where the ground is
smooth and unencumbered, are excitants of the muse. Every artist knows
well some favorite retirement. And yet the experience of some good artist
has taught them to prefer the smallest and plainest chamber, with one chair
and table and with no outlook, to these picturesque liberties. William Blake
said, ‘Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate
imagination in me.’ What prudence again does every artist, every scholar
need in the security of his easel or his desk! These must be remote from
the work of the house, and from all knowledge of the feet that come and go
therein.
Conversation is the right metaphysical professor. This is the true school of
philosophy, - this the college where you learn what thoughts are, what
powers lurk in those fugitive gleams, and what becomes of them; how they
make history. A wise man goes to this game to play upon others and to be
played upon, and at least as curious to know what can be drawn from
himself as what can be drawn from them. For, in discourse with a friend, our
thought, hitherto wrapped in our consciousness, detaches itself, and allows
itself to be seen as a thought, in a manner as new and entertaining to us as
to our companions. Some perceptions – I think the best – are granted to the
single soul; they came from the depth and go to the depth and are the
permanent and controlling ones. Others it takes two to find. Conversation;
for intellectual activity is contagious. If the tone of the companion is higher
than ours, we delight in rising to it.
New poetry: by which I mean chiefly, old poetry that is new to the reader.
What is best in literature is the affirming, prophesying, spermatic words of
men-making poets. Only that is poetry that cleanses and mans me. Fact
books, if the facts be well and thoroughly told, are much more nearly allied
to poetry than many books are that are written in rhyme. Every book is
good to read which sets the reader in a working mood. The deep book,
no matter how remote the subject, helps us best. The day is good in
which we have had the most perceptions. I value literary biography for the
hints it furnishes from so many scholars, in so may countries, of what
hygiene, what ascetic, what gymnastic, what social practices their
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experience suggested and approved. These are some hints towards what is
in all education a chief necessity, - the right government, or, shall I not say?
The right obedience to the powers of the human soul. Itself is the dictator:
the mind itself the awful oracle. All the power, all our happiness consists in
our reception of its hints, which become clearer and grander as they are
obeyed.
GREATNESS:
There is a prize, which we are all aiming at, and the more power, and goodness we
have, so much more the energy of that aim. Every aspiration, by his success in the
pursuit, does not hinder but helps his competitors. I prefer to call it greatness. It is
the fulfillment of a natural tendency in each man. It is a fruitful study. It is the best
tonic to the young soul. And no man is unrelated; therefore we admire eminent men,
not for themselves, but as representatives. It is very certain that we ought not to be
and shall not be contented with any goal we have reached. Our aim is no less than
greatness; that which invites all, belongs to us all to which, in every sane moment,
we resolve to make our own. Greatness – what is it? It is not the soldier who
represents the highest force of mankind: not the strong hand, but wisdom and civility,
the creation of laws, institutions, letters and art. These we call by distinction the
humanities; For the scholars represent the intellect, by which man is man; the
intellect and the moral sentiment, - which in the last sentiment, - which in the last
analysis can never be separated. There are certain points of identity in which these
masters agree. Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears. You say of
some new person. That man will go far, - for you see in his manners that the
recognition of him by others is not necessary to him. They may well fear fate who
have any infirmity of habit or aim; but he who rests on what he is, has a destiny
above destiny, and make mouths at Fortune. There is somewhat in the true
scholar, which he cannot be laughed out of, nor be terrified or bought off from. Stick
to your own; don’t inculpate yourself in the local, social, or national crime, but follow
the path your genius traces like the galaxy of heaven for you to walk in. I am to
infer that you keep good company by your better information and manners, and to
infer your reading, from the wealth and accuracy of your conversation. Whilst he
shares with all mankind the gift of reason and the moral sentiment, there is a
teaching for him from within which is leading him in a new path, and, the more it is
trusted, separates and signalizes him, while it makes him more important and
necessary to society. We call this specially the bias of each individual. And none of
us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to
this whisper, which is heard by him alone. Swedenborg called it the proprium, - not a
thought shared with others, but constitutional to the man. A point of education that I
can never too much insist upon is this tenet that every individual man has a bias
which he must obey, and that it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly
develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle,
which points always in one direction to his proper path, with more or less variation
from any other man’s. He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it; learns
to be at home with himself; learns to watch the delicate hints and insights that come
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to him, and to have the entire assurance of his own mind. In this self-respect or
hearkening to the privatest oracle, he consults his ease I may say, or need never be
at a loss. In morals this is conscience; in intellect, genius; in practice, talent; - not to
imitate or surpass a particular man in his way, but to bring out your own new way; to
each his own method, style, wit, eloquence. Another trait of greatness is facility. Let
that belief, which you hold alone, have free course. I have observed that in all public
speaking, the rule of the orator begins, not in the array of his facts, but when his
deep conviction, and the right and necessity he feels to convey that conviction to his
audience, - when these shine and burn in his address; when the thought which he
stands for gives its own authority to him, adds to him a grander personality, gives
him valor, breadth, and new intellectual power, so that not he, but mankind, seems to
speak through his lips. There is a certain transfiguration; all great orators have it, and
men who wish to be orators simulate it. If we should ask ourselves what is this selfrespect it has its deep foundations in religion. You are rightly fond of certain books or
men that you have found to excite your reverence and emulation. But none of these
can compare with the greatness of that counsel which is open to you in happy
solitude. I mean that there is for you the following of an inward leader, - a slow
discrimination that there is for each a Best Counsel which enjoins the fit word and
the fit act for every moment. But if the first rule is to obey your native bias, to accept
that work for which you were inwardly formed, - the second rule is concentration,
which doubles its force, Let the scholar measure this valor by his power to cope with
intellectual giants. Leave others to count votes and calculate stocks. His courage is
to weigh Plato, judge La Place, know Newton, Faraday, judge of Darwin, criticize
Kant and Swedenborg, and on all these arouse the central courage of insight. Do
you know what the right meaning of Fame is? It is that sympathy, rather than fine
elements by which the good become partners of the greatness of their superiors.
Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my
master in some point, and in that I learn of him. It is noted of some scholars, like
Swift and Gibbon and Donne that they pretended to vices, which they had not, so
much did they hate hypocrisy. William Blake, the artist, frankly says, ‘I never knew a
bad man in whom there was not something very good.’ Men are ennobled by morals
and by intellect; but those two elements knew each other and always beckon to each
other, until at last they meet in the man, if he is to be truly great. There are always
men who have a more catholic genius, are really great as men, and inspire universal
enthusiasm. Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the most remarkable example of this class
that we have seen, - a man who was at home and welcome with the humblest, and
with a spirit and a practical vein in the times of terror that commanded to admiration
of the wisest. His hear was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold
the memory of a wrong. The world is an echo that returns to each of us what we say.
With self-respect then there must be in the aspirant the strong fellow feeling, the
humanity, which makes men of all classes warm to him as their leader and
representative.
RESOURCES:
‘For they conquer who believe they can.’ Every one hears gladly that cheerful
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voice. He reveals to us the enormous power of one man over masses of men; that
one man whose eye commands the end in view and the means by which it can
be attained, is not only better than ten men or a hundred men, but victor over
all mankind who do not see the issue and the means.
POETRY & IMAGINATION:
Power and purpose ride on matter to the last atom. Nothing so marks a man as
imaginative expressions. A figurative statement arrest attention, and is remembered
and repeated. The term ‘genius’, when used with emphasis, implies imagination; use
of symbols, figurative speech. A deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its
thought in a thing. As soon as a man masters a principle and sees his facts in
relation to it, fields, waters, skies, offer to clothe his thoughts in images. Then all men
understand him; Parthian, Mede, Chinese, Spaniard, and Indian hear their own
tongue. For he can now find symbols of universal significance, which are readily
rendered into any dialect; as a painter, a sculptor a musician, can in several ways
express the same sentiment of anger, or love, or religion. The thoughts are few, the
forms are many. The poet writes from a real experience, the amateur feigns one.
Talent amuses, but if you verse has not necessary and autobiographical basis,
though under whatever gay poetic veils, it shall not waste my time. Poetry is faith. To
the poet the world is virgin soil; all is practicable. Any word, every word in language,
every circumstance, becomes poetic in the hands of a higher thought. Ben Jonson
said, ‘The principal end of poetry is to inform men in the just reason of living.’ The
write, like the priest, must be exempted from secular labor. And as everything
streams and advances, as every faculty and every desire is procreant, and every
perception is a destiny, there is no limit to his hope. ‘Anything, child, that the mind
covets, from the milk of a cocoa to the throne of the three worlds, thou mayest obtain,
by keeping the law of thy members and the law of thy mind.’ It suggests that there is
higher poetry than we write or read. The poet should rejoice if he has taught us to
despise his song; if he has so moved us as to lift us, - to open the eye of the intellect
to see farther and better.
SOCIAL AIMS:
He whose word or deed you cannot predict, who answers you without any
supplication in his eye, who draws his determination from within, and draws it
instantly, - that man rules, ‘Manners are stronger than laws.’ Manners seem to say,
you are you and I am I. Give me a thought, and my hands and legs and voice and
face will all go right. The circumstance of circumstance is timing and placing. Selfcommand is the main elegance, ‘Keep cool, and you commend everybody,’ said St.
Just. ‘Eat at your table as you would eat at the table of the king,’ said Confucius. It is
an excellent custom of the Quakers, if only for a school of manners, - the silent
prayer before meals. It has the effect to stop mirth, and introduce a moment of
reflection. After the pause, all resume their usual intercourse from a vantage-ground.
‘Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration. State your opinion without apology. The
attitude is the main point, assuring your companion that, come good news or come
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bad you remain in good heart and good mind, which is the best news you can
possibly communicate. Self-control is the rule. Control your laughter. If a man has
manners and talent he may dress roughly and carelessly. It is only when mind and
the heart; we want friendship; we want knowledge; we want virtue; a more inward
existence to read the history of each other. Welfare requires one or two companions
of intelligence, probity, and grace, to wear out life with, - persons with whom we can
speak a few reasonable words every day. By whom we can measure ourselves, and
who shall hold fast to good sense and virtue; and these we are always in search of.
The delight in good company, in pure, brilliant, social atmosphere; the incomparable
satisfaction of a society in which everything can be safely said, in which every
member returns a true echo, in which a wise freedom, an ideal republic of sense,
simplicity, knowledge, and thoroughly good-meaning abide, - doubles the value of
life. The hunger for company is keen, but it must be discriminating, and must be
economized. That every well-dressed lady or gentleman should be at liberty to
exceed ten minutes in his or her call on serious people shows a civilization still rude.
It is very certain that sincere and happy conversation doubles our powers; that in the
effort to unfold our thought to a friend we make it clearer to ourselves, and surround
it with illustrations that help and delight us. It may happen that each hears from the
other a better wisdom than any one else will ever hear from either. A wise man once
said to me that ‘all whom he knew, met’; - the meaning that he need not take pains to
introduce the persons whom he valued to each other: they were sure to be drawn
together as by gravitation. Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, and
to compel. You are to be missionary and carrier of all that is good and noble. If you
rise to frankness and generosity, they will respect it now or later. Women are not
only wise themselves, they make us wise. No one can be a master in
conversation who has not learned much from women; their presence and
inspiration are essential to its success. Courage to ask questions; courage to
expose our ignorance. The great gain is, not to shine, not to conquer your
companion, - then you learn nothing but conceit, - but to find a companion
who knows what you do not. Then you can see the real and the counterfeit, and
will never accept the counterfeit again. Don’t say things. What you are stands over
you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A
lady of my acquaintance said, ‘I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for
what makes them say it.’ The main point is to throw yourself on the truth and say,
with Newton, ‘here’s no contending against facts.’ Stay at home in your mind. Don’t
recite other people’s opinions. See how it lies there in you; and if there is no counsel,
offer none. What we want is not your activity or interference with your mind, but your
content to be a vehicle of the simple truth. Manners first, then conversation. Every
one must seek to secure his independence; but he need not be rich. The old
Confucius in China admitted the benefit, but stated the limitation, ‘If the search for
riches where sure to be successful, though I should become a groom with whip in
hand to get them, I will do so. As the search may not be successful, I will follow after
that which I love.’ There is in America a general conviction in the minds of all mature
men, that every young man of good faculty and good habits can by perseverance
attain to an adequate estate; if he have a turn for business and a quick eye for the
opportunities which are always offering for investment, he can come to wealth, and
in such good season as to enjoy as well as transmit it. Of course those people, and
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no others, interest us, who believe in their thought, who are absorbed, if you please
to say so, in their own dream. They only can give the key and leading to better
society: those who delight in each other only because both delight in the eternal
laws; who forgive nothing to each other; who, by their joy and homage to these, are
made incapable of conceit, which destroys almost all the fine wits. These are the
bases of civil and polite society; namely manners, conversation, lucrative labor, and
public action; whether political, or in the leading of social institutions.
