 Essays, Second Series, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Essay number seven, Politics, read by Bob Neufeld. Gold and iron are good to buy iron and gold. All earth's fleece and food are for their like sold. Boated Merlin-wise proved Napoleon great. Nor kind nor coinage buys art above its rate. Fear, craft, and avarice cannot rear a state. Out of dust to build what is more than dust, walls am fine piled, febus establish must. When the muses nine with the virtues meet, find to their design an Atlantic seat by green orchard boughs fended from the heat, where the statesman plows furrow for the wheat. When the church is social worth, when the statehouse is the hearth, then the perfect state is calm, the Republican at home. In dealing with the state, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born, that they are not superior to the citizen, that every one of them was once the act of a single man. Every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case, that they all are imitable, all alterable. We may make as good, we may make better. Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions rooted like oak trees to the center, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid. There are no such roots and centers, but any particle may suddenly become the center of the movement and compel the system to gyrate brown it. Because every man of strong will, like Pisistratus or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato or Paul, does forever. But politics rest on necessary foundations and cannot be treated with levity. Republics abound in young civilians who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce, education, and religion may be voted in or out. And that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get sufficient votes to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting. That the state must follow and not lead the character in progress of the citizen. The strongest usurper is quickly got rid of, and they only who build on ideas build for eternity, and that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We are superstitious and esteem the statute somewhat. So much life as it has in the character of living men is its force. The statute stands there to say, yesterday we agreed so and so, but how feel ye this article today? Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait. It soon becomes unrecognizable, and in process of time will return to the mint. Nature is not democratic, nor limited monarchical, but despotic, and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority by the pertest of her sons. And as fast as the public mind is opened to more intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks not articulately, and must be made to. Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. With the tender poetic youth dreams and praise and pains today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years until it gives place in turn to new prayers and pictures. The history of the state sketches in course outline the progress of thought and follows at a distance the delicacy of culture and of aspiration. The theory of politics which has possessed the mind of men and which they have expressed the best they could in their laws and in their revolutions considers persons and property as the two objects for whose protection government exists. Those persons all have equal rights in virtue of being identical in nature. This interest of course with its whole power demands a democracy. Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. One man owns his clothes, another owns a county. This accident, depending primarily on the skill and virtue of the parties, of which there is every degree, and secondarily on patrimony, falls unequally, and its rights of course are unequal. Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census. Property demands a government framed on the ratio of owners and of owning. Everyone who has flocks and herds wishes them looked after by an officer on the frontiers, lest a Midianite shall drive them off and pays a tax to that end. Jacob has no flocks or herds and no fear of the Midianites, and pays no tax to the officer. It seemed fit that Laban and Jacob should have equal rights to elect the officer who is to defend their persons, but that Laban and not Jacob should elect the officer who is to guard the sheep and cattle. And if question arise whether additional officers or watchtowers should be provided, must not Laban and Isaac and those who must sell part of their herds to buy protection for the rest judge better of this and with more right than Jacob, who, because he is a youth and a traveler, eats their bread and not his own. In the earliest society, the proprietors made their own wealth, and so long as it comes to the owners in the direct way, no other opinion would arise in any equitable community than that property should make the law for property and persons the law for persons. But property passes through donation or inheritance to those who did not create it. Life, in one case, makes it as really the new owners as labor made it the first owners. In the other case, of patrimony, the law makes an ownership which will be valid in each man's view according to the estimate which he sets on the public tranquility. It was not, however, found easy to embody the readily admitted principle that property should make law for property and persons for persons, since persons and property mixed themselves in every transaction. At last it seemed settled that the rightful distinction was that the proprietors should have more elective franchise than non-proprietors on the Spartan principle of calling that which is just equal, not that which is equal, just. That principle no longer looks so self-evident as it appeared in former times, partly because doubts have arisen whether too much weight had not been allowed in the laws to property, and such a structure given to our usages has allowed the rich to encroach on the poor and to keep them poor. But mainly because there is an instinctive sense, however obscure and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property on its present tenures is injurious and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading. Yet truly the only interest for the consideration of the state is persons, that property will always follow persons, that the highest end of government is the culture of men, and if men can be educated the institutions will share their improvement, and the moral sentiment will write the law of the land. If it be not easy to settle the equity of this question, the peril is less when we take note of our natural defenses. We are kept by better guards than the vigilance of such magistrates as we commonly elect. Society always consists in greatest part of young and foolish