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)
The student, as we all along insist, is great only by being passive to
the superincumbent spirit. Let this faith, then, dictate all his action.
Snares and bribes abound to mislead him; let him be true nevertheless.
His success has its perils too. There is somewhat inconvenient and
injurious in his position. They whom his thoughts have entertained or
inflamed, seek him before yet they have learned the hard conditions of
thought. They seek him, that he may turn his lamp on the dark riddles
whose solution they think is inscribed on the walls of their being. They
find that he is a poor, ignorant man, in a white-seamed, rusty coat,
like themselves, no wise emitting a continuous stream of light, but now
and then a jet of luminous thought, followed by total darkness;
moreover, that he cannot make of his infrequent illumination a portable
taper to carry whither he would, and explain now this dark riddle, now
that. Sorrow ensues. The scholar regrets to damp the hope of ingenuous
boys; and the youth has lost a star out of his new flaming firmament.
Hence the temptation to the scholar to mystify; to hear the question;
to sit upon it; to make an answer of words, in lack of the oracle of
things. Not the less let him be cold and true, and wait in patience,
knowing that truth can make even silence eloquent and memorable. Truth
shall be policy enough for him. Let him open his breast to all honest
inquiry, and be an artist superior to tricks of art. Show frankly as a
saint would do, your experience, methods, tools, and means. Welcome all
comers to the freest use of the same. And out of this superior frankness
and charity, you shall learn higher secrets of your nature, which gods
will bend and aid you to communicate.
If, with a high trust, he can thus submit himself, he will find that
ample returns are poured into his bosom, out of what seemed hours of
obstruction and loss. Let him not grieve too much on account of unfit
associates. When he sees how much thought he owes to the disagreeable
antagonism of various persons who pass and cross him, he can easily
think that in a society of perfect sympathy, no word, no act, no record,
would be. He will learn, that it is not much matter what he reads, what
he does. Be a scholar, and he shall have the scholar’s part of every
thing. As, in the counting-room, the merchant cares little whether the
cargo be hides or barilla; the transaction, a letter of credit or a
transfer of stocks; be it what it may, his commission comes gently out
of it; so you shall get your lesson out of the hour, and the object,
whether it be a concentrated or a wasteful employment, even in reading a
dull book, or working off a stint of mechanical day labor, which your
necessities or the necessities of others impose.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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