PROGRESS OF CULTURE:
If they know what is good, and require it, you will aspire and burn until you achieve it.
But, from time to time in history, men are born a whole age too soon. The founders
of nations, the wise men and inventors who shine afterwards as their gods, were
probably martyrs in their own time. All the transcendent writers and artists of the
world, -‘tis doubtful who they were, they are lifted as fast into mythology. Probably
the men were so great, so self-fed, that the recognition of them by others was no
necessary to them. The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in the
minorities of one. Every book is written with a constant secret reference to the few
intelligent persons whom the writer believes to exist in the million. The artist has
always the masters in his eye, though he effect to flout them. Often the master is a
hidden man, but not to the true student; invisible to all the rest, resplendent to him.
All his own work and culture form the eye to see the master. The importance of the
one person who has the truth over nations who have it not, is because power
obeys reality, and not appearance; according to quality, and not quantity. So
that, wherever a true man appears, everything usually reckoned great dwarfs itself;
he is the only great event, and it is easy to lift him into a mythological personage.
The first quality we know in matter is centrality, - we call it gravity. The first measure
of a mind is its centrality, its capacity of truth, and its adhesion to it. Every artist was
first an amateur. Great men shall not impoverish us, but enrich us. Great thoughts
come from the heart. Great men are sincere. Great men are they who see that
spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. Men say,
Ah! If a man could impart his talent, instead of his performance, what mountains of
guineas would be paid? Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts
the possessor to new power as a benefactor. The great heart will no more
complain of the obstructions that make success hard, than of the iron walls of
the gun, which hinder the shot scattering. It was walled round with iron tube
with that purpose, to give it irresistible force in one direction. A strenuous soul
hates cheap successes. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the
defender.
IMMORTALITY:
Learning depends on the learner. No more truth can be conveyed than the popular
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mind can bear. ‘Think on living.’ Sufficient to today are the duties of today. Don’t
waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well
assured that the right performance of this hour’s duties will be the best
preparation for the hours or ages that follow it:
‘The name of death was never terrible
To him that knew to live.’
The saying of Marcus Antoninus it were hard to mend: ‘it is well to die if there be
gods, and sad to live if there be none.’ The healthy state of mind is the love of life.
What is so good, let it endure. I find that what is called great and powerful life – the
administration of large affairs, in commerce, in the courts, in the state, - is prone to
develop narrow and special talent; but, unless combined with a certain contemplative
turn, a taste for abstract truth, for the moral laws, does not build up faith or lead to
content. All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.
Franklin said, ‘Life is rather a state of embryo, a preparation for life. A man is not
completely born until he has passed through death.’ Every really able man, in
whatever direction he work, - a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an
orator, a poet, a painter, - if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however
much admired, as far short of what it should be. What is this better, this flying ideal,
but the perpetual premise of his Creator? To a scholar or thinker, his work has no
end. That which he has learned is that there is much more to be learned. The wiser
he is, he feels only the more his incompetence. ‘What we know is a point to what we
do not know.’ ‘He that doeth the will of God abideth forever.’ It is not length of life, but
depth of life.
VOLUME 10
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DEMONOLOGY:
Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. They seem to us to suggest an abundance
and fluency of thought not familiar to the waking experience. They are the maturation
often of opinions not consciously carried out to statements but whereof we already
possessed the elements. Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with
terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed. A skilful man reads his dreams
for his self-knowledge; yet not the details. But the quality. Particular dreams and
presentiments should fall out and be prophetic. ‘Nature,’ said Swedenborg, ‘makes
almost as much demand on our faith as miracles do.’ Euripides said, ‘He is not the
best prophet who guesses well, and he is not the wisest man whose guess turns out
well in the even, but he who, whatever the event be, takes reason and probability for
his guide.’ ‘Swans, horses, dogs and dragons, ‘ says Plutarch, ‘we distinguish as
sacred, and vehicles of the Divine foresight, and yet we cannot believe that men are
sacred and favorites of Heaven.’ Self-trust…’I have a lucky hand, sir,’ said Napoleon
to his hesitating Chancellor; ‘those whom I lay it are fit for anything.’ This faith is
familiar in one form, - that often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an
element of success; that children and young persons come off safe from casualties
that would have proved dangerous to wiser people. Before we acquire great power
we must acquire wisdom to use it well. Thus the so-called fortunate man is one who,
though not gifted to speak when the people listen, or to act with grace or with
understanding to great ends, yet is one who, in actions of a low or common pitch,
relies on his instincts, and simply does not act where he should not, but waits his
time, and without effort acts when the need is. If to this you add a fitness to the
society around him, you have the elements of fortune; so that in a particular circle
and know of affairs he is not so much his own man as the hand of nature and time.
Just as his eye and hand work exactly together, - and to bit the mark with a stone he
has only to fasten his eye firmly on the mark and his arm will swing true, - so the
main ambition and genius being bestowed in one direction, the lesser spirits and
involuntary aids within his sphere will follow. The fault of most men is that they are
busybodies: do not wait the simple movement of the soul, but interfere and thwart
the instructions of their minds.
ARISTOCRACY:
It is not to be a man of rank, but a man of honor, accomplished in all arts and
generosities, which seems to them the right mark and the true chief of our modern
society. Inequalities exist in the powers of expression and action. Men of aim must
lead the aimless: men of invention the uninventive. The basis of all aristocracy must
be truth. I enumerate the claims by which men enter the superior class.

