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)
Nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles
of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike
ephemeral.
Gentlemen, the development of our American internal resources, the
extension to the utmost of the commercial system, and the appearance of
new moral causes which are to modify the state, are giving an aspect of
greatness to the Future, which the imagination fears to open. One thing
is plain for all men of common sense and common conscience, that here,
here in America, is the home of man. After all the deductions which are
to be made for our pitiful politics, which stake every gravest national
question on the silly die, whether James or whether Jonathan shall sit
in the chair and hold the purse; after all the deduction is made for our
frivolities and insanities, there still remains an organic simplicity
and liberty, which, when it loses its balance, redresses itself
presently, which offers opportunity to the human mind not known in any
other region.
It is true, the public mind wants self-respect. We are full of vanity,
of which the most signal proof is our sensitiveness to foreign and
especially English censure. One cause of this is our immense reading,
and that reading chiefly confined to the productions of the English
press. It is also true, that, to imaginative persons in this country,
there is somewhat bare and bald in our short history, and unsettled
wilderness. They ask, who would live in a new country, that can live in
an old? and it is not strange that our youths and maidens should burn to
see the picturesque extremes of an antiquated country. But it is one
thing to visit the pyramids, and another to wish to live there. Would
they like tithes to the clergy, and sevenths to the government, and
horse-guards, and licensed press, and grief when a child is born, and
threatening, starved weavers, and a pauperism now constituting
one-thirteenth of the population? Instead of the open future expanding
here before the eye of every boy to vastness, would they like the
closing in of the future to a narrow slit of sky, and that fast
contracting to be no future? One thing, for instance, the beauties of
aristocracy, we commend to the study of the travelling American. The
English, the most conservative people this side of India, are not
sensible of the restraint, but an American would seriously resent it.
The aristocracy, incorporated by law and education, degrades life for
the unprivileged classes. It is a questionable compensation to the
embittered feeling of a proud commoner, the reflection that a fop, who,
by the magic of title, paralyzes his arm, and plucks from him half the
graces and rights of a man, is himself also an aspirant excluded with
the same ruthlessness from higher circles, since there is no end to the
wheels within wheels of this spiral heaven. Something may be pardoned to
the spirit of loyalty when it becomes fantastic; and something to the
imagination, for the baldest life is symbolic. Philip II.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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