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