his heart's inquiry, was whence is your power? His reply was always the same: "from my nonconformity
Ideas were not less real than the phenomenal world. If anything, ideas were more important than phenomenon because they lay behind them, creating and explaining visible world
Emerson's life and work – indeed, transcendentalism itself – constitutes a refutation of Hume
account every moment of the existence of the universe as a new creation, and all as a revelation proceeding each moment from the divinity to the mind of the observer
fundamental view of the world that sees God in everything...not pantheism but hypertheism
Virginia Woolf said of Emerson that "what he did was to assert that he could not be rejected because he held the universe within him. Each man, by finding out what he feels, discovers the law of the universe
To the question "what is God?" He now replies, "the most elevated conception of character that can be formed in the mind. It is the individual's own soul carried out to perfection." p. 97
Emerson's fundamental and particular conviction in the final authority of the individual self
the highest, most trustworthy knowledge consists of intuitive graspings, moments of direct perception, free mental activities of cognition and recognition, a series of mental activities, as he now realized, could be summed up in the word reason
If there is a single moment… to give meaning to Emerson's life, it would be this moment when he recognized that his proper response to the world must be astonishment, his proper expression celebration
This is the germ of the philosophy of identity that Emerson later recognized in Schelling and in Hinduism. It holds that there is a fundamental unity, a basic similarity in all human experience which is more important, finally, then the many obvious differences
"A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself
Self-knowledge and self cultivation he now sees not as a means to something but as the ends and goal of life itself.… "Revere thyself
the crucial illumination that the spiritual is not a realm apart from the natural but is instead revealed – and alone revealed – through the natural
Says Hedge, "in the transcendental system, the object is to discover in every form of finite existence, an infinite and unconditioned [quality or state] as the ground of its existence, or rather as the ground of our knowledge of its existence, to refer all phenomenon to certain noumena or laws of cognition
Reason is the highest faculty of the soul – what we often mean by the soul itself
education, development, self-consciousness, and self-expression are the purposes of life
the world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end." Page 178
At the core of Emerson's life from now on is this willed surrender, this giving oneself over to the unregarded epiphanies of every blessed day
Emerson's daily life was highlighted by that habitual vision of greatness, apart from which, Whitehead says, education is impossible
nothing can befal me in life, no calamity, no disgrace (leaving me my eyes) to which Nature will not offer sweet consolation
The experience Emerson most values is the exhilaration that can arise sometimes from our presence in nature
the experience of that beauty as a wild delight
Beauty is fundamental, primary, not derived from anything else: "the world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty
He makes a modern case for the idea that the mind common to the universe is disclosed to each individual through his or her own nature
transcendentalism taught – teaches – that even in a world of objective knowledge, the subjective consciousness and the conscious subject can never be left out of the reckoning.
transcendentalism teaches that the religious spirit is a necessary aspect of human nature – or of the human condition
the one thing of value in the universe is the active soul."
self expression, like self development, is one of the purposes of life itself
the well being of the individual – of all the individuals – is the basic purpose and ultimate justification for all social organizations
autonomous individuals cannot exist apart from others.
Transcendentalism believes that the purpose of education is to facilitate the self development of each individual. the political trajectory of transcendentalism begins in philosophical freedom and ends in democratic individualism.
there is one mind common to all individual men.
there is a relation between man and nature so that what ever is in matter is in mind
expression is as basic a human drive as sex
it is the constant endeavor of the mind to idealize the actual, to accommodate the shows of things to the desires of the mind."
conviction that underneath all appearances and causing all appearances are certain eternal laws which we call the Nature of Things.
It is not, believe me, the chief end of man that he should make a fortune and beget children whose end is likewise to make a fortune, but it is, in a few words, that he should explore himself."
the imperative of self reliance, the superiority of the whole person to the specialist who accepts the divided self as a necessary effect of the division of labor
fundamental perception that the world has an essential balance and wholeness.
Against the weight of the past, of the tragic, and of the demonic, Emerson asserts the essential adequacy of the individual, the possibility of action, and the accusing sufficiency of every day
Above all, he insisted..."it is the age of the first person singular
When a better society evolves, it will not, in Emerson's view, come about through a suppression of the process of individuation but through a voluntary association of fulfilled individuals
we live for those rare (one might say Yeatsian) moments when "this deep power in which we lie and whose beatitude is accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object are one."
the power available to the self reliant individual is ultimately the power of the common nature described in "The Oversoul."
utopian euphoria fueled by a widely shared and wildly exciting conviction that the structure of society could really be fundamentally and rapidly changed
Life only avails, not the having lived
the coming of the new American individual, the plain man or woman, cosmos in a work shirt,
unless individual reformation preceding social reorganization, nothing would change for the better
mystical union of the self with the One, in an ecstasy characterized by the absence of all duality."
the ecstatic experience of nature replaces Emerson's previous conception of human moral progress as nature's end. He now conceives of himself as a "professor of the joyous science."
I apprehend nothing of that fact but it's bitterness… It is nothing to me but the gloomiest sensible experience to which I have no key, and no consolation, nothing but oblivion and diversion."