person. The old who have seen through the hypocrisy of courts and statesmen die and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age. With such an ignorant and deceivable majority, states would soon run to ruin, but that there are limitations beyond which the folly and ambition of governors cannot go. Things have their laws as well as men, and things refuse to be trifled with. Property will be protected. Corn will not grow unless it is planted and manured, but the farmer will not plant or hoe it unless the chances are a hundred to one that he will cut and harvest it. Under any forms, persons in property must and will have their just sway. They exert their power as steadily as matter its attraction. Cover up a pound of earth never so cunningly. Divide and subdivide it, melt it to liquid, convert it to gas. It will always weigh a pound. It will always attract and resist other matter by the full virtue of one pound weight, and the attributes of a person, his wit and his moral energy, will exercise under any law or extinguishing tyranny their proper fore. If not overtly, then covertly. If not for the law, then against it. If not wholesomely, then poisonously. With right or by might. The boundaries of personal influence it is impossible to fix, as persons are organs of moral or supernatural force. Under the dominion of an idea which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom or the religious sentiment, the powers of persons are no longer subjects of calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom or conquest can easily confound the arithmetic of statists and achieve extravagant action out of all proportion to their means, as the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done. In like manner, to every particle of property belongs its own attraction. Ascent is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. Its value is in the necessities of the animal man. It is so much warmth, so much bread, so much water, so much land. The law may do what it will with the owner of property. Its just power will still attach to the scent. The law may, in a mad freak, say that all shall have power except the owners of property. They shall have no vote. Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property will, year after year, write every statute that respects property. The non-proprietor will be the scribe of the proprietor. What the owners wish to do, the whole power of property will do, either through the law or else in defiance of it. Of course, I speak of all the property, not merely of the great estates. When the rich are outvoted, as frequently happens, it is the joint treasury of the poor which exceeds their accumulations. Every man owns something, if it is only a cow or a wheelbarrow or his arms, and so has that property to dispose of. The same necessity which secures the rights of person and property against the malignity or folly of the magistrate determines the form and methods of governing, which are proper to each nation and to its habit of thought, and know-wise transferable to other states of society. In this country, we are very vain of our political institutions, which are singular in this, that they sprung, within the memory of living men, from the character and condition of the people, which they still express with sufficient fidelity, and we ostentatiously prefer them to any other in history. They are not better, but only fitter for us. We may be wise in asserting the advantage in modern times of the democratic form, but to other states of society in which religion consecrated the monarchical, that, and not this, was expedient. Democracy is better for us because the religious sentiment of the present time accords better with it. Born Democrats, we are no wise qualified to judge of monarchy, which, to our fathers, living in the monarchical idea, was also relatively right. But our institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other forms. Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire ungovernment can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the state is a trick. The same benign necessity and the same practical abuse appear in the parties into which each state divides itself of opponents and defenders of the administration of the government. Parties are also founded on instincts and have better guides to their own humble aims than the sagacity of their leaders. They have nothing perverse in their origin, but rudely mark some real and lasting relation. We might as wisely reprove the East Wind or the Frost as a political party whose members, for the most part, could give no account of their position, but stand for the defense of those interests in which they find them so. Our quarrel with him begins when they quit this deep natural ground at the bidding of some leader and obeying personal considerations throw themselves into the maintenance and defense of points know-wise belonging to their system. A party is perpetually corrupted by personality. Whilst we absolve the association from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same charity to their leaders. They reap the rewards of the docility and zeal of the masses which they direct. Ordinarily, our parties are parties of circumstance and not of principle. As the planting interest in conflict with the commercial, the party of capitalists and that of operatives, parties which are identical in their moral character and which can easily change ground with each other in the support of many of their measures, parties of principle as religious sects or the party of free trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of abolition of capital punishment, they generate into personalities or would inspire enthusiasm. The vice of our leading parties in this country, which may be cited as a fair specimen of these societies of opinion, is that they do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying of some local or momentary measure know-wise useful to the commonwealth. Of the two great parties which at this hour almost share the nation between them, I should say that one has the best cause and the other contains the best man. The philosopher, the poet, or the religious man will of course wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for free trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating in every manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources of wealth and power, but he can barely accept the persons whom the so-called popular party proposed to him as representatives of these liberalities. They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless. It is not loving. It has no ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right. It aspires to no real good. It brands no crime. It proposes no generous policy. It does not build nor write nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor or the Indian or the immigrant. From neither party, one in power, has the world any benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the nation. I do not, for these defects, despair of our republic. We are not at the mercy of any waves of chance. In the strife of ferocious parties, human nature always finds itself cherished, as the children of the convicts at Botany Bay are found to have as healthy a moral sentiment as other children. Students of feudal states are alarmed at our democratic institutions lapsing into anarchy, and the older and more cautious among ourselves are learning from Europeans to look with some terror at our turbulent freedom. It is said that in our license of construing the constitution, and in the despotism of public opinion, we have no anchor, and one foreign observer thinks he has found the safeguard in the sanctity of marriage among us. And another thinks he has found it in our Calvinism. Fisher Ames expressed the popular security more wisely, when he compared a monarchy and a republic, saying that a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom, whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are always in water. No forms can have any dangerous importance whilst we are befriended by the laws of things. It makes no difference how many tons weight of atmosphere presses on our heads so long as the same pressure resists it within the lungs. Augment the mass a thousandfold, it cannot begin to crush us as long as reaction is equal to action. The fact of two poles, of two forces, centripetal and centrifugal, is universal, and each force, by his own activity, develops the other. Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience. Lynch law prevails only where there is greater hardy-hood and self-subsistency in the leaders. A mob cannot be a permanency. These interests require that it should not exist, and only justice satisfies all. We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity, which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues or songs or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be a transcript of the common conscience. Nations have their origin in the moral identity of men. Reason for one is seen to be reason for another, and for every other. There is a middle measure which satisfies all parties, be they never so many or so resolute for their own. Every man finds a sanction for his simplest claims and deeds in decisions of his own mind, which he calls truth and holiness. In these decisions all the citizens find a perfect agreement, not only in these, not in what is good to eat, good to wear, good use of time, or what amount of land or of public aid each is entitled to claim. This truth and justice men presently endeavor to make application of to the measuring of land, the apportionment of service, the protection of life and property. Their first endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward, yet absolute right is the first governor, or every government is an impure theocracy. The idea, after which each community is aiming to make and mend its law, is the will of the wise man. The wise man it cannot find in nature, and it makes awkward but earnest efforts to secure his government by contrivance, as by causing the entire people to give their voices on every measure, or by a double choice to get the representation of the whole, or by a selection of the best citizen, or to secure the advantages of efficiency and eternal peace by confiding the government to one who may himself select his agent. All forms of government symbolize an immortal government, common to all dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man. Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows. My right and my wrong is their right and their wrong, whilst I do what is fit for me, and abstain from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree in our means, and work together for a time to one end. But whenever I find my dominion over myself not sufficient for me and undertake the direction of him also, I overstep the truth and come into false relations to him. I may have so much more skill or strength than he that he cannot express adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and nature cannot maintain the assumption. It must be executed by a practical lie, namely by force. This undertaking for another is the blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of the world. It is the same thing in numbers as in a pair, only not quite so intelligible. But I can see well enough a great difference between my setting myself down to a self-control and my going to make somebody else act after my views. But when a quarter of the human race assumed to tell me what I must do, I may be too much disturbed by the circumstances to see so clearly the absurdity of their command. Therefore all public ends look vague and quixotic beside private ones. For any laws but those which men make for themselves are laughable. If I put myself in the place of my child and we stand in one thought and see that things are thus and thus, that perception is law for him and me. We are both there, both act. But if without carrying him into the thought I look over into his plot and guessing how it is with him ordained this or that, he will never obey me. This is the history of government. One man does something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me taxes me. Looking from afar at me ordains that a part of my labor shall go to this or that whimsical end, not as I but as he happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts men are least willing to pay their taxes. What a satire is this on government. Everywhere they think they get their money's worth except for thee. Hence the less government we have the better, the fewer laws and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the individual, the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy, the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government is, it must be owned but a shabby imitation. That which all things tend to induce, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions go to form and deliver, is character. That is the end of nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate the wise man the state exists, and with the appearance of the wise man the state expire. The appearance of character makes the state unnecessary. The wise man is the state. He needs no army, fort, or navy. He loves men too well. No bribe or feast or palace to draw friends to him. No vantage ground, no favorable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking. No church, for he is a prophet. No statute book, for he has the law giver. No money, for he is value. No road, for he is at home where he is. No experience for the life of the creator shoots through him and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him needs not husband and educate a few to share with him a select and poetic life. His relationship to men is angelic. His memory is myrrh to them. His presence, frankincense, and flower. We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society, the influence of character is in its infancy. As a political power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected. Malthus and Ricardo quite omitted. The annual register is silent. In the conversations lexicon it is not set down. The President's message, the Queen's speech, have not mentioned it. And yet it is never nothing. Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world. The gladiators in the lists of power feel through all their frocks of force and simulation the presence of worth. I think the very strife of trade and ambition are confession of this divinity, and successes in those fields are the poor amends, the fig leaf with which the shamed soul attempts to hide its nakedness. I find the like unwilling homage in all quarters. It is because we know how much is due from us that we are impatient to show some petty talent as a substitute for worth. We are haunted by a conscience of this right to grandeur of character and are false to it. But each of us has some talent, can do something useful or graceful or formidable or amusing or lucrative. That we do, as an apology to others and to ourselves for not reaching the mark of a good and equal life. But it does not satisfy us while we thrust it on the notice of our companion. It may throw dust in their eyes, but does not smooth our own brow or give us the tranquility of the strong when we walk abroad. We do penance as we go. Our talent is a sort of expiation, and we are constrained to reflect on our splendid moment with a certain humiliation, as somewhat too fine and not as one act of many acts, a fair expression of our permanent energy. Most persons of ability meet in society with a kind of tacit appeal. Each seems to say, I am not all here. Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain enough, not because they think the place specially agreeable, but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compensation to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature. They must do what they can. Like one class of forest animals, they have nothing but a prehensile tale. Climb they must, or crawl. If a man found himself so rich-natured that he could enter into strict relations with the best persons and make life serene around him by the dignity and sweetness of his behavior, could he afford to circumvent the favor of the caucus and the press and covet relations so hollow and pompous as those of a politician? Surely nobody would be a charlatan who could afford to be sincere. The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own consultation, which work with more energy than we believe whilst we depend on artificial restraints. The movement in this direction has been very marked in modern history. Much has been blind and discreditable, but the nature of the revolution is not affected by the vices of the revolters, for this is a purely moral force. It was never adopted by any party in history, neither can be. It separates the individual from all party and unites him at the same time to the race. It promises a recognition of higher bites than those of personal freedom or the security of property. A man has a right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a state, has never been tried. We must not imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part in certain social conventions, nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured when the government of force is at an end. Are our methods now so excellent that all competition is hopeless? Could not a nation of friends even devise better ways? On the other hand, let not the most conservative and timid fear anything from a premature surrender of the bayonet and the system of force. For, according to the order of nature, which is quite superior to our will, it stands thus. There will always be a government of force where men are selfish, and when they are pure enough to abjure the code of force, they will be wise enough to see how these public ends of the post office and of the highway of commerce and the exchange of property of museums and libraries of institutions of art and science can be answered. We live in a very low state of the world and pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on force. There is not among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations a reliance on the moral sentiment and a sufficient belief in the unity of things to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system, or that the private citizen might be reasonable and a good neighbor without the hint of a jail or a confiscation. What is strange, too, there never was in any man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude to inspire him with the broad design of renovating the state on the principle of right and love. All those who have pretended this design have been partial reformers and have admitted in some manner the supremacy of the bad state. I do not call to mind a single human being who has steadily denied the authority of the laws on the simple ground of his own moral nature. Such designs, full of genius and full of fate as they are, are not entertained except avowedly as air pictures. If the individual who exhibits them dare to think them practicable, he disgusts scholars and churchmen and men of talent and women of superior sentiments cannot hide their contempt. Not the less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm, and there are now men, if indeed I can speak in the plural number. More exactly I will say I have just been conversing with one man to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments as well as a knot of friends or a pair of lover. End of Essay Number Seven. Essays, Second Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Essay Number Eight, Nominalist and Realist. Read by Bob Neufeld. Not often enough say that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in him, I shall not find it. Could any man conduct into me the pure stream of that which he pretends to be? Long afterwards I find that quality elsewhere which he promised me. The genius of the Platonists is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books? The man momentarily stands for the thought, but will not bear examination, and a society of men will cursorily represent well enough a certain quality and culture, for example chivalry or beauty of manners, but separate them, and there is no gentleman and no lady in the group. The least hint sets us on the pursuit of a character which no man realizes. We have such exorbitant