Lectures and biographical sketchesEmerson, Ralph Waldo
Philosophy
Lectures and biographical sketches
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
American essays -- 19th century; Speeches, addresses, etc., American -- 19th century
As every wind draws music out of the Æolian harp, so doth every object
in Nature draw music out of his mind. Is it not true that every
landscape I behold, every friend I meet, every act I perform, every
pain I suffer, leaves me a different being from that they found me?
That poverty, love, authority, anger, sickness, sorrow, success, all
work actively upon our being and unlock for us the concealed faculties
of the mind? Whatever private or petty ends are frustrated, this end is
always answered. Whatever the man does, or whatever befalls him, opens
another chamber in his soul,--that is, he has got a new feeling, a new
thought, a new organ. Do we not see how amazingly for this end man is
fitted to the world?
What leads him to science? Why does he track in the midnight heaven a
pure spark, a luminous patch wandering from age to age, but because
he acquires thereby a majestic sense of power; learning that in his
own constitution he can set the shining maze in order, and finding
and carrying their law in his mind, can, as it were, see his simple
idea realized up yonder in giddy distances and frightful periods of
duration. If Newton come and first of men perceive that not alone
certain bodies fall to the ground at a certain rate, but that all
bodies in the Universe, the universe of bodies, fall always, and at one
rate; that every atom in nature draws to every other atom,--he extends
the power of his mind not only over every cubic atom of his native
planet, but he reports the condition of millions of worlds which his
eye never saw. And what is the charm which every ore, every new plant,
every new fact touching winds, clouds, ocean currents, the secrets of
chemical composition and decomposition possess for Humboldt? What but
that much revolving of similar facts in his mind has shown him that
always the mind contains in its transparent chambers the means of
classifying the most refractory phenomena, of depriving them of all
casual and chaotic aspect, and subordinating them to a bright reason
of its own, and so giving to man a sort of property,--yea, the very
highest property in every district and particle of the globe.
By the permanence of Nature, minds are trained alike, and made
intelligible to each other. In our condition are the roots of language
and communication, and these instructions we never exhaust.
In some sort the end of life is that the man should take up
the universe into himself, or out of that quarry leave nothing
unrepresented. Yonder mountain must migrate into his mind. Yonder
magnificent astronomy he is at last to import, fetching away moon, and
planet, solstice, period, comet and binal star, by comprehending their
relation and law. Instead of the timid stripling he was, he is to be
the stalwart Archimedes, Pythagoras, Columbus, Newton, of the physic,
metaphysic and ethics of the design of the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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