The universe is the externalization of the soul.
To find the journey's end in every step of the road," he says in "experience," "to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom."
Emerson was still committed to individualism, though he now put less emphasis on the mind common to all individuals and more on individual differences and on the process of individuation. He was still as committed as ever to the idea of freedom and self liberation, though he was now aware of a variety of false or hollow freedoms.
So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each men's genius contracts itself to a few hours.
The classical view of tragedy, the view of choruses of villagers in all times and places, is that this wisdom redeems the suffering. Emerson says no. Suffering brought him misery, not wisdom:
We have nothing but our conviction of the adequacy of the present moment to throw into the uneven balance. "We must set up the strong present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come.
He knows what the Stoic has always known. Real knowledge may be unattainable; the question therefore is not "What can I know?" but "How should I live?
The one good in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation." He had also learn to give everything he had to each project in turn, to hold nothing back: "What a discovery I made one day that the more I spent the more I grew."
Emerson believed in equality because he believed in the adequacy of the individual, of each individual.
He felt he had lost control of his own life. He wrote soberly to Sam Ward, saying he now thought that "we belong to our life, not that it belongs to us." It was the nadir of Emerson self-reliance and self-esteem.
Emerson still believed – at least he kept repeating – that "life is an ecstasy" and that "each man is a jet of flame." But his dreams now suggest that he knew he had lost something important
This new idealism was so tempered, qualified, and intertwined with the always increasing cares of Emerson's daily life, with his experience of innumerable live audiences, and with the growing materialism of the times, that it amounts in places to a new position. It is a refracted idealism, a new idealism born of the struggle between the old idealism and the new materialism
Though one could not predict the actions of any single individual, one could be dismayingly accurate in predicting the actions of the large number of individuals.
He had rather a sense that something was fundamentally wrong with universe, an awareness of some elemental lack at the core of things
his growing willingness to face that other world of experience, the world of defeat and despair, the world that was more determined and less free than Emerson hoped.
Fate" is Emerson's long deferred, full dress confrontation with the dark side of life, with evil, with indifference, with violence and savagery, with entropy and cold obstruction and rot.
freedom is necessary. We can only lead moral lives if we can choose. We can only choose if we are free to do so. "Choosing or acting in the soul is freedom." What is more interesting, freedom is also associated with thought and insight. "So far as a man thinks he is free," he says. Indeed freedom comes from thought. "Intellect annuls fate,
There can be no driving force," he says, "except through the conversion of the man into his will… The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will.
Emerson is at last convinced that the universe can be understood as "advance out of fate into freedom."... Emerson began by asking, "How should I lead my life?" The answer given by the essay "Fate" is "Pursue Freedom."
We live," he says, "by our imaginations, by our admiration, by our sentiment," and it is sobering to discover how much of what is most important to us is illusion.
There is," said Whitman, "apart from intellect… an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, an incredible make-believe and general unsettledness we call the world; a soul-light of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of a hunter.
The days are gods. That is, everything is divine.
The purpose of life is individual self cultivation, self expression, and fulfillment.
Creation is continuous. There is no other world; this one is all there is. Every day is the day of judgment
Life is an ecstasy; Thoreau has it right when he says, "Surely joy is the condition of life."
each new day challenges us with its adequacy and our own.
The personal consequence of such perceptions was an almost intolerable awareness that every morning began with infinite promise. Any book may be read, any idea thought, any action taken. Anything that has ever been possible to human beings is possible to most of us every [day.].… Each of us has all the time there is; each accepts those invitations he can discern. By the same token, each evening brings a reckoning of infinite regret for the paths refused, openings not seen, and actions not taken.
Your work, as Ruskin says, should be the praise of what you love
But one of these days, before I die, I still believe I shall do better.
Memory is "the thread on which the beads of a man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral action.
Everything that lives, said Santayana, is tragic in its fate, comic in its existence, and lyric in its ideal essence.
sometimes believe that I have no new thoughts, and that my life is quite at an end."
Each man is conscious of a heaven within him, a realm of undiscovered sciences, of slumbering potencies, a heaven of which the feats of talent are no measure; it arches like a sky over all that it has done, all that has been done."
When you are suddenly awakened to the great cosmic truth that you do not have a physical body but are actually a boundless flow of energy in unity with the energy of the cosmos, you will have cheese the highest aim of Tai Chi Chuan. P. 164 The Complete Book of Tai Chi Chuan.
Can we be totally agnostic about this, remaining totally open and skeptical of all statements about ourselves and human nature – and still aspire to set and accomplish meaningful and worthwhile goals in our lives, or do we take an "as if" position that says we can do more and accomplish more with our lives if we believe in Mind and Self-Reliance and Transcendental Individualism. The "correctness" or "rightness" of the believe depends on how useful it is to us? And so, why choose that over another belief – say – eight perception of Man as "no – self" – Anatta- or even more radically as "man the sinner in the angry hands of God".
Michael Murphy calls it "the transformative capacities of human nature."
"we live only part of the life we are given… All of us have great potentials for growth."
