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ESSAYS - FIRST SERIES
ESSAYS - FIRST SERIES RALPH WALDO EMERSON HISTORY.
There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh all things are
And it cometh everywhere.
I am owner of the sphere
Of the seven stars and the solar year
Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain
Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakspeare's strain.
I.
HISTORY.
THERE is one mind common to all individual men. Every
man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He
that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a
freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought
he may think; what a saint has felt he may feel; what
at any time has befallen any man he can understand.
Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to
all that is or can be done for this is the only and
sovereign agent.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its
genius is illustrated by the entire series of days.
Man is explicable by nothing less than all his
history. Without hurry without rest the human spirit
goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty
every thought every emotion which belongs to it in
appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to
the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the
mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances
predominant and the limits of nature give power to but
one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn and
Egypt Greece Rome Gaul Britain America lie folded
already in the first man. Epoch after epoch camp
kingdom empire republic democracy are merely the
application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.
This human mind wrote history and this must read it.
The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of
history is in one man it is all to be explained from
individual experience. There is a relation between the
hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the
air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of
nature as the light on my book is yielded by a star a
hundred millions of miles distant as the poise of my
body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and
centripetal forces so the hours should be instructed
by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of
the universal mind each individual man is one more
incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each
new fact in his private experience flashes a light on
what great bodies of men have done and the crises of
his life refer to national crises. Every revolution
was first a thought in one man's mind and when the
same thought occurs to another man it is the key to
that era. Every reform was once a private opinion and
when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve
the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond
to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We as
we read must become Greeks Romans Turks priest and
king martyr and executioner; must fasten these images
to some reality in our secret experience or we shall
learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar
Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind's powers
and depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law
and political movement has meaning for you. Stand before
each of its tablets and say 'Under this mask did my
Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the defect
of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our
actions into perspective; and as crabs goats scorpions
the balance and the waterpot lose their meanness when
hung as signs in the zodiac so I can see my own vices
without heat in the distant persons of Solomon Alcibiades
and Catiline.
It is the universal nature which gives worth to
particular men and things. Human life as containing
this is mysterious and inviolable and we hedge it
round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence
their ultimate reason; all express more or less
distinctly some command of this supreme illimitable
essence. Property also holds of the soul covers great
spiritual facts and instinctively we at first hold to
it with swords and laws and wide and complex combinations.
The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of
all our day the claim of claims; the plea for education
for justice for charity; the foundation of friendship
and love and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to
acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily
we always read as superior beings. Universal history the
poets the romancers do not in their stateliest pictures
--in the sacerdotal the imperial palaces in the triumphs
of will or of genius--anywhere lose our ear anywhere make
us feel that we intrude that this is for better men; but
rather is it true that in their grandest strokes we feel
most at home. All that Shakspeare says of the king yonder
slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history in
the great discoveries the great resistances the great
prosperities of men;--because there law was enacted the
sea was searched the land was found or the blow was
struck for us as we ourselves in that place would have
done or applauded.
We have the same interest in condition and character.
We honor the rich because they have externally the
freedom power and grace which we feel to be proper
to man proper to us. So all that is said of the wise
man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist describes
to each reader his own idea describes his unattained
but attainable self. All literature writes the character
of the wise man. Books monuments pictures conversation
are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is
forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and accost
him and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by personal allusions. A true aspirant therefore never needs look for
allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation not of himself but more sweet of that
character he seeks in every word that is said concerning character yea further in every fact and circumstance--in
the running river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked
homage tendered love flows from mute nature from the
mountains and the lights of the firmament.
These hints dropped as it were from sleep and night
let us use in broad day. The student is to read
history actively and not passively; to esteem his own
life the text and books the commentary. Thus
compelled the Muse of history will utter oracles as
never to those who do not respect themselves. I have
no expectation that any man will read history aright
who thinks that what was done in a remote age by men
whose names have resounded far has any deeper sense
than what he is doing to-day.
The world exists for the education of each man. There
is no age or state of society or mode of action in
history to which there is not somewhat corresponding
in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner
to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him.
He should see that he can live all history in his own
person. He must sit solidly at home and not suffer
himself to be bullied by kings or empires but know
that he is greater than all the geography and all the
government of the world; he must transfer the point of
view from which history is commonly read from Rome
and Athens and London to himself and not deny his
conviction that he is the court and if England or
Egypt have any thing to say to him he will try the
case; if not let them for ever be silent. He must
attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield
their secret sense and poetry and annals are alike.
The instinct of the mind the purpose of nature
betrays itself in the use we make of the signal
narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining
ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor no
cable no fences avail to keep a fact a fact.
Babylon Troy Tyre Palestine and even early Rome
are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden
the sun standing still in Gibeon is poetry
thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact
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