|
 This
is the full text of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, Self-Reliance.
Emerson uses several words that are not in common use today.
You'll find the definitions of those words by simply clicking
on them (they are underlined). Self-Reliance was a revelation
in its day and it is completely relevant today. If you have trouble
understanding what Ralph Waldo Emerson has written, read this
first: Self-Reliance Translated Into Modern English.
Self-Reliance
I READ THE OTHER DAY SOME VERSES written
by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional.
Always the soul hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject
be what it may. The sentiment they instill 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 always the inmost becomes
the outmost — and our first thought is rendered back to
us by the trumpets of the Last Judgement. 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 luster 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 tomorrow 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 the plot of ground which is given 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. It is not without
pre-established harmony, this sculpture in the memory. The eye
was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of
that particular ray. Bravely let him speak the utmost syllable
of his confession. 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.
It needs a divine man to exhibit anything divine. 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 Eternal was stirring 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 pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before
a revolution, but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants
to be noble clay under the Almighty effort let us advance on
Chaos and the dark.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on
this text in the face and behavior 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 pray 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 who spoke so clear and emphatic? It seems he knows
how to speak to his contemporaries. Good Heaven! it is he! it
is that very lump of bashfulness and phlegm which for weeks has
done nothing but eat when you were by, but now rolls out these
words like bell-strokes. 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. How is a boy the master
of society; 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 éclat 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 neutral, godlike independence! Who can thus lose all
pledge and, having observed, observe again from the same unaffected,
unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted
innocence, must always be formidable, must always engage the
poet's and the man's regards. Of such an immortal youth the force
would be felt. 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 a 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 non-conformist.
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 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 Barbados,
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 a 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 exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man
did today, 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 the college of fools; the
building of meeting-houses to the vain
end to which many now stand; alms to sots,
and the thousandfold Relief Societies; though I confess with
shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked
dollar, which by-and-by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather
the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues.
Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage
or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily
non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology
or extenuation
of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane
pay a high board. Their virtues are penances.
I do not wish to expiate,
but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for
itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should
be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it
should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and
sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. My life should be unique;
it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine. I ask
primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from
the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference
whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent.
I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts
may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or
the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.
What I must do is all that concerns me,
not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual
and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction
between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you
will always find those who think they know what is your duty
better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after
the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our
own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps
with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that
have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses
your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you
maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-Society, vote
with a great party either for the Government or against it, spread
your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens
I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And of course
so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your
thing, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce
yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this
game of conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument.
I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency
of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand
that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I
not know that with all this ostentation
of examining the grounds of the institution he will do no such
thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look
but at one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish
minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench
are the emptiest affectation.
Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief,
and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion.
This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors
of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth
is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four
not the real four: so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin
to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in
the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to
wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest
asinine expression. There is a mortifying
experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself
also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of
praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where
we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which does
not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved
by a low usurping willfulness,
grow tight about the outline of the face, and make the most disagreeable
sensation; a sensation of rebuke
and warning which no brave young man will suffer twice.
For non-conformity the world whips you
with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate
a sour face. The bystanders look askance
on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. If this
aversion had its origin in the contempt and resistance like his
own he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour
face of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause
— disguise no god, but are put on and off as the wind blows
and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of the multitude
more formidable than that of the senate and the college. It is
easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes.
Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid, as being
very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the
indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the
poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies
at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the
habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle
of no concernment.
The other terror that scares us from self-trust
is our consistency; a reverence
for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other
data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath
to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over
your shoulder? Why drag about this monstrous corpse of your memory,
lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that
public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?
It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory
alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the
past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever
in a new day. Trust your emotion. In your metaphysics you have
denied personality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions
of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should
clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph
his coat in the hands of the harlot, and flee.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin
of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers
and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing
to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the
wall. Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up with pockthread,
do. Else if you would be a man speak what you think today in
words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow
thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing
you said today. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall
be sure to be misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is a right fool's
word. 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 the 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 to be 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.
Fear never but you shall be consistent
in whatever variety of actions, so they each be 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 when
seen 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. This is only microscopic criticism.
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 always appeals to the
future. If I can be great enough now 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. There they all stand and shed an united light on the
advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels
to every man's eye. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice,
and dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adam's eye.
Honor is venerable
to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue.
We worship it today because it is not of today. 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
and 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 bow and apologize never
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 moving wherever moves a man; that a true man
belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things.
Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all men and
all events. You are constrained to accept his standard. 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 — put all
means into the shade. This all great men are and do. Every true
man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces
and numbers and time fully to accomplish his thought; —
and posterity seem to follow his steps as a procession. 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,
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 bed, and, on his waking, treated with all
obsequious ceremonies
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 makes fools of us, 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 today as followed their public and
renowned steps. When private men shall act with original views,
the luster will be transferred from the actions of kings to those
of gentlemen.