"we harbor of range of capacities that no single philosophy or psychology has ever embraced, and… these can be developed by practicing certain virtues and disciplines."
"These many extraordinary attributes exhibit an apparent continuity w ith features of animal nature… Part of a richly complex development that began with the earliest forms of life and a point to further human events. Their cultivation… Would carry forward the Earth's evolutionary adventure."
Emerson opened not only the tomb for family vault but the coffin itself. The act was essential Emerson. He had to see for himself. P 3
Emerson's lifelong search, what he called his heart's inquiry, was whence is your power? His reply was always the same: "from my nonconformity. I never listen to your people's law or to what they called the gospel and wasted my time. I was content with this simple rural poverty of my own. Hence the sweetness."
Emerson had also by now learned to think of ideas not as abstractions but as perceptions, laws, templates, patterns, and plans. Ideas were not less real than the phenomenal world. If anything, ideas were more important than phenomenon because they lay behind them, creating and explaining visible world. P. 4
To a great extent Emerson's life and work – indeed, transcendentalism itself – constitutes a refutation of Hume. P. 30
"Events seem conjoined, but never connected," Hume writes, "But as we can have no idea of anything which never appeared to our outward senses or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be, that we have no idea of connection or power at all, and that the words are absolutely without any meaning." p. 45
Emerson's interest in Plato would become a major preoccupation. Plato was the single most important source of Emerson's lifelong conviction that ideas are real because they are the forms and laws that underlie, precede, and explain appearances. P. 65
"I know that I exist, and that a part of me, as essential as memory or reason, is a desire that another being exist." p. 69
He goes on to say "that it were fitter to account every moment of the existence of the universe as a new creation, and all as a revelation proceeding each moment from the divinity to the mind of the observer." p. 71
Emerson's fundamental view of the world that sees God in everything, the view that an associate of Emerson once said was not pantheism but hypertheism. P. 77
"A portion of the truth," he told his aunt, "bright and sublime, lives in every moment in every mind." p. 82
The truth was that Emerson did not often refer to Scripture (after he announced the text, which was invariably from the Bible) because the Bible was no longer for him an object of study; it was an example for him for emulation. He was interested in his own primary, personal religious experience and that of his parishioners, not in repeating and deferring to the reported religious experiences of long departed historical personages. p. 90
Many years later Virginia Woolf said of Emerson that "what he did was to assert that he could not be rejected because he held the universe within him. Each man, by finding out what he feels, discovers the law of the universe." p. 95
As the new year, 1830, began, Emerson was working out a new and strikingly modern theology. He started from the premise that "Christianity is validated in each person's life and experience or not at all." Following Coleridge's life-giving observation that "Christianity is not a theory or a speculation, but life – not a philosophy of life but life itself, not knowledge but being," Emerson insists that "every man makes his own religion, his own God." To the question "what is God?" He now replies, "the most elevated conception of character that can be formed in the mind. It is the individual's own soul carried out to perfection." p. 97
Emerson's fundamental and particular conviction in the final authority of the individual self. p. 99
Indeed, it now seem to Emerson that science itself had a greater capacity for real wonder and a greater claim on our veneration than either the arid textual scholarship that passed for training in divinity for the barren doubt of skeptical philosophy. p. 101
From Coleridge via Marsh Emerson had come to accept the idea that the highest, most trustworthy knowledge consists of intuitive graspings, moments of direct perception, free mental activities of cognition and recognition, a series of mental activities, as he now realized, could be summed up in the word reason. p. 104
Emerson was 27 when Ellen died.… After this time Emerson believed completely, implicitly, and vicereally in the reality and primacy of the spirit, though he was always aware that the spirit can manifest itself only in the corporeal world. p 110
It was Emerson's instinct – and a major key to his strength – that in extreme situations he tended not to reach for traditional supports, not even for the Bible, but to reach for his own resources and to go it alone. Page 113
If there is a single moment… to give meaning to Emerson's life, it would be this moment when he recognized that his proper response to the world must be astonishment, his proper expression celebration. Page 122
"I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made this theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible." The new astronomy had revealed a world and a universe that could no longer usefully be described as fallen. p. 124
In the late fall of 1832 Emerson suffered a physical and emotional letdown after the great crisis. After a brief brief burst of enthusiasm in October, he found himself utterly, appallingly free. p. 127
Emerson's moment of insight into the interconnectedness of things in the Jardin de Plantes was a moment of almost visionary intensity that pointed him away from theology and toward science. That moment had the emotional quality of a new beginning. Page 143
This is the germ of the philosophy of identity that Emerson later recognized in Schelling and in Hinduism. It holds that there is a fundamental unity, a basic similarity in all human experience which is more important, finally, then the many obvious differences. Page 146
"I feel myself pledged ," he wrote, "to demonstrate that all necessary truth is it's own evidence." Page 151
"A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befall him must be from himself." Page 152
"The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself." He declares himself free not only of the conventional past but of the conventionally conceived future: "He is not to live to the future as described to him, but to live to the real future by living to the real present." Page 152
Self-knowledge and self cultivation he now sees not as a means to something but as the ends and goal of life itself.… "Revere thyself." Page 153
The writer draws mainly on nature for language and for symbol and that these symbols – white whales, ravens, Walden ponds, leaves of grass – can be used as symbols because of the primary connections that already exist between nature and every mind. Page 155
For Emerson it is always the instructed eye, not the object seen, that gives the highest delight, that connets us with the world. Page 155
In the convergence of Quakerism and science with the Platonism and the Stoicism that already formed the central stream of Emerson's thought we can see a common principle: the crucial illumination that the spiritual is not a realm apart from the natural but is instead revealed – and alone revealed – through the natural. Page 163
