SELF-RELIANCE -- 4

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, and all events.

Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation.

The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent.

Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age;

requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; and

posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.

 A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire.

Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man;

as,

Monachism, of the Hermit Antony;

the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox;

Methodism, of Wesley;

Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome";

and all history resolves itself very easily into

the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet.

Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him.

But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these.

To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, "Who are you, Sir?"

Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession.

The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic.

In history, our imagination plays us false.

Kingdom and lordship,

power and estate,

are a gaudier vocabulary; but the things of life are the same to all;

the sum total of all is the same.

Why all this deference to?

Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue?

As great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps.

When private men shall act with original views,

the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the eyes of nations.

It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man.

The joyful loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale of men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust.

Who is the Trustee?

What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded?

What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star,

without parallax,

without calculable elements,

which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions,

if the least mark of independence appear?

The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius,

of virtue, and of life,

which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.

We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition,

whilst all later teachings are tuitions.

In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go,

all things find their common origin.

For, the sense of being which in calm hours rises,

we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things,

from space, from light, from time, from man,

but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source

whence their life and being also proceed.

We first share the life by which things exist, and

afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and

forget that we have shared their cause.

Here is the fountain of action and of thought.

Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity.

When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.

If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault.

Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.

Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due.

He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed.

My willful actions and acquisitions are but roving;

the idlest reverie,

the faintest native emotion,

command my curiosity and respect.

Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily; for, they do not distinguish between perception and notion.

They fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but fatal.

If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time, all mankind, — although it may chance that no one has seen it before me.

For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.

It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate,

not one thing, but all things;

should fill the world with his voice;

should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the 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 to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not.

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being?

Whence, then, this worship of the past?

The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.

Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light;

where it is, is day;

where it was, is night; and

history is an impertinence and an injury,

if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

Man is timid and apologetic;

he is no longer upright;

he dares not say "I think," "I am,"

but quotes some saint or sage.

He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose.

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones;

they are for what they are;

they exist with God to-day.

There is no time to them.

There is simply the rose;

it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts;

in the full-blown flower there is no more;

in the leafless root there is no less.

Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature,

in all moments alike.

But man postpones

or

remembers;

he does not live in the present,

but with reverted eye laments the past,

or,

heedless of the riches that surround him,

stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.

He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

So use all that is called Fortune.

Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls.

But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect,

the chancellors of God.

In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations.

A political victory,

a rise of rents,

the recovery of your sick,

or

the return of your absent friend,

or

some other favorable event,

raises your spirits,

and

you think

good days are preparing for you.

Do not believe it.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.