Miscellanies : $b embracing Nature, addresses, and lecturesEmerson, Ralph Waldo
Philosophy
Miscellanies : $b embracing Nature, addresses, and lectures
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
American essays -- 19th century; Philosophy of nature; Transcendentalism (New England)
its mountains in the vast West? I praise with wonder this great reality,
which seems to drown all things in the deluge of its light. What man
seeing this, can lose it from his thoughts, or entertain a meaner
subject? The entrance of this into his mind seems to be the birth of
man. We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know
that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which
house to-day in this mortal frame, shall ever re-assemble in equal
activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a natural
history like that of this body you see before you; but this one thing I
know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick
with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that they circulate
through the Universe: before the world was, they were. Nothing can bar
them out, or shut them in, but they penetrate the ocean and land, space
and time, form and essence, and hold the key to universal nature. I draw
from this faith courage and hope. All things are known to the soul. It
is not to be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater than
it. Let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in her native
realm, and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich
as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn; they
are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goes out
through universal love to universal power.
MAN THE REFORMER.
A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE MECHANICS’ APPRENTICES’ LIBRARY ASSOCIATION,
BOSTON, JANUARY 25, 1841.
MAN THE REFORMER.
MR. PRESIDENT, AND GENTLEMEN,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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