Says Hedge, "in the transcendental system, the object is to discover in every form of finite existence, an infinite and unconditioned [quality or state] as the ground of its existence, or rather as the ground of our knowledge of its existence, to refer all phenomenon to certain noumena or laws of cognition." Page 165
"Reason is the highest faculty of the soul – what we often mean by the soul itself; it never reasons, never proves, it's simply perceives; it is vision. The Understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues, near-sighted but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present, the expedient, the customary." Page 166
What Emerson now perceived was that the "reason" of Milton, Coleridge, and the Germans was another name for what the Quakers recognized as the inner light. The same phenomenon was explained philosophically and logically by the one group; it was made practically available and psychologically real by the other. Together, these conceptions of reasons make up the fundamental basis, the necessary bottom rung, of Emerson's self-reliance. p. 167
Goethe's greatest gifts to Emerson were two. First was the master idea that education, development, self-consciousness, and self-expression are the purposes of life; second was the open, outward-facing working method of sympathetic appropriation and creative recombination of the world's materials. Page 173
"I am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondences between these and those." Page 177
Beauty is the primary, basic, foundational, a given. As Emerson will soon put it in Nature: "the world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end." Page 178
The world itself is the great poem, the source of all the verbal approximations of itself. When the poet can hold fast to this connection, he has access – through his own poor powers – to the world's power and beauty… At the core of Emerson's life from now on is this willed surrender, this giving oneself over to the unregarded epiphanies of every blessed day. Page 179
Even Emerson's daily life was highlighted by that habitual vision of greatness, apart from which, Whitehead says, education is impossible. Page 189
Almost from the beginning he proposed to use the attainments of the departed great to illustrate the range of possibilities open to 19th century Americans. Page 189
"As I walk in the woods I felt what I often feel, that nothing can befal me in life, no calamity, no disgrace (leaving me my eyes) to which Nature will not offer sweet consolation." Page 199
Now, as he worked on nature, Emerson jumped at Goethe's insistence that beauty is fundamental, separate, underived. "The nature of the beautiful… lies out of the limits of the cogitative power." Page 222
"Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul," or, as we might now prefer to say, nature and consciousness, or the world and the mind. Page 227
The experience Emerson most values is the exhilaration that can arise sometimes from our presence in nature, although we cannot say quite why. Page 228
Not only does Emerson accept the Greek idea that the universe is beauty, kosmos, but he emphasizes the experience of that beauty as a wild delight. This inner wildness, this habit of enthusiasm, this workaday embracing of the Dionysian is quintessential Emerson. He is wild or he is nothing. Page 229
Of much more interest to Emerson is the way in which nature furnishes us with our ideas and standards of beauty, whether physical beauty, moral beauty (virtue), or intellectual beauty (truth): "the standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms – the totality of nature." Beauty is inherent in the world: "such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves." The highest beauty is finally in relations: "nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole." Beauty is fundamental, primary, not derived from anything else: "the world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty." Page 230
Stoicism cares always for ethics, almost never for metaphysics or epistemology. It's question is not "What can I know for certain?" but "How should I lead my life?" Stoicism asserts that since there is only one law for human beings and for nature, we should study nature to learn the law for us. Stoicism emphasizes individual will, self rule, or autarchy, and Stoics believe that human beings are for the most part able to help themselves, that they have adequate resources if only they can be mobilized. Page 233
In this sense, the plan or idea is more real – more important – than the physical product. This is the mainmast of idealism and Emerson lashed himself to it for life. Page 234
He makes a modern case for the idea that the mind common to the universe is disclosed to each individual through his or her own nature. Page 234
"Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the
phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that
Adam had, all that Cesar could, you have and can do… build,
therefore your own world." Page 234
The transcendental club: They were dissatisfied, individually and as a group, with the present state of philosophy, religion, and literature in America. They look for hope to Europe, especially to Germany, to Kant in philosophy, to Schleiermacher in religion, and to Goethe in literature. They were mostly anti-Lockean; most believed in intuition. They were romanticists, not classicists or philosophes. They were radicals or liberals rather than conservatives in politics and almost all followed the logic of their belief in freedom and autonomy into one or another arena of social action. Page 249
In philosophy transcendentalism taught – teaches – that even in a world of objective knowledge, the subjective consciousness and the conscious subject can never be left out of the reckoning. Page 250
In religion transcendentalism teaches that the religious spirit is a necessary aspect of human nature – or of the human condition – and that the religious spirit does not reside in external forms, words, ceremonies, or institutions. In Emerson's words, "the one thing of value in the universe is the active soul." In literature transcendentalism holds that it is a built-in necessity of human nature to express itself, that self expression, like self development, is one of the purposes of life itself. The social imperative of transcendentalism is twofold. It insists, first, that the well being of the individual – of all the individuals – is the basic purpose and ultimate justification for all social organizations and second that autonomous individuals cannot exist apart from others. In the transcendentalist vocabulary "association" is just as charged a word as "self." Transcendentalism believes that the purpose of education is to facilitate the self development of each individual the political trajectory of transcendentalism begins in philosophical freedom and ends in democratic individualism. Page 250
Emerson… saw with unaccustomed force and clarity the cardinal points of what he recognized both as his own convictions and the "perennial philosophy." He jotted down eight basic propositions. He begins with the idea that will underlie "history," "self-reliance," and the other great essays: "there is one mind common to all individual men." This is Platonism; Emerson means that we all have reason and common. Communication is possible because all human minds are, in important respects, similarly constituted.
