 3 Great Virtues 3 Essays by Emerson Section 1 Self-Reliance This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Self-Reliance Part 1 Quote Nite Quasiveris Extra End Quote Quote Man is his own star, and the soul that can render an honest and 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. End Quote 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 hawk and fox, power and speed, be hands and feet. 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 instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense. For 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 fair voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they sat at nought books and traditions and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts, they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good humored inflexibility, than most when the cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time. And we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion, that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil be stowed 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 such impression on him and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without pre-established 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 issue, 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 him. 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 behavior of children, babes and even brutes, that divided and rebel mind that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is 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 pickancy 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 ought to conciliate one is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse, dependent, 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, summery 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 own consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with Eclet, 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 leave for this, that he could pass again into his neutrality, who could thus avoid all pledges and, having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbridgeable, unafrighted innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs which being seen to be not private but necessary and sink like darts into the ear of men and put them in fear. These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue, in most requests, 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 advisor who was wont to impartoon me with the dear old doctrines of the church on my saying, quote, what have I to do with the sacredness of traditions if I live wholly from within, end quote, my friend suggested, quote, but these impulses may be from below not from above, end quote. I replied, quote, they do not seem to me to be such, but if I am the devil's child I will live then from the devil, end quote. 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 everything 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 decadent 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 where the coat of philanthropy shall that pass. If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of abolition and comes to me with his last news from Barbados why should I not say to him go love thy infant, thy woodchopper 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 fuels and winds. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lentils of the doorpost 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 today of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold. For them I will go to prison if need be. But your miscellaneous popular charities, the education at College of Fools, the building of meeting houses to the vain end which many now stand, alms to sats, 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 a 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 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 higher 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 may 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 what a nice 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 blind man's bluff is this game of conformity. 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 heirs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief and attach 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 too is not the real too. Their for not the real for. So that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow in us in the prison uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to where 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 general history. I mean, quote, the foolish face of praise, end quote. The forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles not spontaneously moved but moved by a low usurping willfulness grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation. For non-conformity the world whips you with its displeasure and therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders look a scance on him in the public street and the friend's parlor. 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 face of the multitude like their sweet faces have no deep cause but are put on and off as the wind blows and the 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. We are loath to disappoint them. But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of 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 left 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 tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again though it contradicts everything you said today. 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. Recording by Robert Scott Mojo Move 411.com M-O-J-O-M-O-V-E 411.com August the 8th, 2007 Three Great Virtues Three Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson Section 2 Self-Reliance Part 2 This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Self-Reliance Part 2 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 Himalaya 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 sound 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 amid 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 a ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tax 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 it can be firm enough today 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 of the field which so fills the imagination. The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed a united light on the advancing actor. He is attended 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 Adam's eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it today because it is not of today. We love it and pay it homage because it is not a trap for our love and homage. But is self-dependent self-derived and therefore of an old 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 hence-forward. Instead of going 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 center of things where he is there is nature he measures you and all men in your existence ordinarily everybody 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 that a truly 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 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 Anthony the reformation of Luther Quakerism of Fox Methodism of Wesley abolition of Clarkson Scipio Milton called quote the height of Rome and quote 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 quote who are you sir quote 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 sought who was picked up 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 sort of sought 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 state are a gaudier vocabulary than private john and edward in a small house and common days 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 scandinburg and gustavus suppose they were virtuous did they wear out virtue as great a state depends on your private act today as followed their public and renown steps when private men shall act with original views the luster will be transferred from the actions of kings to those 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 state of every man the magnetism which all original actions 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 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 ingenuity leads us to that source at once the essence of genius of virtue of life which we call spontaneity or instinct we denote this primary wisdom as intuition whilst all latter teachings are tuitions in that deep force the last fact beyond which analysis cannot go all things find their common origin 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 that preceded we first share the life by which things exist and afterward see them as appearances in nature and forget that we had shared their cause here is the fountain of action and 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 origins 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 air in the expression of them but he knows that these things are so like day and night not to be disputed my willful actions and accusations are but roving the idolist reverie this 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 center 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 center 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 in the physiology of some old molded nation in another country in another world believe him not is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being 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 would be anything more than a cheerful apology 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 or the blowing rose these roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones they are for what they are they exist with God today there is no time to them there is simply the rose it is perfect in every moment of its existence before a leaf bud has burst its whole life acts in the full blown flower there is no more in the leafless root there is no less its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike but man postpones or remembers he does not live in the present but with reverted I 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 grand aims 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 we have new perception we shall gladly disturb the memory of its hoarded treasures and 