The world has indeed 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,
the essence of virtue, and the essence 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 preceedeth obviously from the same source whence their life
and being also preceedeth. We at 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 the fountain of thought. Here are the lungs of
that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, of that inspiration
of man which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We
lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us organs
of its activity and receivers of its truth. 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 metaphysics, all
philosophy is at fault. Its presence or absence is all we can
affirm. Every man discerns between the voluntary acts of his
mind and his involuntary perceptions. And to his involuntary
perceptions he knows a perfect respect 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. All my willful actions
and acquisitions are but roving; — the most trivial reverie,
the faintest native emotion, are domestic and divine. 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 center of the present thought;
and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple
and receives a divine wisdom, then 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 thing as much as another. All things
are dissolved to their center by their cause, and in the universal
miracle petty and particular miracles disappear. This is and
must be. 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 fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the
child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then is
this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against
the sanity and majesty of the soul. Time and space are but physiological
colors which the eye maketh, 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 dare 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 today. 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. There is not time to it. 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 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. So was it with us,
so will it be if we proceed. 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 appointed way; you shall not discern the footprints
of another; 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 all other being. You
take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed
are its fugitive ministers. There shall be no fear in it. Fear
and hope are alike beneath it. It asks nothing. There is somewhat
low even in hope. We are then in vision. There is nothing that
can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul is raised
over passion. It seeth identity and eternal causation. It is
a perceiving that Truth and Right are. Hence it becomes a Tranquillity
out of the knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature;
the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; vast intervals of time, years,
centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay
that former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie
my present and will always all circumstances, 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 a gulf, in the
darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul
becomes; for that forever 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 soul than I masters me, though he
should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the
gravitation of spirits. Who has less I rule with like facility.
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. Virtue is the governor, the creator, the
reality. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain.
Hardship, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, personal
weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of the
soul's presence and impure action. I see the same law working
in nature for conservation and growth. The poise of a planet,
the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital
resources of every animal and vegetable, are also demonstrations
of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul. All history,
from its brightest to its trivial passage is the various record
of this power.
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 them 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 men, nor is the soul 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
men. We must go alone. Isolation must precede true society. 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,' — Do not spoil thy soul; do not all
descend; keep thy state; stay at home in thine own heaven; come
not for a moment into their facts, into their hubbub of conflicting
appearances but let in the light of thy law on their confusion.
The power men possess to annoy me I give them by 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 a 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 endeavor 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 must be myself. 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 today?
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 may you 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 fulfill 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, neighbor, 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 task-master. 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 so do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping
is mendicant, our
arts, our occupation, our marriages, our religion we have not
chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers.
The rugged battle of fate, where strength is born, we shun.
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 arise who shall reveal 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
— a new respect for the divinity in man — 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.
I. 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 — anything 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 theft and meanness. It supposes duality and not unity in nature
and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he
will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer
of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of
the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers
heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in
Fletcher's Bonduca,
when admonished to
inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies,
"His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
Our valors are our best gods."
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets.
Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will.
Regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not,
attend your own work and already the evil begins to be repaired.
Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly
and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them
truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once
more in communication with the soul. 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, 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 bereaved 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 Spurzheim, it imposes its classification on other
men, and lo! a new system. In proportion always to the depth
of the thought, and so to the number of objects it touches and
brings within reach of the pupil, in his complacency. But chiefly in this apparent
in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some
powerful mind acting on the great elemental thought of Duty and
man's relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism,
Swedenborgianism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating
everything to the new terminology that a girl does who has just
learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby.
It will happen for a time that the pupil will feel a real debt
to the teacher — will find his intellectual power has grown
by the study of his writings. This will continue until he has
exhausted 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 idol of Traveling, the idol of Italy, of England, of Egypt,
remains for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy,
or Greece venerable
in the imagination, did so not by rambling round creation as
a moth round a lamp, but by sticking fast where they were, like
an axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our
place and that the merry men of circumstance should follow as
they may. The soul is no traveler: the wise man stays at home
with the soul, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion
call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home
still and is not gadding
abroad from himself, 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.
Traveling is a fool's paradise. We owe
to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. 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, and 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 traveling is itself
only a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual
action. The intellect is vagabond,
and the universal 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 traveling of the mind? Our houses
are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with
foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our whole minds,
lean, and follow the Past and the Distant, as the eyes of a maid
follow her mistress. The soul created the arts wherever they
have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought
the 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 Shakespeare? Where is the
master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or
Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is an unique. The Scipionism
of Scipio is precisely
that part he could not borrow. If anybody will tell me whom the
great man imitates in the original crisis when he performs a
great act, I will tell him who else than himself can teach him.
Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do
that which is assigned thee and thou canst not hope too much
or dare too much. There is at this moment, there is for me an
utterance bare 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 of these. Not possibly will the soul, all
rich, all eloquent, with thousands cloven
tongue, deign to repeat
itself; but if I can hear what these patriarchs say, surely I
can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and
the tongue are two organs of one nature. Dwell up there 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. Its progress is only apparent
like the workers of a treadmill. 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 his aboriginal
strength, the white man has lost. If the traveler tell us truly,
strike the savage with a broad ax 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 the muscle. He has got a fine Geneva
watch, but he has lost 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 notebooks 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 be wholly his own
man, and in his turn a 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 facts 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 today, 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 what they call the soul's
progress, namely, the religious, learned and civil institutions
as guards of property, and they depreciate 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
what he has, out of a new respect for his being. 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 permanent and 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 is put. "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. But not so, O friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit
you, but by a method presently the reverse. It is only as a man
puts off from himself all external 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 in the soul, that he is weak only 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 always drag her after thee. A political
victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return
of your absent friend, or some other quite external event raises
your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you.
Do not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can bring you
peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph
of principles.
The End
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