The second of Emerson's Goose Pond principles is the Stoic ground law: "there is a relation between man and nature so that what ever is in matter is in mind." This is the basis for language and for what the writer does.
The third point is that expression is as basic a human drive has sex: "it is a necessity of the human nature that it should express itself outwardly and embody its thought."
Point four says, "it is the constant endeavor of the mind to idealize the actual, to accommodate the shows of things to the desires of the mind." He gives architecture and art as examples.
Point five is the theory of classification: "it is the constant tendency of the mind to unify all it beholds or to reduce the remotest facts to a single law."
Point 6… "There is a parallel tendency/corresponding unity in nature."
Point 7 describes… The tendency to "separate particulars" and magnify them, from which come "all false views and particular sects."
Emerson's last point… "The remedy for all abuses… is the conviction that underneath all appearances and causing all appearances are certain eternal laws which we call the Nature of Things." When Emerson speaks of faith or necessity, he means these eternal laws.
These principles are Emerson's categories, his list of primary powers of the mind. Page 255
Henceforward the perception that each is an expression of all will be the immovable anchor of Emerson's thought. Page 259
He defined self trust now… as "a perception that the mind common to the universe is disclosed to the individual through his own nature." Page 259
"What," he asked, "is the end of human life? It is not, believe me, the chief end of man that he should make a fortune and beget children whose end is likewise to make a fortune, but it is, in a few words, that he should explore himself." Page 261
To argue for the practical adequacy of the individual, the imperative of self reliance, the superiority of the whole person to the specialist who accepts the divided self as a necessary effect of the division of labor. Page 264
"If the single man plants himself indomitability on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him." p. 265
"The modern mind teaches that the nation exists for the individual." But the subject of the series is not the individual and the state but self cultivation. "His own culture – the unfolding of his nature, is the chief end of man." Page 271
"The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbance can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music… Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good." Page 273
Harvard Divinity school address: Emerson produced for this location a modern confession of faith, an announcement of the gospel according to the present moment, a belief not so much in pantheism as hypertheism, a declaration of the divinity of the human. Page 288
Religious sentiment is universal and derives from or is awakened by the "moral sentiment," which is the even more fundamental perception that the world has an essential balance and wholeness. The feeling of veneration or reverence that arises from this perception is the basic building block of all religion. That feeling is an intuition, revealed to each person; it cannot be had at secondhand. Page 289
The study of painting sharpened Emerson's already keen visual sense. There seems to be actual link between visual acuity and increased articulation. P. 298
He no longer spoke with tease about how the individual must sink his private self in the general human nature. His fundamental ideas had not changed, but now he was impressed with how society could whip an individual for not conforming. Page 300
The more Emerson emphasized the appeal to the light or spirit within the individual, the more he was appalled by the crippling burden of the past each individual is obliged to carry. Page 307
Emerson's increasing preference for process over results. Indeed, now, for Emerson life is process. "The one thing of value in the world is the active soul," he would say, with the emphasis on the word "active." At the end of the first lecture he said flatly, "the presence of this element [soul] is constant creation." In the second lecture he defined growth as the constant effort of the soul to find outside itself that which is within it, and he characterized culture as the "constant progress of the heart." Page 308
Against the weight of the past, of the tragic, and of the demonic, Emerson asserts the essential adequacy of the individual, the possibility of action, and the accusing sufficiency of every day. Page 310
In a less self deprecating mood Emerson noted how a journal full of highlights and notable quotations, one that leaves out the chaff and dross of daily routine and dull reading, tends to move from one great passage to the next. Page 320
"Self-reliance" is Emerson's essay on the on alienated human being. The essay is not a blueprint for selfishness or withdrawal; it is not anti-– community. It recommends self reliance as a starting point – indeed the starting point – not as a goal. When a better society evolves, it will not, in Emerson's view, come about through a suppression of the process of individuation but through a voluntary association of fulfilled individuals. Page 322
"Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfillments: each of its joys ripens into a new want." p. 331
Emerson's new myth of the growth of consciousness: in proportion to the vigor of the individual, .... [changes] are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant... And the man of today scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should be the outward biography of a man in time, a putting off of dead circumstance day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. P. 323
[Emerson] was living at the apogee of his own orbit of possibility. P. 324
Above all, he insisted..."it is the age of the first person singular." p. 333
The multifaceted, fractionated self is now a given, a starting point, though the goal of thought and perception remains the same. As he explains in the lecture on religion, we live for those rare (one might say Yeatsian) moments when "this deep power in which we lie and whose beatitude is accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object are one." p. 333
His main convictions ...rest on the perception that the world of differences can and must be resolved into a world...of identity....Identity alone constitutes paradise. P. 334