A commanding talent. In every company one finds the best man; and
if there be any question, it is decided the instant they enter into any
practical enterprises. It is certain that a sound body must be at the root
of any excellence in manners and actions; a strong and supple frame
which yields a stock of strength and spirits for all the needs of the day,
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

and generates the habit of relying on a supply of power for all
extraordinary exertions. As long as I am in my place, I am safe. Let a
man’s social aims be proportioned to his means and power. A certain
quantity of power belongs to a certain quantity of faculty. When old
writers are consulted by young writers who have written their first book,
they say, Publish it by all means; so only can you certainly know its
quality. The qualifications for leadership…Is he a man of talent? Is he
honest and not looking for an office or any manner of bribe? Has he the
will? Can he carry his points against opposition? It is not sufficient that
your work follows your genius, or is organic, to give you the magnetic
power over men. More than taste and talent must go to the Will.
Genius, what is so called in strictness, - the power to affect the
Imagination, as possessed by the orator, the poet, the novelist, or the
artist, - has a royal right in all possessions and privileges being itself
representative and accepted by all men as their delegate. It has indeed
the best right, because it raises men above themselves, intoxicates
them with beauty. Genius unlocks for all men the chains of use,
temperament and drudgery, and gives them a sense of delicious liberty
and power. The first example that occurs is an extraordinary gift of
eloquence. A man who has that possession of his means and that
magnetism that he can at all times carry the convictions of a public
assemble, we must respect, and he is thereby ennobled. The best feat
of genius is to bring all the varieties of talent and culture into its
audience; the mediocre and the dull are reached as well as the
intelligent.
Elevation of sentiment, refining and inspiring the manners, must really
take place of every distinction whether of material power or of
intellectual gifts. Be loyal to your thought. ‘All that depend on another
gives pain; all that depends on himself gives pleasure; in these few
words is the definition of pleasure and pain.’ The noble mind is here
to teach us that failure is a part of success. A man’s success is
made up of failures, because he experiments and ventures every
day, and ‘the more falls he gets, moves faster on;’ defeated all the
time and yet to victory born. I have heard that in horsemanship he is
not the good rider who never was thrown, but rather that a man never
will be a good rider until he is thrown; then he w8ill not be haunted any
longer by the terror that he shall tumble, and he will ride; - that is, his
business, - to ride, whether with falls or whether with none, to ride unto
the place whither he is bound. And I know no such unquestionable
badge and ensign of a sovereign mind, so that tenacity of purpose
which, through all changes of companions, of parties, of fortunes, changes never, bates no jot of heart or hope, but wearied our
opposition and arrives at its port. Superficial success is of no account.
Prosperity…difficulty is its delight and perplexity is its noonday. Selfreliance is the patent of royal natures. The honor of a member consists
in indifferency to the person and practices about him. The generous
soul, on arriving in a new port makes instant preparation for a new
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voyage. By experiment, by original studies, by secret obedience, he
has made a place for himself in the world; stands there a real,
substantial, unprecedented person, and when the great come by, as
always there are angels walking in the earth, they know him at sight.
Effectual service in his own legitimate fashion distinguishes the true
man. The distinction of a royal nature is a great heart. The old renown
attaches to the virtues of simple faith and staunch endurance and clear
perception and plain speech, and that there is a master grace and
dignity communicated by exalted sentiments to a human form, to which
utility and even genius must do homage. And it is the sign and badge
of this nobility, the drawing his counsel from his own breast. You must,
for wisdom, for sanity, have some access to the mind and heart of the
common humanity. No great man has existed who did not rely on the
sense and heart of mankind as represented by the good sense of the
people. A man of generous spirit will use a high prudence in the
conduct of life to guard himself from being dissipated on many things. It
suffices that his aims are high, that the interest of intellectual and moral
beings is paramount with him that he comes into what is called fine
society from higher ground, and has an elevation of habit that ministers
of empires will be forced to see and to remember. Self-trust is a trust
in God himself. Call it man of honor, or call it Man the one who
would serve his country must learn the beauty and honor of
perseverance, he must reinforce himself by the power of
character, and revisit the margin of that well from which his
fathers drew waters of life and enthusiasm, the fountain I mean of
the moral sentiments, the parent fountain from which this goodly
Universe flows as a wave.
PERPETUAL FORCES:
We cannot afford to miss any advantage. Art is long, and life short and he must
supply this disproportion by borrowing and applying to his task the energies of
Nature. Go out the doors and get the air. Take up a spadeful or a bucket-load of
loans: who can guess what it holds? But a gardener knows that it is full of peaches,
full of oranges, and he drops in a few seeds by way of keys to unlock and combine
its virtues; lets it lie in sun and rain, and by and by it has lifted into the air its full
weight in golden fruit. There is no loss, only transference. Man’s whole frame is
responsive to the world, part for part, every sense, every pore to a new element so
that he seems to have as many talent as there are qualities in nature. We define
Genius to be a sensibility to all the impressions of the outer world, a sensibility so
equal that it receives accurately all impressions, and can truly report them without
excess or loss as it received. It must not only receive all, but it must render all. And
the health of man is an equality of inlet and outlet, gathering and giving. Any
hoarding is tumor or disease. What are my resources? ‘Our stock in life, our real
estate, is that amount of thought which we have had.’ – and which we have applied,
and so domesticated. The ground we have thus created is forever a fund for new
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thoughts. A few moral maxims confirmed by much experience would stand high on
the list, constituting a supreme prudence. Then the knowledge unutterable of our
private strength, of where it lies, of its accesses and facilitations, and of its
obstructions. My conviction of principles, that is great part of my possessions.
