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.
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