Natural history of intellect, and other papersEmerson, Ralph Waldo
Philosophy
Natural history of intellect, and other papers
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
American essays -- 19th century; Boston (Mass.); Intellect; Memory; Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475-1564; Milton, John, 1608-1674
The spiritual power of man is twofold, mind and heart, Intellect and
morals; one respecting truth, the other the will. One is the man,
the other the woman in spiritual nature. One is power, the other is
love. These elements always coexist in every normal individual, but
one predominates. And as each is easily exalted in our thoughts till
it serves to fill the universe and become the synonym of God, the
soul in which one predominates is ever watchful and jealous when such
immense claims are made for one as seem injurious to the other. Ideal
and practical, like ecliptic and equator, are never parallel. Each
has its vices, its proper dangers, obvious enough when the opposite
element is deficient.
Intellect is skeptical, runs down into talent, selfish working for
private ends, conceited, ostentatious and malignant. On the other
side the clear-headed thinker complains of souls led hither and
thither by affections which, alone, are blind guides and thriftless
workmen, and in the confusion asks the polarity of intellect. But all
great minds and all great hearts have mutually allowed the absolute
necessity of the twain.
If the first rule is to obey your genius, in the second place the
good mind is known by the choice of what is positive, of what is
advancing. We must embrace the affirmative. But the affirmative of
affirmatives is love. _Quantus amor tantus animus._ Strength enters
as the moral element enters. Lovers of men are as safe as the sun.
Goodwill makes insight. Sensibility is the secret readiness to
believe in all kinds of power, and the contempt of any experience we
have not is the opposite pole. The measure of mental health is the
disposition to find good everywhere, good and order, analogy, health
and benefit,—the love of truth, tendency to be in the right, no
fighter for victory, no cockerel.
We have all of us by nature a certain divination and parturient
vaticination in our minds of some higher good and perfection than
either power or knowledge. Knowledge is plainly to be preferred
before power, as being that which guides and directs its blind force
and impetus; but Aristotle declares that the origin of reason is not
reason but something better.
The height of culture, the highest behavior, consists in the
identification of the Ego with the universe; so that when a man says
I hope, I find, I think, he might properly say, The human race thinks
or finds or hopes. And meantime he shall be able continually to keep
sight of his biographical Ego,—I have a desk, I have an office, I am
hungry, I had an ague,—as rhetoric or offset to his grand spiritual
Ego, without impertinence, or ever confounding them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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