Certain thoughts, certain observations, long familiar to me in night watches and
daylights, would be my capital. Every valuable person who joins in an enterprise, what he chiefly brings is his thoughts, his way of classifying and seeing things, his
method. And thus with every one a new power. In proportion to the depth of the
insight is the power and reach of the kingdom he controls. Imagination combined
with the analyzing understanding, it makes Eloquence; the art of compelling belief
the art of making people’s ears dance to his pipe! And not less, method, patience,
self-trust, perseverance, love, desire of knowledge, the passion of truth. By their
strength we are strong, and on the signal occasions in our career their inspirations
flow to us and make the selfish and protected and tenderly bred person strong for his
duty, wise in counsel, skilful in action, competent to rule, willing to obey. I delight in
tracing these wonderful powers, the electricity and gravity of the human world. The
power of persistence, of enduring defeat and of gaining victory by defeats, is one of
these forces that never lose its charm. The power of a man increases steadily by
continuance in one direction. He becomes acquainted with the resistances,
and with his own tools; increases his skill and strength and learns the
favorable moments and favorable accidents. He is his own apprentice, and more
time gives a great addition of power, just as a falling body acquires momentum with
every foot of the fall. How we prize a good continuer. In each the talent is the
perception of an order and series in the department he deals with, - of an order and
series which preexisted in nature, and which this mind sees and conforms to. See
how rich life is: rich in private talents, each of which charms us in turn and seems the
best. Obedience alone gives the right to command. This child of the dust throws
himself by obedience into the circuit of the heavenly wisdom, and shares the secret
of God. Thus the world delivered into your hand, but on two conditions, - not for
property, but for use, use according to the noble nature of the gifts; and not for toys,
not for self-indulgence. Things work to their ends, not to yours, and will certainly
defeat any adventurer who fights against this ordination. One thing is plain; a certain
personal virtue is essential to freedom. Half a man’s wisdom goes with his courage.
Fear disenchants life and the world. If I have not my own respect I am an imposter,
not entitled to other men’s, and had better creep into my grave. Thoreau…’Nothing
is so much to be feared as fear; God himself likes atheism better.’ For the world
is a battleground; every principle is a war-note, and the most quiet and protected life
is at any moment exposed to incidents that test your firmness. The soul of God is
poured into the world through the thoughts of men. The world stands on ideas,
nations of men and their institutions rest on thoughts.
CHARACTER:
Morals respect the source or motive of action. It is the science of substances, not of
shows. It is the what, and not the how. The reason we must give for the existence of
the world is, that it is for the benefit of all being. He that speaks the truth executes no
private function of an individual will. But the world utters a sound by his lips. He who
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doth a just action seeth therein nothing of his own, but an inconceivable nobleness
attaches to it, because it is a dictate of the general mind. Under the action of his
sentiment of the right, his heart and mind expand above himself and above Nature.
The simple and sincere soul makes the contrary prayer, ‘Let no intruder come
between thee and me; deal thou with me; let me know it is thy will, and I ask no
more.’ The excellence of Jesus and of every true teacher, is, that he affirms the
Divinity in him and in us, - not thrusts himself between it and us. We should say with
Heraclitus: ‘Come unto this smoky cabin; God is here also: approve yourself to him.’
We affirm that in all men is this majestic perception and command; that it is the
presence of the Eternal in each perishing man. If all things are taken away, I have
still all things in my relation to the Eternal. Slowly the soul unfolds itself in the new
man. It is partial at first, and honors only some one of some few truths. In its
companions it sees other truths honored, and successively finds their foundation
also in itself. Then it cuts the cord, and no longer believes ‘because of thy saying,’
but because it has recognized them in itself. When a man is born with a profound
moral sentiment, preferring truth, justice and the serving of all men to any honors or
any gain, men readily fell the superiority. I notice in many lives, that to every serious
mind Providence sends from time to time five or six or seven teachers who are of the
first importance to him in the lessons they have to impart. The perpetual supply of
new genius shocks us with thrills of life, and recalls us to principles. Character
denotes habitual self-possession, habitual regard to interior and constitutional
motives, a balance not to be overset or easily disturbed by outward events and
opinion, and by implication points to the source of right motive. Such souls do not
come in troops: oftenest appear solitary, like a general without his command,
because those who can understand and uphold such appear rarely, not many,
perhaps not one, in a generation. And the memory and tradition of such a leader is
preserved in some strange way by those who only half understand him, until a true
disciple comes, who apprehends and interprets every word. The greatest dominion
will be to the deepest thought. The establishment of Christianity in the world does
not rest on any miracle but the miracle of being the broadest and most humane
doctrine. ‘Every age,’ says Vamhagen, ‘has another sieve for the religious tradition,
and will sift it out again. Something is continually lost by this treatment, which
posterity cannot recover.’ Ideas always generate enthusiasm. The creed, the legend,
forms of worship, swiftly decay. Morals are the incorruptible essence, very heedless
in its richness of any past teacher or witness, heedless of their lives and fortunes.
The whole science of theology of great uncertainty. The science of ethics has no
mutation; and whoever feels any love or skill for ethical studies may safely lay out all
his strength and genius in working in that mine. The pulpit may shake, but this
platform will not. All the victories of religion belong to the moral sentiment. To nations
or to individuals the progress of opinion is not a loss of moral restraint, but simply a
change from coarser to finer cheeks. No evil can come from reform that a deeper
thought will not correct. If there is any tendency in national expansion to form
character, religion will not be a loser. Character is the habit of action from the
permanent vision of truth. The more reason, the less government. In a sensible
family, nobody ever hears the words, ‘shall’ and ‘shan’t’: nobody commands, and
nobody obeys, but all conspire and joyfully co-operate. Take off the roofs of
hundreds of happy houses, and you shall see this order without ruler, and the like in
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every intelligent and moral society. Swedenborg said, that, ‘In the spiritual world,
when one wishes to rule, or despises others, he is thrust out of doors.’
Goethe…’Pure loveliness and right good-will are the highest manly prerogative,
before which all energetic heroism, with its luster and renown, must recede.’ There is
no end to the sufficiency of character. To a well-principled man existence is victory.
He defends himself against failure in his main design by making every inch of the
road to it pleasant. It asks, with Marcus Aurelius, ‘What matter by whom the good is
done?’ It extols humility, - by every self-abasement lifted higher in the scale of being.
It makes no stipulation for earthly felicity, - does not ask, in the absoluteness of its
trust, even for the assurance of continued life.
