Self-Reliance and Other Essays

History

There is one single mind that connects all people. Every person is a doorway to this same, shared mind.

When you learn to reason and think clearly, you gain access to everything this mind knows.

• What the great thinker Plato thought, you can think.
• What a holy person felt, you can feel.
• Whatever has happened to anyone, anytime, you can understand.

If you connect with this universal mind, you become part of everything that exists or could ever happen. This shared mind is the true power behind everything.

History: The Story of the Universal Mind

History is simply the record of what this universal mind has done. The story of all time shows its genius.

To understand a person, you need to understand all of human history. The human spirit slowly but surely expresses every ability, thought, and feeling it holds through the events of history.

But the idea always comes before the action. All the events in history first existed as ideas or laws in the mind. These laws become visible one by one as circumstances allow. Nature’s limits mean only one main idea can shape events at a time.

You Contain All of History

Think of it this way: You are like a walking encyclopedia of all facts.

• Just as a single acorn holds the potential for a thousand forests…
• …the histories of Egypt, Greece, Rome, France, Britain, and America were already contained within the very first human being.

Different periods of history – like camps, kingdoms, empires, republics, democracies – are just different ways this powerful human spirit has shown itself in the world.

Understanding History Through Yourself

The same human mind that created history is the only thing that can truly understand it. It’s like the Sphinx needing to solve her own riddle.

If all of history exists within one person, then we can understand history by looking at our own lives and experiences.

There’s a deep connection between your daily life and the grand sweep of centuries.

• The air you breathe comes from the vast atmosphere.
• The light you read by comes from a distant star.
• Your body stays balanced because of large cosmic forces.

In the same way, your everyday moments can teach you about the ages, and the ages can be understood through your everyday moments.

Every individual person is a new expression of the universal mind. All its qualities exist within you.

• Each new thing you learn from your own life sheds light on the actions of large groups of people in the past.
• The major challenges in your life echo the major crises nations have faced.

Every revolution started as a thought in one person’s mind. When you have that same thought, you understand that historical era. Every reform was once just someone’s private opinion. When it becomes your private opinion too, you grasp the solution to that time’s problems.

For a historical story to make sense or feel real, it must connect to something inside you. As we read, we need to imagine ourselves as the people we read about:

• Become Greeks or Romans or Turks.
• Imagine being a priest or a king, a martyr or an executioner.

We must link these historical figures and events to something real in our own inner experience. Otherwise, we won’t truly learn anything. What happened to ancient figures like Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia shows the same human powers and failings that exist within us today.

Every new law or political change has meaning for you. Look at each historical event and realize, “This was one way my own flexible human nature expressed itself.”

This approach stops us from being too caught up in our immediate selves. It gives us perspective on our own actions. Just like ordinary things (crabs, goats, scales) gain significance when seen as zodiac signs, you can view your own flaws more calmly when you see them in distant historical figures like Solomon, Alcibiades, or Catiline.

The Value Comes from Our Shared Nature

It’s our shared, universal human nature that gives importance to specific people and events. Because human life contains this universal element, we see it as mysterious and precious, and we protect it with laws and consequences.

All laws ultimately come from this idea. They all express, in some way, a command from this supreme, limitless core of being. Even the concept of property is tied to the soul; it represents deep spiritual ideas. We instinctively defend property strongly because it connects to this deeper value.

This vague awareness of our connection to the universal mind is the driving force behind everything we do.

• It’s the reason we value education, justice, and charity.
• It’s the foundation of friendship and love.
• It’s the source of bravery and greatness in acts of self-reliance.

It’s interesting how we naturally read about history and literature as if we belong in those grand situations. When we read about palaces, triumphs of willpower, or strokes of genius, we don’t feel like outsiders. We don’t feel like it’s only for “better” people. Instead, it’s in these most impressive moments that we often feel most connected, most at home.

Even a young boy reading Shakespeare feels that what is said about a king is somehow true for himself. We connect deeply with history’s great moments – the discoveries, the struggles, the successes – because we feel that those actions were done for us. We sense that if we had been there, we would have done the same thing or cheered it on.

Connecting with Character and Condition

We feel the same connection when reading about people’s situations and characters.

• We respect the wealthy, not just for their money, but because they seem to have the freedom, power, and ease that we feel should belong to all humans – including ourselves.
• When philosophers or writers describe a “wise person,” each reader recognizes their own ideal self – the person they haven’t become yet, but could.

All literature, in a way, describes this ideal wise person. Books, monuments, paintings, and conversations are like portraits where we find parts of the character we are trying to build in ourselves. Both silence and speech seem to praise this ideal. Wherever we go, we feel nudged towards it, as if by personal hints.

Therefore, someone truly trying to improve doesn’t need specific praise directed at them. They hear encouragement for the character they aspire to – which is even better than personal praise – in every discussion about character, and even in everyday things like a flowing river or rustling corn. Nature itself seems to offer praise, respect, and love through mountains and stars.

Read History Actively

Let’s take these ideas, which might seem like nighttime thoughts, and use them in the clear light of day.

A student should read history actively, not just passively absorb it.

