RALP

1882), born in Boston, Mass., was descended from a long line of Unitarian clergymen. He studied theology at Cambridge, Mass., and became minister in Boston, but, in 1832, resigned his pastorate, and, after two years' travelling in Europe (1832-33), turned to lecturing and literary work as a profession. In 1834 he settled in the village of Concord, near Boston, which remained his home for the rest of his life. A lecturing tour in England, in 1847, brought him great triumphs, and furnished him with the material for his essays on English Traits. From about 1872 his mind began to fail, till he quietly passed away in his seventyninth year. A lifelong friendship bound him to Carlyle, whom he had for the first time visited at Craigenputtock in 1833.

Though not a systematic thinker, Emerson was 'the most potent intellectual force' of the New World and the most original of the New England Transcendentalists, who, in reaction to the prevailing narrow Puritanism and materialistic Utilitarianism, preached an idealism mainly rooted in the new German philosophy. Emerson's place in the front rank of American authors is

based on a long series of highly stimulating essays, which mostly originated in his lectures and were collected under the general titles of Essays (1841-44), Miscellanies (1849), Representative Men (i. e. Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakspere, Napoleon, and Goethe, 1850), English Traits (1856), The Conduct of Life (1860), Society and Solitude (1870), and Letters and Social Aims (1876). They embrace such various subjects as nature, history, biography, literature, philosophy, morals, and politics, and are all pervaded by an optimistic idealistic view of life, by an almost mystical passion for Nature, and by strong ethical feeling. They are characterized, too, by that fervent pleading for individualism which is also the key-note of his most celebrated essay, that on Self-Reliance (1841). Emerson's style is full of noble imagery and happy phrase, but is somewhat aphoristic and discursive; his forte accordingly lies rather in the coining of sparkling epigrams than in the artistic arrangement or logical development of his thought. His poems, though they include masterpieces like Days, Rhodora, Concord Hymn, and Two Rivers, will probably be of less permanent power.

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in 5 male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole and diastole of 10 the heart; in the undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism at 15 one end of a needle; the opposite magnetism takes place at the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, you must condense there. An inevitable dualism

that no creatures are favorites, but 40 a certain compensation balances every gift and every defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction from another part of the same creature. If the head and neck 45 are enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut short.

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in power is lost in time; and the con50 verse. The periodic or compensating errors of the planets is another instance. The influences of climate and soil in political history are another. The cold climate invigorates. The 55 barren soil does not breed fevers, crocodiles, tigers, or scorpions.

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every excess causes a defect; every defect, 60 an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with 65 its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something. If 70 riches increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. 75 Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to equalise them80 selves. There is always some levelling circumstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all others. Is a man 85 too strong and fierce for society, and by temper and position a bad citizen

a morose ruffian, with a dash of

the pirate in him nature sends him a troop of pretty sons and daughters, who are getting along in 90 the dame's classes at the village school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar, takes the boar 95 out and puts the lamb in, and keeps her balance true.

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The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President has paid dear for his White 100 House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is 106 content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne. Or, do men desire the more substantial and permanent grandeur of genius? Neither has this immunity. He who by force of will or of thought is great, and overlooks thousands, has the charges of that eminence. With every influx of light comes new danger. Has he 115 light? he must bear witness to the light, and always outrun that sympathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by his fidelity to new revelations of the incessant soul. He 120 must hate father and mother, wife and child. Has he all that the world loves and admires and covets?

he must cast behind him their admiration, and afflict them by faith- 125 fulness to his truth, and become a byword and a hissing.

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build or plot or combine against it. Things 130 refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male administrari. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor's 135 life is not safe. If you tax too high,

the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law 140 is too mild, private vengeance comes in. If the government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is resisted by an over-charge of energy in the citizen, and life glows with a fiercer 145 flame. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost rigors or felicities of condition, and to establish themselves with great indifferency under all varieties of cir150 cumstances. Under all governments the influence of character remains the same in Turkey and in New England about alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly 155 confesses that man must have been as free as culture could make him. These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every160 thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist

sees

one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as 165 a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part 170 all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world and a cor175 relative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the 180 whole man, and recite all his destiny.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, 185 smell, motion, resistance, appetite, Herrig-Förster, British Authors.

and organs of reproduction that take hold on eternity all find room to consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true doctrine of omnipresence 190 is, that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if 195 the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of 200 us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. 'It is in the world, and the world was made by it.' Justice is not postponed. A perfect 205 equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. Οἱ κύβοι Διὸς ἀεὶ εὐπίπτουσι

The dice of God are always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication - table, or a mathematical 210 equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is 215 punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears. 220 If you see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs is there behind.