EDUCATION:
Victory over things is the office of man. Every one has a trust of power. And what
activity the desire of power inspires! What toils it sustains! How it sharpens the
perceptions and stores the memory with facts. It is a constant contest with the active
faculties of men, a study of the issues of one and another course of action, an
accumulation of power, and, if the higher faculties of the individual are from time to
time quickened, he will gain wisdom and virtue from his business. Poverty, love,
authority, anger, sickness, sorrow, success, all work actively upon our being and
unlock for us the concealed faculties of the mind. Education should be as broad as
man. If he is dexterous, his tuition should make it appear; if he is capable of dividing
men by the trenchant sword of his thought, education should unsheathe and sharpen
it if he is one to cement society by his all-reconciling affinities. Oh! Hasten their
action! The imagination must be addressed. Is not the Vast an element of the mind?
Yet what teaching, what book of this day appeals to the Vast? If the vast and the
spiritual are omitted, so are the practical and the moral. It does not make us brave or
free. We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be
all they can. We do not give them training as if we believed in their noble nature. The
great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should
be a moral one; to teach self-trust: to inspire the youthful man with an interest in
himself, with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources
of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength and to inflame him with a
piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives. Let people be themselves, and enjoy
life in their own way. If he can turn his books to such picturesque account in his
fishing and hunting, it is easy to see how his reading and experience, as he has
more of both, will interpenetrate each other. Friendship is an order of nobility; from its
revelations we come more worthily into nature. Heaven often protects valuable souls
charged with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own
thoughts. And the most genial and amiable of men must alternate society with
solitude, and learn its severe lessons. There comes the period of the imagination to
each, a later youth: the power of beauty, the power of books, of poetry. Culture
makes his books realities to him, their characters more brilliant, more effective on his
mind, than his actual mates. Do not spare to put novels into the hands of young
people as an occasional holiday and experiment, but above all, good poetry in all
kinds, epic tragedy, and lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them,
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they will never forget. The secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not
for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and
foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. Respect the child, respect
him to the end, but also respect yourself. Be the companion of thought, the friend of
his friendship, the lover of his virtue, - but no kinsman of his sin. Let him find you so
true to yourself that you are the irreconcilable hater of his vice and the imperturbable
slighter of his trifling. The two points in a boy’s training are. To keep his natural
and train off all but that: - to keep his natural, but stop off his uproar, fooling
and horse-play; - keep his nature and arm it with knowledge in the very
direction in which it points. Here are the two capital facts, genius and drill. The
first is the inspiration in the well-born healthy child, the new perception he has of
nature. Somewhat he sees in forms or hears in music or apprehends in mathematics,
or believes practicable in mechanics or possible in political society, which no one
else sees or hears or believes. This is the perpetual romance of new life. Happy this
child with a bias, with a thought which entrances him, leads him, now into deserts,
now into cities, the fool of an idea. Let him follow it in good and in evil report, in good
or bad company; it will justify itself, it will lead him at last into the illustrious society of
the lovers of truth. The enthusiast always finds the master, the masters, whom
he seeks. Always genius seeks genius, desires nothing so much as to be a
pupil and to find those who can lend it aid to perfect itself. Nor are the two
elements, enthusiasm and drill, incompatible. Accuracy is essential to beauty. Give a
boy accurate perceptions. Teach him the difference between the similar and the
same. Make him call things by their right names. Pardon in him no blunder. Then he
will give you solid satisfaction as long as he lives. It is better to teach the child
arithmetic and Latin grammar than rhetoric or moral philosophy, because they
require exactitude of performance; it is made certain that the lesson is mastered, and
that power of performance is worth more than the knowledge. He can learn anything
that is important to him now that the power to learn is secured: as mechanics say,
when one has teamed the use of tools, it is easy to work at a new craft. Letter by
letter, syllable by syllable, the child learns to read, and in good time can convey to
the entire domestic circle the sense of Shakespeare. The joy of our childhood in
hearing beautiful stories from some skilful aunt, who loves to tell them, must be
repeated in youth. Happy the natural college thus self-instituted around every natural
teacher. Every mind should be allowed to make its own statement in action, and its
balance will appear. The whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil. It
requires time, use, insight, event, all the great lessons and assistances of God; and
only to think of using it implies character and profoundness; to enter on this course of
discipline is to be good and great. Import into education the wisdom of life. Adopt the
pace of nature. Her secret is patience. Have the self-command you wish to inspire.
Your teaching and discipline must have the reserve and taciturnity of Nature. Teach
them to hold their tongues by holding your own. Say little; do not snarl; do not chide;
but govern by the eye. See what they need, and that the right thing is done. To
whatsoever upright mind, to whatsoever beating heart I speak, to you it is committed
to educate men. By simple living, by an illimitable soul, you inspire, you correct, you
instruct, you raise, and you embellish all. By your own act you teach the beholder
how to do the practicable. According to the depth from which you draw your life, such
is the depth not only of your strenuous effort, but also of your manners and presence.
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Consent yourself to be an organ of your highest thought, and lo! Suddenly you put all
men in your debt, and are the fountain of an energy that goes pulsing on with waves
of benefit to the borders of society, to the circumference of things.
THE SUPERLATIVE:
The Maine Law to the heights of absolute self-command, which respect the
conservatism of the entire energies of the body, the mind, and the soul. Language
should aim to describe the fact. To gain an advantage take caution and provide
accuracy in your report of facts. I will be as moderate as the fact, and will use the
same expression, without color, which I received; and rather repeat it several times,
word for word, than vary it ever so little. The first valuable power in a reasonable
mind was the power of plain statement, or the power to receive things as they befall,
and to transfer the picture of them to another mind unaltered. ‘Tis a good rule of
rhetoric with Schlegel gives, - ‘In good prose, every word is underscored’; which, I
suppose, means, Never italicize. Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing
from the human to the diving. The superlative is the excess of expression. And fit
expression is so rare…to the most expressive man that has existed namely,
Shakespeare; they have awarded the highest place. Yet nature measures her
greatness by what she can spare, by what remains when all superfluity and
accessories are shorn off. Religion and poetry are all the civilization of the Arab.
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF ETHICS:
The law is: To each shall be rendered his own. As thou sowest, thou shall reap.
Smite and thou shalt smart. Serve, and thou shalt be served. If you love and serve
men, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape the remuneration. Secret
retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the Divine justice.
Never so happy as when he has lost all private interests and regards, and exists only
in obedience and love of the Author. We are to know that we are ever without a pilot.