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 footprints of any other you shall not see the face of man you shall not hear any name the way the thought, the good shall be wholly strange and new it shall exclude example and experience you take the way from man not to man 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 external causation perceives the self-existence of truth and right and claims 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 forever degrades the past turns all riches to poverty all reputation to a shame confounds the saint with the rogue shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside why then do we pratt of self-reliance in as much 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 shall 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 company plastic and permeable two 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 they contain commerce husbandry hunting, wailing, 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 or is in nature the essential measure of right nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom which cannot help itself the genesis and maturation of a planet its poise and orbit the bending tree recovering itself from the strong wind the vital resources internal 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 docileity to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune provide 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 person looks 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 our 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 let thy closed 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 quote what we love that we have but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love end quote 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 Odin 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 oh father oh mother oh wife oh brother oh friend I have lived with you after appearances hitherto henceforward I am the truths be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law covenants but proximities I shall endeavor to nourish my parents to support my family to be the chaste husband of my 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 I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints if you are knowable 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 and your companions I will seek my own I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly it is alike your interest and mine and all men's however long we have dwelt in lies to live in truth does this sound harsh today you will soon love dictated by your nature as well as mine if we follow the truth it will bring us out safe at last but so may you give these friends pain yes but I cannot sell my liberty and 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 populist think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard and mere antinominism and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to guild his crimes but the law of consciousness abides there are two confessionals in one or the other of which we must be shriven you may fulfill your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct or the reflex way consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father mother cousin neighbor town cat and dog whether any of these can up braid you but I may also neglect this reflex standard and absolve me to myself I have my own stern claims and perfect circle is 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 anyone imagines that this law is lax let him keep its commandment one day and truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a task master high be his heart faithful his will clear his insight 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 parlor 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 as 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 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 pedals keeps a school, preaches edits a newspaper goes to congress buys a township and so forth 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 is 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 for himself tossing the laws the books idolatries and custom 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 in their modes of living their association in their property in their speculative views end of self-reliance part 2 recording by Robert Scott mojo move 411.com mojo move 411.com 411.com 411.com August, the ninth 2007 three great virtues three essays by Emerson Section 3 this is a LibriVox Recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer 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, anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing His works good. But prayer as a means to affect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes a 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. Our true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Karatak in Fletcher's Banduka, when admonished to inquire the mind of the God Audate, replies, quote, his hidden meaning lies in our endeavours. Our valours are our best gods, end quote. 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 communion with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to God's 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. Quote to the preserving mortal, end quote, said Zoroaster. Quote the blessed immortals are swift, end quote. 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, quote, let God not speak to us lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey, end quote. Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of his brothers or his brother's brothers 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 Forrier, 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 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 everything 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, passed for the end and not for speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eyes in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe. The luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their masters built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see, how you can see. Quote, it must be somehow that you stole the light from us, end quote. They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin even into theirs. Let them chirp a while and call it their own. If they are honest and do well presently their neat new pinfold will be too straight 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. Two, it is for want of self-culture that the superstition of traveling, 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 traveler. 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 not like an interloper or a valet. I have no kurlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that 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 traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness, affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. 4. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay home. We imitate, and what is imitation but the traveling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste. Our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments. Our opinions, our tastes, our 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 Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any. And if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also. Insist on yourself, never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation. But of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin or Washington or Bacon or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipianism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned to 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 Fiodes 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. For, 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 everything 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 New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided 20th 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 man 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 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 notebooks impair his memory. His libraries overload his wit. The insurance office increases the number of accidents, and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber, whether we have not lost by refinement some energy by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For every stoic was a stoic, but in Christendom where is the Christian? There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages. Nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and in his turn the founder of a sect. The arts are inventions of each period and are only its costume, and do not invigorate them. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Bering 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 other since. Columbus found the New World in an undocked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuses 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 any aids. The emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Lascase. Quote, 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 handmill, and bake his bread himself, end quote. 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 person who makes up a nation today next year dies, 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 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 sees 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 not root in him, and merely lies there because no revolution or 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 weight the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. Quote, thy lot or portion of life, end quote, says the Calphi Ali, quote, is seeking after thee, therefore be at rest from seeking after it, end quote. 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, oh friends, will the God dain 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 writes 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 arise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or 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. End of The Essay on Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson Recording by Robert Scott MojoMove411.com August the 9th 2007