Self-Reliance

from Essays: First Series (1841)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Ne te quaesiveris extra."
"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
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."
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune

Cast the bantling on the rocks,

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