When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current
knows the way, though we do not. When the starts and sun appear, when we have
conversed with navigators who know the coast, we may begin to put out an oar and
trim a sail. The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder. It
seems as if when the Spirit of God speaks so plainly to each soul, it were an impiety
to be listening to one or another saint. Jesus was better than others, because he
refused to listen to others and listened at home. We, in the west, are changed with a
great deficiency in worship; that reverence does not belong to our character. A man
who has accustomed himself to look at all his circumstances as very mutable, to
carry his possessions, his relations to person, and even his opinions, in his hand,
and in all these to pierce to the principle and moral law, and everywhere to find that,
- has put himself out of the reach of all skepticism; and it seems as if whatever is
most affecting and sublime in our intercourse, in our happiness, and in our losses,
tended steadily to uplift us to a life so extraordinary, and, one might say,
superhuman.
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THE PREACHER:
It is certain that many dark hours, many imbecilities, periods of inactivity, - solstices
when we make no progress, but stand still, - will occur. In those hours, we can find
comfort in reverence of the highest power, and only in that. We never do quite
nothing, or never need. It looks as if there were much doubt, much waiting, to be
endured by the best. Perhaps there must be austere elections and determinations
before any clear vision. When a man acts from one motive, and all his faculties play
true, it is clear mathematically, is it not, that this will tell in the result as if twenty men
had co-operated, - will give new senses, new wisdom of its own kind; that I, not more
facts, nor new combinations, but divination, or direct intuition of the state of men and
things? The lessons of the moral sentiment teach a great peace. All wise men regard
it as the voice of the Creator himself.
THE MAN OF LETTERS:
There is an oracle in the world, that nations die of suicide. The sign of it is the decay
of thought. There is no unemployed force in Nature. You are the carriers of ideas
which are to fashion the mind and so the history of this breathing world, so as they
shall be, and not otherwise. Every man is a scholar potentially, and does not need
any one good so much as this of right thought. Coleridge traces ‘three silent
revolutions,’ of which the first was ‘when the clergy fell from the Church.’ A scholar
was once a priest. But the church slung to ritual, and the scholar clung to joy, low as
well as high, and thus the separation was a mutual fault. But I think it is a schism,
which must be healed. The true scholar is the Church. Only the duties of intellect
must be owned. The intellectual man lives in perpetual victory. As certainly as
water falls in rain on the tops of mountains and runs down into the valleys, plains and
pits, so does thought fall first on the best minds, and run down, from class to class,
until it reaches the masses, and works revolutions. Nature says… When I add
difficulty, I add brain. What does the scholar represent? The organ of ideas, the
subtle force that creates Nature and men and states; - consoler, upholder, imparting
pulses of light and shocks of electricity, guidance and courage. I wish the youth to be
an armed and complete man; no helpless angel to be slapped in the face, but a man
dipped in the Styx of human experience and made invulnerable so, - self-helping. A
redeeming trait of the Sophists of Athens, Hippias and Gorgias, is that they made
their own clothes and shoes. Learn to harness a horse, to row a boat, to camp down
in the woods, to cook your supper. I chanced lately to be at West Point and, after
attending the examination in scientific classes, I went into the barracks. The chamber
was in perfect order; the mattress on the iron camp bed rolled up, as if ready for
removal. I asked the first Cadet, ‘Who makes your bed?’ ‘I do.’ ‘Who fetches your
water?’ ‘I do.’ ‘Who blacks your shoes?’ ‘I do.’ It was so in every room. These are
first steps to power. Learn of Samuel Johnson or David Hume, that it is a primary
duty of the man of letters to secure his independence. Stand by your order. Where
there is no vision, the people perish. I am here to commend to you your art and
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profession as thinkers. It is real. It is the secret of power. It is the art of command. All
superiority is this, or related to this. ‘All that the world admires comes from within.’
Thought makes us men; ranks us; distributes society; distributes the work of the
world; is the prolific source of all arts, of all wealth, of all delight of all grandeur. Men
are, as they believe. Men are as they think, and the man who knows any truth not
yet discerned by other men, is master of all other men so far as that truth and its
wide relations are concerned. Intellect… there is no mass which it cannot surmount
and dispose of. Rely on yourself.
THE SCHOLAR:
The scholar is here to fill others with love and courage by confirming their trust in the
love and wisdom which are at the heart of all things; to affirm noble sentiments; to
hear them wherever spoken, out of the deeps of ages, out of the obscurities of
barbarous life, and to republish them: - to untune nobody, but to draw all men after
the truth, and to keep men spiritual and sweet. All the sciences are only new
applications, each translatable into the other, of the one law, which his mind is. The
natural and permanent function of the scholar is as an organic agent in nature. He is
here to be the beholder of the real; self-centered amidst the superficial; here to
revere the dominion of a serene necessity and be its pupil and apprentice by tracing
everything home to a cause; here to be sobered, not by the cares of life, as men say,
no, but by the depth of his draughts of the cup of immortality. At the sound of some
subtle word that falls from the lips of an imaginative person, or even at the reading in
solitude of some moving image of a wise poet the sun shines and the worlds roll to
music, and the poet replaces all this cowardly Self-denial and God-denial of the
literary class with the conviction that to one poetic success the world will surrender
on its knees. Instantly he casts in his lot with the pearl diver and the diamondmerchant. Like them he will joyfully lose days and months, and estates and credit, in
the profound hope that one restoring, all-rewarding, immense success will arrive at
last, which will give him at one bound a universal dominion. And rightly; for if his wild
prayers are granted, if he is to succeed, his achievement is the piercing of the brass
heavens of use and limitation, and letting in a beam of the pure eternity which burns
up this limbo of shadows and chimeras in which we dwell. I wish you to experiment
boldly and give play to your energies, but not, if I could prevail with you, in
conventional ways. I should wish your energy to run in works and emergencies
growing out of your personal character. Nature will fast enough instruct you in the
occasion and the need, and will bring to each of you the crowded hour, the great
opportunity. Love, Rectitude, everlasting Fame, will come to each of you in loneliest
places with their grand alternatives, and Honor watches to see whether you dare
seize the palms. I have no quarrel with action, only I prefer no action to misaction.