eyes that on seeing the smallest arc we complete the curve, and when the curtain is lifted from the diagram which it seemed to veil, we are vexed to find that no more was drawn than just that fragment of an arc which we first beheld. We are greatly too liberal in our construction of each other's faculty in promise. Exactly what the parties have already done they shall do again, but that which we inferred from their nature and inception they will not do. That is in nature, but not in them. That happens in the world, which we often witness in a public debate. Each of the speakers expresses himself imperfectly. No one of them hears much that another says, such is the preoccupation of mind of each, and the audience, who have only to hear and not to speak, judge very wisely and superiorly how wrong-headed and unskillful is each of the debaters to his own affair. Great men, or men of great gifts, you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never. When I meet a pure intellectual force or a generosity of affection, I believe here, then, is man, and am presently mortified by the discovery that this individual is no more available to his own or to the general ends than his companion, because the power which drew my respect is not supported by the total symphony of his talents. All persons exist to society by some shining trait of beauty or utility which they have. We borrow the proportions of the man from that one fine feature and finish the portrait symmetrically, which is false, for the rest of his body is small or deformed. I observe a person who makes a good public appearance and conclude, then, the perfection of his private character on which this is based. But he has no private character. He is a graceful cloak or lay figure for holidays. All our poets, heroes, and saints fail utterly in some one or in many parts to satisfy our idea, fail to draw our spontaneous interest, and so leave us without any hope of realization but in our own future. Our exaggeration of all fine characters arises from the fact that we identify each in turn with the soul. We consecrate a great deal of nonsense because it was allowed by great men. There is none without his foible. I verily believe if an angel should come to chant the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too much gingerbread or take liberties with private letters or do some precious atrocity. It is bad enough that our geniuses cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society who has fine traits. He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing a cripple. The men of fine parts protect themselves by solitude or by courtesy or by satire or by an acid worldly manner, each concealing as he best can is in capacity for useful association, but they want either love or self-reliance. Our native love of reality joins with this experience to teach us a little reserve and to dissuade a too sudden surrender to the brilliant qualities of persons. Young people admire talents or particular excellences. As we grow older, we value total powers and effects as the impression, the quality, the spirit of men and things. The genius is all. The man, it is his system. We do not try a solitary word or act, but his habit. The acts which you praise, I praise not, since they are departures from his faith and are mere compliances. The magnetism, which arranges tribes and races in one polarity, is alone to be respected. The men are steel filings. Yet we unjustly select a particle and say, oh, steel filing number one, what heart drawings I feel to thee, and what prodigious virtues are these of thine, how constitutional to thee and incommunicable. Whilst we speak, the lodestone is withdrawn. Down falls our filing in a heap with the rest, and we continue our memory to the wretched shaving. Let us go for universals, for the magnetism, not for the needles. Human life and its persons are poor empirical pretensions. A personal influence is an igneous fatuous. If they say it is great, it is great. If they say it is small, it is small. You see it, and you see it not by turns. It borrows all its size from the momentary estimation of the speakers. The will of the wisp vanishes if you go too near, vanishes if you go too far, and only blazes at one angle. Who can tell if Washington be a great man or no? Who can tell if Franklin be, yes or any but the twelve or six or three great gods of fame, and they too loom and fade before the eternal? We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic. We adjust our instrument for general observation and sweep the heavens as easily as we pick out a single figure in the terrestrial landscape. We are practically skillful in detecting elements for which we have no place in our theory and no name. Thus we are very sensible of an atmospheric influence in men and in bodies of men not accounted for in an arithmetical addition of all their measurable property. There is a genius of a nation which is not to be found in the numerical citizens but which characterizes the society. England, strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England, I shall not find if I should go to the island to seek it. In the parliament, in the playhouse, at dinner tables, I might see a great number of rich, ignorant, book-read, conventional, proud men, many old women, and not anywhere the Englishmen who made the good speeches, combined the accurate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. It is even worse in America, where from the intellectual quickness of the race the genius of the country is more splendid in its promise and more slight in its performance. Webster cannot do the work of Webster. We conceive distinctly enough the French, the Spanish, the German genius, and it is not the less real that perhaps we should not meet in either of those nations a single individual who corresponded with the type. We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone. And universally, a good example of this social force is the veracity of language, which cannot be debauched. In any controversy concerning morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the sentiments which the language of the people expresses. Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision than the wisest individual. In the famous dispute with the nominalists, the realists had a good deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods. They round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living. Our proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry. The day laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours. Morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind. Money, which represents the prose of life and which is hardly spoken of in parlours without an apology, is in its effects and laws as beautiful as roses. Property keeps the accounts of the world and is always moral. The property will be found where the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have been in nations, in classes, and the whole lifetime considered with the compensations in the individual also. How wise the world appears when the laws and usages of nations are largely detailed and the insurers and notaries' offices and the completeness of the municipal system is considered. Nothing is left out. If you go into the markets and the custom houses, the insurers and notaries' offices, the offices of sealers of weights and measures, of inspection of provisions, it will appear as if one man had made it all. Wherever you go, a wit like your own has been before you and has realized its thought. The Aaloo's Indian mysteries, the Egyptian architecture, the Indian astronomy, the Greek sculpture, show that there always were seeing and knowing men in the planet. The world is full of masonic ties, of guilds, of secret and public legions of honour. That of scholars, for example, and that of gentlemen fraternizing with the upper class of every country and every culture. I am very much struck in literature by the appearance that one person wrote all the books, as if the editor of a journal planted his body of reporters in different parts of the field of action and relieved some by others from time to time. But there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of view in the narrative that it is plainly the work of one all seeing, all hearing gentleman. I looked into Pope's Odyssey yesterday. It is as correct and elegant after our canon of today as if it were newly written. The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man. What is well done, I feel as if I did. What is ill done, I wreck not of. Shakespeare's passages of passion, for example, in Lear and Hamlet, are in the very dialect of the present year. I am faithful again to the whole over the members in my use of books. I find the most pleasure in reading a book in a manner least flattering to the author. I read Proclus and sometimes Plato, as I might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy and the imagination. I read for the losters, as if one should use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment for its rich colors. It is not Proclus, but a piece of nature and fate that I explore. It is a greater joy to see the author's author than himself. A higher pleasure of the same kind I found lately at a concert, where I went to hear Handel's Messiah. As the master overpowered the loodleness and incapableness of the performers and made them conductors of his electricity, so it was easy to observe what effort's nature was making through so many horse, wooden, and imperfect persons to produce beautiful voices, fluid, and soul-guided men and women, the genius of nature was paramount at the oratoria. The preference of the genius to the parts is the secret of that deification of art which is found in all superior minds. Art in the artist is proportion, or a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and the charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes. Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation men are encumbered with personality and talk too much. In modern sculpture, picture, and poetry the beauty is miscellaneous. The artist works here and there and at all points adding and adding instead of unfolding the unit of his thought. Beautiful details we must have or no artist, but they must be means and never other. The eye must not lose sight for a moment of the purpose. Lively boys write to their ear and eye and the cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. When they grow older they respect the argument. We obey the same intellectual integrity when we study in exceptions the law of the world. Anomalous facts as the never quite obsolete rumors of magic and demonology and the new allegations of phrenologists and neurologists are of ideal use. They are good indications. Homeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygia or medical practice of the time. So with mesmerism, Swedenborgism, Fourierism, and the Millennial Church, they are poor pretensions enough, but good criticism on the science, philosophy, and preaching of the day. For these abnormal insights of the adepts are to be normal and things of course. All things show us that on every side we are very near to the best. It seems not worthwhile to execute with too much pains some one intellectual or aesthetic or civil feat when presently the dream will scatter and we shall burst into universal power. The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes. Thus we settle it into our cool libraries, that all the agents with which we deal are subalterns, which we can well afford to let pass, and life will be simpler when we live at the center and flout the surfaces. I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals. Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a convenience in household matters, the divine man does not respect them. He sees them as a rack of clouds or a fleet of ripples which the wind drives over the surface of the water. But this is flat rebellion. Nature will not be Buddhist. She resents generalizing and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh particulars. It is all idle talking, as much as a man as a whole, so is he also apart, and it were partial not to see it. What you say in your pompous distribution only distributes you into your class and section. You have not got rid of parts by denying them, but are the more partial. You are one thing, but nature is one thing and the other thing in the same moment. She will not remain orbed in a thought, but brushes into persons, and when each person, inflamed to a fury of personality, would conquer all things to his poor crotchet, she raises up against him another person, and by many persons incarnates again a sort of whole. She will have all. Nick Bottom cannot play all the parts, work it how he may. There will be somebody else, and the world will be round. Everything must have its flower or effort at the beautiful coarser or finer according to its stuff. They relieve and recommend each other, and the sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities. She punishes abstractionists, and will only forgive an induction which is rare and casual. We like to come to a height of land and see the landscape, just as we value a general remark in conversation. But it is not the intention of nature that we should live by general views. We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the victims of these details. And once in a fortnight, we arrive perhaps at a rational moment. If we were not thus infatuated, if we saw the real from hour to hour, we should not be here to write and to read, but should have been burned or frozen long ago. She would never get anything done if she suffered admirable critons and universal geniuses. She loves better a wheelwright, who dreams all night of wheels, and a groom who is part of his horse, for she is full of work, and these are her hands. As the frugal farmer takes care that his cattle shall eat down the rowan, and swine shall eat the waste of his house, and poultry shall pick the crumbs, so our economical mother dispatches a new genius and habit of mind into every district and condition of existence. Plants an eye wherever a new ray of light can fall, and gathering up into some man every property in the universe, establishes thousandfold occult mutual attractions among her offspring, that all this wash and waste of power may be imparted and exchanged. Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this incarnation and distribution of the Godhead, hence nature has her maligners, as if she were Cersei, and Alfonso of Castile fancied he could have given useful advice. But she does not go unprovided. She has hellebore at the bottom of the cup. Solitude would ripen a plentiful crop of despots. The recluse thinks of men as having his manner, or as not having his manner, and as having degrees of it, more or less. But when he comes into a public assembly, he sees that men have very different manners from his own, and in their way admirable. In his childhood and youth, he has had many checks and censures, and thinks modestly enough of his own endowment. When afterwards he comes to unfold it in propitious circumstance, it seems the only talent. He is delighted with his success, and accounts himself already the fellow of the great. But he goes into a mob, into a banking house, into a mechanics shop, into a mill, into a laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and in each new place he is no better than an idiot. Other talents take place and rule the hour. The rotation which whirls every leaf and pebble to the meridian reaches to every gift of man, and we all take turns at the top. For nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her heart on breaking up all styles and tricks, and it is so much easier to do what one has done before than to do a new thing, that there is a perpetual tendency to a set mode. In every conversation, even the highest, there is a certain trick, which may be soon learned by an acute person, and then that particular style continued indefinitely. Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others, and their trick is their natural defense. Jesus would absorb the race, but Tom Payne, or the coarsest blasphemer, helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power. Hence, the immense benefit of party in politics, as it reveals faults of character in a chief, which the intellectual force of the persons with ordinary opportunity and not hurled into aphelion by hatred could not have seen, since we are all so stupid what benefit that there should be too stupidity. It is like that brute advantage so essential to astronomy of having the diameter of the earth's orbit for a base of its triangles. Democracy is morose and runs to anarchy, but in the state and in the schools it is indispensable to resist the consolidation of all men into a few men. If John was perfect, why are you and I alive? As long as any man exists, there is some need of him. Let him fight for his own. A new poet has appeared, a new character approached us. Why should we refuse to eat bread until we have found his regiment and section in our old army files? Why not a new man? Here is a new enterprise of Brookfarm of Skinny Attleys of Northampton. Why so impatient to baptize them Essenes, or Port Royalists, or Shakers, or by any known any feet name? Let it be a new way of living. Why have only two or three ways of life and not thousands? Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much. We come this time for condiments, not for corn. We want the great genius only for joy, for one star more in our constellation, for one tree more in our grove. But he thinks we wish to belong to him, as he wishes to occupy us. He greatly mistakes us. I think I have done well if I have acquired a new word from a good author, and my business with him is to find my own, though it were only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use. Into paint will I grind thee, my bride. To embroil the confusion, and make it impossible to arrive at any general statement, when we have insisted on the imperfection of individuals, our affections and our experience urge that every individual is entitled to honor, and a very generous treatment is sure to be repaid. A breccluse sees only two or three persons, and allows them all their room. They spread themselves at large. The statesman looks at many, and compares the few habitually with others, and these look less. Yet are they not entitled to this generosity of reception, and is not munificence the means of insight? For though gamesters say that the cards beat all the players, though they were never so skillful, yet in the contest we are now considering, the players are also the game, and share the power of the cards. If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and instead of the poet, are censuring your own caricature of him. For there is something sphero and infinite in every man, especially in every genius, which, if you can come very near him, sports with all your limitations. For rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and whilst I fancied that I was criticizing him, I was censuring, or rather terminating, my own soul. After taxing Goethe as a courtier, artificial, unbelieving, worldly, I took up his book of Helena, and found him an Indian of the wilderness, a piece of pure nature like an apple or an oak, large as morning or night, and virtuous as a briar rose. But care is taken that the whole tune shall be played. If we were not kept among surfaces, everything would be large and universal. Now the excluded attributes burst in on us with the more brightness that they have been excluded. Your turn now, my turn next, is the rule of the game. The universality being hindered in its primary form comes in the secondary form of all sides. The points come in succession to the meridian, and by the speed of rotation a new hole is formed. Nature keeps herself whole, and her representation complete in the experience of each mind. She suffers no seat to be vacant in her college. It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire little from sight, and afterwards return again. Whatever does not concern us is concealed from us. As soon as a person is no longer related to our present well-being, he is concealed or dies, as we say. Really, all things and persons are related to us, but according to our nature they act on us not at once, but in succession, and we