Ralph Waldo Emerson

The teaching

Taught from his own essays and addresses, above all Nature (1836), Self-Reliance and The Over-Soul (1841).

An original relation to the universe

Emerson's teaching opens with a complaint and a demand. Our age is retrospective, he writes at the start of Nature: it builds the sepulchres of the fathers, and the generations before beheld God and nature face to face, while we see them through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe, a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? The sun shines today also. The whole of his work answers that question: the divine is met at first hand, in nature and in the self, by anyone who will look.

The transparent eyeball

He tells plainly the experience at the root of it. Crossing a bare common at twilight, under a clouded sky, with no special good fortune in his thoughts, he felt a perfect exhilaration, and in the woods he found it again. Standing on the bare ground, his head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball, he writes; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Nature met in this way is not a heap of things but a presence. The lover of nature, he says, is the one whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other, who has kept the spirit of infancy into the years of manhood.

Nature is the symbol of spirit

Nature serves the soul in rising degrees: as commodity, feeding and sheltering us; as beauty, delighting us; as language; and as discipline, training the understanding and the conscience. Of language he gives three rules. Words are signs of natural facts. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. And nature is the symbol of spirit. Right first meant straight and wrong meant twisted; spirit first meant wind; a lamb is innocence, a snake is subtle spite, and light and darkness are our speech for knowledge and ignorance. The world is emblematic, and to read it is to read the mind that made it.

Trust thyself

Self-Reliance turns the same faith inward. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all, that is genius. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist, for nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds: speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.

The self he trusts is not the small and wanting self. It is what he calls the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded, the deep force through which all things are present to us. To rely on it is to rely on God, and when a person lives with God, he writes, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

The Over-Soul

Within every person is the soul of the whole. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles, Emerson writes; meantime within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One. He calls it the Over-Soul, within which every person's particular being is contained and made one with all others. Its coming into the mind is revelation, an influx of the divine mind into ours, and it comes not by straining after it but when we stop obstructing it, for the soul's communication of truth is the highest event in nature.

It is known by its effects. It makes us humble and simple; it speaks through the character more than through words; and before it the distinctions of learning, rank and creed fall away, so that the simplest person who in his integrity worships God, he says boldly, becomes God.

Compensation

Every act, Emerson holds, rewards and punishes itself. Polarity, action and reaction, runs through every part of nature, in darkness and light, heat and cold, the ebb and flow of waters, and the same law runs through the moral world. Every excess causes a defect, and every defect an excess; for everything you have missed you have gained something else, and for everything you gain you lose something. Crime carries its punishment within it and virtue its reward, not in a later reckoning but in the very doing, for the soul is altered by what it does. The dice of God, he writes, are always loaded.

Religion at first hand

To the young ministers at Harvard he gave the same teaching for the churches. The religious sentiment, the sense that the moral law is real and binds us, is the essence of all religion, and it cannot be received at second hand; it is an intuition. Historical Christianity, he told them, has dwelt with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus, whereas the soul knows no persons. His charge was to go alone, to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.

Brahma

His poem Brahma speaks in the voice of the One beyond all opposites. If the red slayer think he slays, or if the slain think he is slain, they know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near; shadow and sunlight are the same; the vanished gods to me appear; and one to me are shame and fame. The poem, drawn from the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads he read in translation, ends with the turn of all true seeking: find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

Experience

The later essays add the shadow. In Experience, written after the death of his small son, he finds that even grief slides off and teaches little: I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, he writes. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-coloured lenses which paint the world their own hue. Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.

Yet the counsel is not despair but patience: to live in the present hour, to do the work at hand, and to trust the deeper life of the soul beneath the moods, for the true romance which the world exists to realise, he ends, is the transformation of genius into practical power.