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)
They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in
self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to
guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow,
unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in
their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of
all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But
he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars
of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such,--watching
days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old
records;--must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period
of his preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness
in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him
aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for
the dead. Worse yet, he must accept,--how often! poverty and solitude.
For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the
fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of
making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart,
the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and
tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the
state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and
especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what
offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of
human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations,
and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the
world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. He is to resist the vulgar
prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and
communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and
the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all
emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the
world of actions,--these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new
verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men
and events of to-day,--this he shall hear and promulgate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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