are made aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which we have known, are here present, and many more than we see. The world is full. As the ancients said, the world is a plenum or solid, and if we saw all things that really surround us, we should be imprisoned and unable to move. For though nothing is impassable to the soul, but all things are pervious to it and like highways, yet this is only whilst the soul does not see them. As soon as the soul sees any object, it stops before that object. Therefore the divine providence, which keeps the universe open in every direction to the soul, conceals all the furniture and all the persons that do not concern a particular soul from the senses of that individual. Through solidest eternal things the man finds his road as if they did not subsist, and does not once suspect their being. As soon as he needs a new object, suddenly he beholds it, and no longer attempts to pass through it, but takes another way. When he has exhausted for the time the nourishment to be drawn from any one person or thing, that object is withdrawn from his observation, and though still in his immediate neighborhood, he does not suspect its presence. Nothing is dead. Men feign themselves dead and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand, looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise. Jesus is not dead. He is very well alive, nor John, nor Paul, nor Mohammed, nor Aristotle. At times we believe we have seen them all, and could easily tell the names under which they go. If we cannot make voluntary and conscious steps in the admirable signs of universals, let us see the parts wisely, and infer the genius of nature from the best particulars with a becoming charity. What is best in each kind is an index of what should be the average of that thing. Love shows me the opulence of nature by de-closing to me in my friend a hidden wealth, and I infer an equal depth of good in every other direction. It is commonly said by farmers that a good pair or apple costs no more time or pains to rear than a poor one. So I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best. The end and the means, the gamester and the game. Life is made up of the intermixture and reaction of these two amicable powers, whose marriage appears beforehand monstrous, as each denies and tends to abolish the other. We must reconcile the contradictions as we can, but their discord and their concord introduce wild absurdities into our thinking and speech. No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just is by giving ourselves the lie. Speech is better than silence, silence is better than speech. All things are in contact, every atom has a sphere of repulsion. Things are and are not at the same time, and the like. All the universe over, there is but one thing. This old, two-face, creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied. Very fitly, therefore, I assert that every man is a partialist, that nature secures him as an instrument by self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion and science. And now further assert that each man's genius, being nearly and affectionately explored, he is justified in his individuality, as his nature is found to be immense. And now I add that every man is a universalist also, and as our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around the sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his private affair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the universal problem. We fancy men are individuals, so are pumpkins, but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history. The rabid Democrat, as soon as he is senator and rich man, has ripened beyond possibility of sincere radicalism, and unless he can resist the sun, he must be conservative the remainder of his days. Lord Eldon said in his old age that if he were to begin life again, he would be damned, but he would begin as agitator. We hide this universality if we can, but it appears at all points. We are as ungrateful as children. There is nothing we cherish and strive to draw to us, but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of the senses. Then goes by perchance of fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy, and making the commonest offices beautiful by the energy and heart with which she does them, and seeing this, we admire and love her and them and say, lo, a genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated or too early ripened by books, philosophy, religion, society, or care, insinuating a treachery and contempt for all we had so long loved and wrought in ourselves and others. If we could have any security against moods, if the profoundest prophet could beholden to his words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all and join the crusade could have any certificate that tomorrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony. But the truth sits veiled there on the bench, and never interposes an adamantine syllable, and the most sincere and revolutionary doctrine put as if the Ark of God were carried forward some furlongs, and planted there for the sucker of the world shall in a few weeks be codely set aside by the same speaker as morbid. I thought I was right, but I was not. And the same immeasurable credulity demanded fore new audacities. If we were not of all opinions, if we did not in any moment shift the platform on which we stand and look and speak from another. If there could be any regulation, any one-hour rule, that a man should never leave his point of view without sound or trumpet, I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods. How sincere and confidential we can be, saying that all lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the same words. My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation until all is said which words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first because of that vicious assumption. Is it that every man believes every other to be an incurable partialist and himself a universalist? I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers. I endeavored to show my good men that I love everything by turns and nothing long, that I loved the center, but doted on the superficies, that I loved man, if men seemed to me mice and rats, that I revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan world stood its ground and died hard, that I was glad of men of every gift and nobility, but could not live in their arms. Could they but once understand that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily wished them God's speed, yet out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or welcome from them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon for any claim I felt on them, it would be a great satisfaction. End of essay number eight.