"Self-reliance" affirms the tendency toward individuation. "The Oversoul" affirms the existence of "that great nature in which we rest." This nature is variously called a unity "within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all others," a "common nature," "the great heart of nature," "the common heart," and "the great, the universal mind." What links these two essays is Emerson's perception that the power available to the self reliant individual is ultimately the power of the common nature described in "The Oversoul." Page 335
Individuation was a fact and identity was a fact. But above and governing both of these processes now, in Emerson's imagination and in his writing, is the sense of flux, the conviction that all things change. Page 336
He finished the great essay "Circles," perhaps his best expression of the endlessly opened and unfixed nature of things. "Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn: that there is no end in nature, that every end is a beginning, that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens." "Circles" denigrates the permanent, the final, the fixed. It praises "life, transition, the energizing spirit." Nothing is truly permanent. p. 337
It was an emotionally charged and politically turbulent decade similar to the 1790s in the 1960s. All three were decades of utopian euphoria fueled by a widely shared and wildly exciting conviction that the structure of society could really be fundamentally and rapidly changed. Page 341
"I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred, none are profane. I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back." This is the Emerson John Burroughs called "the arch radical of the world." Page 341
Nature itself, as Heraclitus had said, was change. "The method of advance in nature is perpetual transformation," he now wrote, and the same perception is repeated over and over in phrases he would work into the essays he kept retouching and revising. "Life only avails, not the having lived ," page 341
Emerson was now living as intensely as he ever would; his expressive channels were all wide open. His soaring moods – all constellated around the central perception that every day is both the day of creation and the date of judgment – found form in parables, poems, and dreams. Page 342
This is Emerson's global Eucharist; he had come to take Communion at last. The apple that Adam and Eve ate brought sin and death into the world. Newton saw that the moon was only a larger Apple and its orbit a larger Fall. The story of the third apple, the world Emerson ate, marks the coming of the new American individual, the plain man or woman, cosmos in a work shirt, a self-reliant person who, as Virginia Woolf said years later in a review of Emerson's journals, has discovered that "he cannot be rejected because he carries the universe with in him." p. 342
He was convinced that "the Community is not good for me" and he wasn't willing to put to the community "the task of my emancipation which I ought to take on myself." Page 343
He could join no association that was not based on the recognition that each person is the center of his or her own world. Page 343
His faith in the power and the infinitude of the individual was greater than his faith in collective action, and he would not confuse the issue by compromise or by what he once called "a mush of concession." Page 344
"Can anything be so elegant has to have few wants and to serve them oneself?"… Emerson was committed to the belief that unless individual reformation preceding social reorganization, nothing would change for the better. Page 345
For Plotinus everything emanates, or flows out, from the One, the ultimate power and unity of things. The first emanation is thought or mind, meaning the whole range of ideas from which in turn the whole range of tangible things and beings emanate. Page 348
The other idea Emerson took from Plotinus, an idea that blazed up in Emerson like fire in a dry forest, is Plotinus's conception of the final stage in the developing self-consciousness of the individual soul. This last stage is a mystical union of the self with the One, in an ecstasy characterized by the absence of all duality." Page 348
The kind of experience for which Emerson is always reaching is the ecstatic state, an experience that gives a person the feeling of being outside time. The word ecstasy means "a displacement," a standing outside oneself. Page 353
A recent commentator has pointed out, "The Method of Nature" marks the point at which the ecstatic experience of nature replaces Emerson's previous conception of human moral progress as nature's end. He now conceives of himself as a "professor of the joyous science." Page 354
The talk "the Poet" focuses on the human need for expression, which Emerson insists is "a primary impulse of nature." Happiness itself depends, he says, not on property but on expression. "All that we do, or say or see is expression or for expression." Page 357
"I have no skill, no illumination, no "nearness" to the power which has bereaved me of the most beautiful of the children of men. I apprehend nothing of that fact but it's bitterness… It is nothing to me but the gloomiest sensible experience to which I have no key, and no consolation, nothing but oblivion and diversion." Page 369
"The Poet" is arguably the best piece ever written on literature as literary process, and it is the major statement of international romantic expressionism, the idea that expressing our thoughts and feelings is not only one of the fundamental and given aspects about human nature – a basic drive, like sex – but also one of the main purposes of human life. Page 371
"The universe is the externalization of the soul." Page 373
Poetry is not finally an end in itself. Emerson packs his essay now into one grand simple sentence: "Art is the path of the creator to his work." This is the transitive and the vehicular wisdom of Emerson, it is what keeps him interested more in the present than in the future or the past. "To find the journey's end in every step of the road," he says in "experience," "to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom." Page 374
Emerson is better than Marcus Aurelius at last because of "his sense of life's capacity for self renewal." If death is the end of everything, then living is everything. Or as Emerson stubbornly puts it this spring, "I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born." Page 375