The poet writes his verse on a scrap of paper, and instantly the desire and love of all
mankind take charge of it, as if it were Holy Writ. It only shows that such is the gulf
between our perception and our painting, the eye is so wise, and the hand so clumsy,
that all the human race have agreed to value a man according to his power of
expression. Ideas are the parents of men and things; there was never anything that
did not proceed from a thought. The speculative man, the scholar, is the right hero.
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He is brave, because he sees the omnipotence of that which inspires him. Is there
only one courage and one warfare? Men of thought…let then co that which they can
do. Let them fight by their strength, not by their weakness. It seems to me that the
thoughtful man needs no armor but this – concentration. He is not there to defend
himself but to deliver his message; if his voice is clear, then clearly; if husky, then
huskily; if broken, he can at least scream; gag him, he can still write it; bruise,
mutilate him, cut off his hands and feet, he can still crawl towards his object on his
stumps. The descent of genius into talents is part of the natural order and history of
the world. There is a great deal of spiritual energy in the universe, but it is not
palpable to us until we can make it up into man. There is plenty of air, but it is worth
nothing until by gathering it into sails we can beat it into shape and service to carry
our cargo and us across the sea. Then it is paid for by hundreds of thousands of our
money. Plenty of water also, sea full, sky full; who cares for it? But when we can get
it where we want it, and in measured portions, on a mill wheel, or boat-paddle, we
will buy it with millions. There is plenty of wild azote and carbon unappropriated, but
it is naught till we have made it up into loaves and soup. So we find it in higher
relations. There is plenty of wild wrath, but it steads not until we can get it racked off,
shall I say? And bottled into persons; a little pure, and not too much, to every head.
How many young geniuses we have known, and none but ourselves will ever hear of
them for want in them of a little talent. Ah, gentlemen, I own and I love talents and
accomplishments; the feet and hands of genius. I am apt to believe, with the
Emperor Charles V., that ‘as many languages as a man knows, so many times is he
a man.’ I like to see a man of that virtue that no obscurity or disguise can conceal,
who wins all souls to his way of thinking. It is excellent when the individual is ripened
to that degree that he touches both the center and the circumference, so that he is
not only widely intelligent of the fact in pure intellect with the total conversion of the
intellect into energy. I value power of achievement. There is but one defense against
the principle of chaos, and that is the principle of order, or brave return at all hours to
an infinite common-sense, to the mother-wit, to the wise instinct, to the pure intellect.
Have you a thought in your heart? There was never such need of it as now. Truth
alone is great. This is the secret of eloquence – to persuade a multitude of persons
to renounce their opinions, and change the course of life. They go forth not the men
they came in, but shriven, convicted, and converted. I wish to see a revival of the
human mind: to see men’s sense of duty extend to the cherishing and use of their
intellectual powers: their religion should go with their thought and hallow it. The
scholar then is unfurnished who has only literary weapons. He ought to have as
many talents as he can; memory, arithmetic. Practical powers, manners, temper,
lion-heart are all good things, and if he has none of them he can still manage, if he
have the mainmast, - he is anything. Genius has truth and clings to it, so that what it
says and does is not in a by-road, visited only by curiosity, but on the great highways
of nature, which were before the Appian Way, and which all souls must travel.
Genius delights only in statements that are themselves true. The scholar…he is to
know that in the last resort he is not here to work, but to be worked upon. I invite you
not to cheap joys, to the flutter of gratified vanity, to a sleek and rosy comfort; no, but
to bareness, to power, to enthusiasm, to the mountain of vision, to true and natural
supremacy, to the society of the great, and to love. He shall think very highly of his
destiny. He is here to know the secret of Genius; to become, not a reader of poetry,
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but Homer, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare. Swedenborg, in the fountain, through that. If
one man could impart his faith to another, if I could prevail to communicate the
incommunicable mysteries, you should see the breadth of your realm; - that ever as
you ascend your proper and native path, you receive the keys of Nature and history,
and rise on the same stairs to science and to joy.
MARY MOODY EMERSON: (Emerson’s Mentor)
Her early reading was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards,
and always the Bible. Later Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Antoninus, Stewart, Coleridge,
Cousin, Herder, Locke, Madame De Stael, Channing, Mackintosh, Byron. She
delighted in success, in youth, in beauty, in genius, in manners. Scorn trifles, lift
your aims: do what you are afraid to do: sublimity of character must come from
sublimity of motive: these were the lessons that were urged with vivacity, in ever-new
language. A mediocrity does seem to me more distant from eminent virtue than the
extremes of station: though after all it must depend on the nature of the heart. A
mediocre mind will be deranged in either extreme of wealth or poverty, praise or
censure, society or solitude. War devastates the conscience of men, yet corrupt
peace does not less. Away with knowledge; - God alone. I have heard that the
greatest geniuses have died ignorant of their power and influence on the arts and
sciences. I believe thus much, that their large perception consumed their egotism, or
made it impossible for them to make small calculations. Faith alone. Faith alone.
THOREAU:
An iconoclast in literature. He aimed at a much more comprehensive calling, the art
of living well. He was more intent to reconcile his practice with his own belief. 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. 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. He was 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 caliber. Patience. He knew the worth of the
imagination for the uplifting and consolation of human life, and liked to throw every
thought into a symbol. He thought that without religion or devotion of some kind
nothing great was ever accomplished. 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.’ How can we expect a harvest
of thought who has not had a seedtime of character?
CARLYLE:
Carlyle likes genuineness (the source of all strength) in his companions. This man is
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a hammer that crushes mediocrity and retention. His talk often reminds you of what
was said of Johnson: ‘If his pistol missed fire he would knock you down with the buttend.’ A natural defender of anything, a lover who will live and die for that which he
speaks for, and who does not care for him or for anything but his own business, he
respects; and the nobler this object, of course, the better. Great is his reverence for
realities. Carlyle…he has stood for scholars, asking no scholar what he should say.
Holding an honored place in the best society, he has stood for the people, for the
Chartist, for the pauper, idly and scornfully teaching the nobles their peremptory
duties. It is intrepidly and scornfully teaching the nobles their duties. It is the
speaking to the heart of the thing. He never feared the face of man.
***
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