The Spiritual Emerson Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - Self -Reliance

  Chapter 2 - Compensation

  Chapter 3 - Spiritual Laws

  Chapter 4 - The Over-Soul

  Chapter 5 - Circles

  Chapter 6 - Fate

  Chapter 7 - Success

  Bibliographical Information

  About the Author

  THE TARCHER CORNERSTONE EDITIONS

  Tao Te Ching

  by Lao Tzu, translated by Jonathan Star

  The Essential Marcus Aurelius

  newly translated and introduced

  by Jacob Needleman and John P. Piazza

  Accept This Gift: Selections from A Course in Miracles

  edited by Frances Vaughan, Ph.D., and Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D.

  foreword by Marianne Williamson

  The Kybalion

  by Three Initiates

  The Spiritual Emerson:

  Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson

  introduction by Jacob Needleman

  JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York

  JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882.

  The spiritual Emerson : essential works / by Ralph Waldo Emerson ; introduction

  by Jacob Needleman.

  p. cm.

  Self-reliance—Compensation—Spiritual laws—The over-soul—Circles—Fate—Success.

  eISBN : 978-1-4406-3828-2

  I. Title.

  PS1602.N

  814’.3—dc22

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  Introduction

  JACOB NEEDLEMAN

  Ralph Waldo Emerson: Why do we need him now? He brings no scientific discoveries, no technological breakthroughs, no blueprints for economic or social change, no programs of political action. Yet our personal lives and the life of our world may now depend on grasping, really grasping, the importance of what this great nineteenth-century American thinker is trying to show us.

  As a college professor, I have had the privilege of introducing hundreds of young people to the work of Emerson, and each time the result has been astonishing. In an era of instant electronic communication and imaging, I had feared that they would experience difficulty with the measured flow of his long thoughts on the printed page. And I was nervous about whether they could take in his vision of the living universe and the mystic core of human nature; or follow his effort to bring this spiritual vision to everything that concerns our common life, be it ethics, politics, religion, money, power, love—everything. I was nervous because of the deeply implanted despair of the modern mind that can see in nature and human life only mechanisms devoid of conscious origin or purpose. And that same modern mind masks its despair with scientific or theological ideologies, or with lonely, futile, haphazard efforts to express something, anything, and then call it art or truth.

  But I need not have feared. Rarely have I seen students of any age or preparation work with such voluntary intensity. The classroom often became a volcano overflowing with burning questions. But what touched me most was the quality of stillness that descended after a passage from Emerson’s essays was read aloud. One almost never encounters that kind of silence in the world we now live in.

  Once, on the last day of class, I asked them what it was about Emerson that so passionately interested them. Their answer took me by surprise—and in fact I did not understand it rightly at the moment. After a rather long pause, several people started to speak. “He brought me hope,” said one. At that, a feeling of assent rippled through the class.

  Only later did I recognize what kind of hope this was and how important—essential even—it is for our lives and our world. We are not speaking here of anything as simplistic as the prediction of favorable future events, which mollifies the frightened ego. Emerson never descends to that. Nor is it even a matter of the metaphysical content of Emerson’s thought, though that is quite important. It is not a matter solely of his vision of the universe as governed by moral and spiritual laws which can be discovered only by the moral or spiritual mind. Many philosophers and great thinkers have offered high visions of reality and our potential power of knowing the truth and willing the good-but few of them now touch the nerve of hope that is touched by the essays of Emerson. We have to seek elsewhere for the meaning of this hope.

  To put it simply: Reading Emerson can awaken a part of the psyche that our culture has suppressed. And when this part of our human nature makes itself known to us, we are, for that moment, no longer hypnotized by the black dream of a dead universe or the hellish dream of a vain and angry God. Nor, for that moment, are we under the spell of sullen illusions or arrogant fantasies about what human beings are and what they can become: illusions that deny the true metaphysical nobility of man; fantasies that blind us to how far we actually are from that nobility.

  The appearance of this element of objective hope within ourselves is not the appearance of a concept, an idea, an image, an ambition, a hypothesis, a naïve belief. It is the awakening of an actual energy that for a brief moment pours through every cell and tissue of the human heart and the human body. To awaken this hope and then to think boldly and carefully about what it implies about us and the crisis of our world is the most essential function of real philosophy, of great ideas and great questions, greatly expressed. The experience of this hope is for many of us the first real step toward d
iscovering the great work leading toward genuine inner change. This great work is not the task of the philosophers, but it is the ancient office of philosophy to magnetize the heart and mind— as the needle of a compass is magnetized. After which, so the legends tell us, a door is found, a path is discovered—or, perhaps more accurately, discovers us, finds us.

  Emerson’s writings honor our search for how to conduct ourselves amid the tensions and tribulations of everyday life, while calling us to something in ourselves that both transcends and heals the wounds that the friction of life inflicts on us. Hearing what he is telling us, can we any longer believe in our ordinary selves? Can we any longer believe that war; injustice; intolerance; the brutalization of nature; the coarsening of love; the all-pervading marketing of lies, illusions, and agitation; the exploitation of scientific knowledge in the service of greed, fanaticism, hatred, and fear—can any of us any longer believe that it is within our ordinary power, as we presently exist, to oppose or even lessen the forces generating all that now threatens our world and our individual lives? In a state of tormented wonder we stand in front of man’s inability to break free from the ironclad repetition of history, the endless violence—which now portends its final reprise under the cloud of planetary destruction. Do we still really hope in the ordinary mind, the ordinary heart, the ordinary senses? Or are we at last ready to accept the idea that what is needed is a new human being, new men and women. Are we at last ready to accept the possibility that we are not yet human beings in anything like the real meaning of that term?

  The quality of hope that Emerson awakens in us is a clear response to that question. That hope, with its specific energy, is evidence of a great inner reality calling us to go beyond hope—toward the work of actually becoming what we are meant to be: fully human.

  Jacob Needleman is the author of books including Why Can’t We Be Good?, The American Soul, and Money and the Meaning of Life. He is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University and former director of the Center for the Study of New Religions at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

  1

  Self -Reliance

  SELF-RELIANCE

  “Ne te quæsiveris extra.”

  Man is his own star; and the soul that can

  Render an honest and a perfect man,

  Commands all light, all influence, all fate;

  Nothing to him falls early or too late.

  Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,

  Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.

  —Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune.

  Cast the bantling on the rocks,

  Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat,

  Wintered with the hawk and fox,

  Power and speed be hands and feet.

  Self-Reliance

  I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses withoutnotice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

  There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preëstablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

  Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

  What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it; so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.

  The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as it were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with éclat he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges and, having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence,—must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men and put them in
fear.

  These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

  Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, “What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?” my friend suggested,—“But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.’ Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;—though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.