So strong had his belief in character become that he could not say, "There ought to be no such thing as Fate. As long as we use this word, it is a sign of our impotence and that we are not ourselves." Page 383
Emerson was still committed to individualism, though he now put less emphasis on the mind common to all individuals and more on individual differences and on the process of individuation. He was still as committed as ever to the idea of freedom and self liberation, though he was now aware of a variety of false or hollow freedoms. Page 384
"A man must do the work with that faculty he has now. But that faculty is the accumulation of past days. No rival can rival backwards. What you have learned and done is safe and fruitful. Work and learn in evil days, in insulted days, in days of debt and depression and calamity. Fight best in the shade of the cloud of arrows." This is the fighting faith of the American scholar. Page 390
, "Every actual state is corrupt," he wrote. "Good men must not obey the laws too well." Page 401
"So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each men's genius contracts itself to a few hours." Page 401
It is not that Emerson rejects pain, loss, or grief. What he rejects is the idea put forward by the chorus of villagers in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex that in suffering is wisdom. The classical view of tragedy, the view of choruses of villagers in all times and places, is that this wisdom redeems the suffering. Emerson says no. Suffering brought him misery, not wisdom: "I grieve that grirf can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature." p. 402
There is no answer to this dilemma, no solution, but there is a best course of action. We have nothing but our conviction of the adequacy of the present moment to throw into the uneven balance. "We must set up the strong present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come." Page 402
"Experience" is not a despairing essay. If Emerson accepts no one vision, no one set of facts, he proposes an entirely new order of fact. "It is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe." Page 402
He knows what the Stoic has always known. Real knowledge may be unattainable; the question therefore is not "What can I know?" but "How should I live?" Page 403
The perception of identity does not excuse us from acting; quietism is not the answer. Page 409
Emerson believed in equality because he believed in the adequacy of the individual, of each individual. Each great person represents, for Emerson, the full flowering of some one aspect of our common nature. Page 414
"The one good in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation." He had also learn to give everything he had to each project in turn, to hold nothing back: "What a discovery I made one day that the more I spent the more I grew." page 430
"The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away." Page 438
He was still convinced that there was a point by point correspondence between the world of mind and the world of nature. "The conclusion is irresistible," he wrote, "that what is a truth or idea in the mind is a power out there in nature." Page 450
Emerson believed in equality because he believed in the adequacy of the individual, of each individual. Each great person represents, for Emerson, the full flowering of some one aspect of our common nature. Page 414
"The one good in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation." He had also learn to give everything he had to each project in turn, to hold nothing back: "What a discovery I made one day that the more I spent the more I grew." page 430
"The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away." Page 438
He was still convinced that there was a point by point correspondence between the world of mind and the world of nature. "The conclusion is irresistible," he wrote, "that what is a truth or idea in the mind is a power out there in nature." Page 450
He felt he had lost control of his own life. He wrote soberly to Sam Ward, saying he now thought that "we belong to our life, not that it belongs to us." It was the nadir of Emerson self-reliance and self-esteem. He even felt faintly fraudulent. page 459
Though one could not predict the actions of any single individual, one could be dismayingly accurate in predicting the actions of the large number of individuals. Page 469
Emerson still believed – at least he kept repeating – that "life is an ecstasy" and that "each man is a jet of flame." But his dreams now suggest that he knew he had lost something important in Europe and that he felt that he himself was not at all what he seemed to the casual observer. Page 469
Newly kindled by Hegelian notions about history, the role of ideas in history, and the processes of consciousness, he set out on a strenuous re-examination of many of his old convictions. This reformulation will reach its full expression in Emerson's great essay "Fate." Here idealism, freedom, and melioration are only put forward after the claims of materialism, determinism, and inertia have been exhausted. This new idealism was so tempered, qualified, and intertwined with the always increasing cares of Emerson's daily life, with his experience of innumerable live audiences, and with the growing materialism of the times, that it amounts in places to a new position. It is a refracted idealism, a new idealism born of the struggle between the old idealism and the new materialism. Page 470
There is a sense of fresh energy as Emerson tested old convictions with new observations. The idea that there is a fundamental order in the physical world, that's when we get to the bottom of things reality will be found to be constructed in a manner that excludes mere randomness, took on new life for Emerson. Page 474
Somehow, Margaret's death caught him unprepared and undefended. Her loss drove him in on himself and made him intensely conscious of a side of life he usually tended to rush over. It is easy to call this consciousness a sense of tragedy, but in Emerson's case it did not have the clear form and redemptive lift of classical tragedy. He had rather a sense that something was fundamentally wrong with universe, an awareness of some elemental lack at the core of things. Page 486
