Compensation : $b Being an essay as written by Ralph Waldo EmersonEmerson, Ralph Waldo
Philosophy
Compensation : $b Being an essay as written by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
American essays -- 19th century
This Law writes the laws of cities and nations. It will not be balked
of its end in the smallest iota. It is in vain to build or plot
or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. _Res
nolunt diu male administrari._ Though no checks to a new evil appear,
the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel, the
governor’s life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will
yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will
not convict. Nothing arbitrary, nothing artificial can endure. The
true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost rigors
or felicities of condition, and to establish themselves with great
indifferency under all varieties of circumstance. Under all governments
the influence of character remains the same,--in Turkey and New England
about alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly
confesses that man must have been as free as culture could make him.
These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented
in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the
powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the
naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a
horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying
man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main
character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims,
furtherances, hindrances, energies and whole system of every other.
Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world
and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human
life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its
end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man and recite all
his destiny.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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