Every act rewards itself, or, in 225 other words, integrates itself, in a twofold manner; first, in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly, in the circumstance, or in apparent nature.

Men call the circumstance 230 the retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing, and is seen by the soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding; it is in

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235 separable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time, and so does not become distinct until after many years. The specific stripes may follow late after the offence, but they follow 240 because they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. 245 Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end pre-exists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

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Whilst thus the world will be whole, and refuses to be disparted, we seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example, to gratify the senses, we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs of the character. The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual 260 strong, the sensual bright, &c., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to 265 get a one end, without an other end. The soul says, Eat; the body would feast. The soul says, The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh 270 only. The soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power over things to its own ends.

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to this day, it must be owned, no projector has had the smallest success. The parted water re-unites behind our 296 hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong things, as soon as we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no more halve 300 things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow. 'Drive out nature with a fork, she comes running back.' 806

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to dodge, which one and another brags that the does not know; that they do not touch him; do not touch him; but the brag is $10 on his lips, the conditions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one part, they part, they attack him in another more vital part. If he has escaped them in form, and in the appearance, 315 it is because he has resisted his life, and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much death. So signal is the failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good from the 320 tax, that the experiment would not be tried since to try it is to be mad but for the circumstance, that when the disease began in the will, of rebellion and separation, the 325 intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to see the sensual allurement of an object, and not see the sensual hurt; he 330 sees the mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail; and thinks he can

cut off that which he would have, from that which he would not have. 385 'How secret art thou who dwellest in the highest Heavens in silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied Providence certain penal blindnesses upon such as have un340 bridled desires!'

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in literature 345 unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Supreme Mind; but having traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they involuntarily made amends to reason, by tying up the 850 hands of so bad a god. He is made as helpless as a king of England. Prometheus knows one secret which Jove must bargain for; Minerva, another. He cannot get his own thunders; 355 Minerva keeps the key of them.

'Of all the gods, I only know the keys That cope the solid doors within whose vaults His thunders sleep.'

A plain confession of the in-working 360 of the All, and of its moral aim. The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and it would seem impossible for any fable to be invented and get any currency which was not 365 moral. Aurora forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though Tithonus is immortal, he is old. Achilles is not quite invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by 370 which Thetis held him. Siegfried,

in the Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon's blood, and that spot which it covered 375 is mortal. And so it must be. There is a crack in everything God has made. It would seem, there is always this vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares, even into the wild 380 poesy in which the human fancy

attempted to make bold holiday, and to shake itself free of the old laws this back-stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal; that in nature nothing can be given, 885 all things are sold.

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch in the universe, and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies, they said, are 890 attendants on justice, and if the sun in Heaven should transgress his path, they would punish him. The poets related that stone walls, and iron swords, and leathern thongs had an 395 occult sympathy with the wrongs of their owners; that the belt which Ajax gave Hector dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels of the car of Achilles, and the sword 400 which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajax fell. They recorded that when the Thasians erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of his rivals went to it 405 by night, and endeavoured to throw it down by repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its pedestal, and was crushed to death beneath its fall.

This voice of fable has in it some- 410 what divine. It came from thought above the will of the writer. That is the best part of each writer, which has nothing private in it; that which he does not know; that which flowed 415 out of his constitution, and not from his too active invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might not easily find, but in the study of many, you would abstract 420 as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work of man in that early Hellenic world, that I would know. The name and circumstance of Phidias, however convenient 425 for history, embarrass when we come to the highest criticism. We are to see that which man was tending to do in a given period, and was hindered,