His interest in these books shows his growing willingness to face that other world of experience, the world of defeat and despair, the world that was more determined and less free than Emerson hoped. Page 489
"Culture" is Emerson's essay on education. The goal of education is the fulfilled individual. "Individuality is not only not inconsistent with culture, but the basis of it," he says. Page 493
"Fate" is Emersons long deferred, full dress confrontation with the dark side of life, with evil, with indifference, with violence and savagery, with entropy and cold obstruction and rot. Page 501
There is fate, but there is also freedom. We must accept the existence of freedom just as we accept that of fate. In a seeming paradox he later explores in detail Emerson insists that freedom is necessary. We can only lead moral lives if we can choose. We can only choose if we are free to do so. "Choosing or acting in the soul is freedom." What is more interesting, freedom is also associated with thought and insight. "So far as a man thinks he is free," he says. Indeed freedom comes from thought. "Intellect annuls fate," he says. Page 502
More importantly and most characteristically Emerson now associates freedom with power, and he places the two of them in opposition to fate. "There can be no driving force," he says, "except through the conversion of the man into his will… The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will." Page 502
"History," he says, "is the action and reaction of these two, Nature and Thought." It is, he says, like "two boys pushing each other on the curbstone of the pavement." But there is not only action and reaction, stroke and recoil. There is unity and there is advance. The unity lies in the fact that the entire second column – power, thought, freedom, and will – is just as necessary, as fated, as the first column. This is the "beautiful necessity," the real order of nature, the ultimate status quo, the conviction that nature bats last. Page 503
For Emerson is at last convinced that the universe can be understood as "advance out of fate into freedom."... Emerson began by asking, "How should I lrad my life?" The answer given by the essay "Fate" is "Pursue Freedom." Freedom is as much the "beautiful necessity" as is the standing order. Page 503
In his effort to share Caroline's grief and dismay, Emerson held out what he called an "intelligent fatalism", "all the great world call their thought fatalism, or concede that ninety-nine parts are nature and one part power." Yet even in the face of suicide, that most irrefutable argument against self-reliance, Emerson could not entirely close the door, not even for consolatory purposes. This letter represents the farthest swing of Emerson's pendulum away from his belief in growth, change, and freedom toward a fatal determinism. It must be taken seriously, even if it is in a letter of condolence and not in a public lecture. Yet even here he does not abandon freedom and self-reliance; what he does is recalculate and drastically reduce the odds operating in their favor. Page 514
"We live," he says, "by our imaginations, by our admiration, by our sentiment," and it is sobering to discover how much of what is most important to us is illusion. We are easy prey for these "deceptions of the senses, deceptions of the passions, and the structural beneficent delusions of sentiment and intellect." Page 537
Optimism is a weak, almost useless word for this kind of perception. "There is," said Whitman, "apart from intellect… an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, an incredible make-believe and general unsettledness we call the world; a soul-light of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of a hunter. Of such soul-sight and root center for the mind, mere optimism explains only the surface. Page 538
At the center of Emerson's life and work is a core of these perceptions,.… When the storms of illusion clear, in the moments at the top of the mountain, these of the perceptions that Emerson retains:
The days are gods. That is, everything is divine.
Creation is continuous. There is no other world; this one is all there is. Every day is the day of judgment.
The purpose of life is individual self cultivation, self expression, and fulfillment.
Poetry liberates. Thought is also free.
The powers of the soul are commensurate with its needs; each new day challenges us with its adequacy and our own.
Fundamental perceptions are intuitive and inarguable; all important truths, whether of physics or ethics, must at last be self-evident.
Nothing great is ever accomplished without enthusiasm.
Life is an ecstasy; Thoreau has it right when he says, "Surely joy is the condition of life."
Criticism and commentary, if they are not in the service of enthusiasm and ecstasy, are idle at best, destructive at worst. Your work, as Ruskin says, should be the praise of what you love. Page 538
The personal consequence of such perceptions was an almost intolerable awareness that every morning began with infinite promise. Any book may be read, any idea thought, any action taken. Anything that has ever been possible to human beings is possible to most of us every [day.].… Each of us has all the time there is; each accepts those invitations he can discern. By the same token, each evening brings a reckoning of infinite regret for the paths refused, openings not seen, and actions not taken. Page 539
"But one of these days, before I die, I still believe I shall do better." Page 539
"This day for all that is good and fair. It is too dear with its hopes and invitations to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays." Page 543
Memory is "the thread on which the beads of a man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral action." Page 543
Sometime in 1859 Emerson wrote, "I have now for more than a year, I believe, ceased to write in my journal, in which I formerly wrote almost daily – I see few intellectual persons, and even those to no purpose, and sometimes believe that I have no new thoughts, and that my life is quite at an end." Page 545
Everything that lives, said Santayana, is tragic in its fate, comic in its existence, and lyric in its ideal essence. Page 558
"Each man is conscious of a heaven within him, a realm of undiscovered sciences, of slumbering potencies, a heaven of which the feats of talent are no measure; it arches like a sky over all that it has done, all that has been done." Page 561