• Think of your own life as the main text.
• Think of history books as the commentary that helps explain your text.

When you approach history this way, respecting your own experience, the spirit of history will reveal deep truths – truths it never shows to those who don’t value their own lives.

I don’t believe anyone can read history correctly if they think that events from long ago, involving famous people, have a deeper meaning than what they are doing right now, today.

Your Life Contains All History

The world exists to teach and develop each individual person. There is no time period, type of society, or way of acting in history that doesn’t have some connection to your own life.

Everything in history, in a wonderful way, tends to condense itself and offer its essential lesson to you. You should realize that you can experience all of history within yourself.

You must stand firm in your own experience. Don’t let yourself be pushed around by the reputation of kings or empires. Know that you, as an individual with access to the universal mind, are more important than all the world’s geography and governments.

You need to change the usual perspective on history. Stop looking at it from the viewpoint of Rome, Athens, or London. Look at it from your own viewpoint. Trust your conviction that you are the judge. If England or Egypt has something relevant to say to you, listen. If not, let them be silent.

You must reach and hold onto a higher perspective where historical facts reveal their hidden, deeper meanings. From this viewpoint, poetry and historical records become equally meaningful.

The mind’s natural instinct, the purpose of nature itself, is shown in how we use the great stories of history. Time dissolves the hard edges of facts, turning them into something lighter, more symbolic. No anchor or fence can keep a fact purely factual forever.

• Ancient places like Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are already becoming more like legends than strict history.
• Stories like the Garden of Eden or the sun standing still are now understood as poetry by everyone.

Who really cares about the exact historical fact once we’ve turned it into a symbolic star in the sky, an immortal sign? London, Paris, and New York will eventually go the same way, becoming symbols and stories.

Napoleon asked, “What is History but a fable agreed upon?” Our lives are surrounded by history – Egypt, Greece, France, England, War, Exploration, Church, Government, Business – like flowers and ornaments decorating our world. But don’t make too much of the external details.

Believe in the Eternal, the timeless principles. You can find the essence of Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and all eras within your own mind.

History is Personal Experience

We constantly encounter the key themes of history in our own private lives and confirm their truth there. All history becomes subjective – meaning, it’s really about your personal understanding. In a way, there is no objective “History,” only individual “Biography.”

Every mind has to learn the whole lesson for itself. You must cover the ground personally.

• What you don’t see for yourself, you won’t know.
• What you don’t experience or live through, you won’t understand.

If a past age summarized something into a simple rule for convenience, you lose the benefit of discovering it yourself if you just accept the rule without question. Sooner or later, you’ll feel that loss and need to do the work yourself to truly understand. Ferguson, the astronomer, rediscovered many things that were already known – and that was good for him, because he learned them firsthand.

Understanding the ‘Why’

History must connect to personal understanding, or it is worthless. Every law a state passes points to some fact about human nature – that’s its core meaning.

We must look within ourselves to see the necessary reason behind every historical fact – to see how and why it had to happen that way. Apply this approach to everything:

• A powerful speech by Burke
• A victory by Napoleon
• The martyrdom of Sir Thomas More or others
• Events like the French Reign of Terror or the Salem witch trials
• Periods of religious fanaticism or strange social trends

Assume that if you were in the same situation, you would be affected similarly and might act similarly. Try to mentally grasp the steps involved and understand how people reached those heights or depths. You are trying to understand your fellow human, who acts as your representative in history.

Connecting Past and Present

All investigation into ancient times – our curiosity about the Pyramids, buried cities, Stonehenge, ancient mounds, Mexico, Memphis – comes from a desire to bridge the gap between the strange, distant “There” or “Then” and introduce the familiar “Here” and “Now.”

When an explorer like Belzoni digs in the tombs of Thebes, he measures and studies until he understands the people who built these massive structures. He seeks to close the gap between their “monstrous work” and himself.

• Once he convinces himself that people like him, with similar tools and motivations, built these things for reasons he can understand, the mystery is solved.
• His mind can then follow the whole line of temples, sphinxes, and tombs with understanding. They become alive again in his mind, or rather, they become part of the present.

Understanding Creations Through Their Creators

A Gothic cathedral can feel like it was made by us (humans) but not by us (modern individuals). It seems beyond our own capabilities. But we can understand it by studying how it was made.

• We put ourselves in the builder’s situation.
• We think about the early forest dwellers, the first simple temples, how designs were repeated, and how decoration increased as wealth grew.
• We see how carving wood led eventually to carving entire stone cathedrals.
• We add the context of the Catholic Church – its symbols, music, rituals, and beliefs.

By going through this mental process, it’s as if we become the person who built the cathedral. We see how it could happen and why it had to be that way. We find the “sufficient reason.”

Seeing Deeper Connections

People differ in how they group things together.

• Some people focus on surface details: color, size, appearance.
• Others look for deeper connections: inner similarity, or cause and effect.

Intellectual growth involves developing a clearer vision of causes, which allows you to look past surface differences. To someone with deep insight (a poet, philosopher, or saint), everything seems connected and meaningful:

• All things are friendly and sacred.
• All events offer lessons.
• All days are holy.
• All people have a divine spark.

This is because their attention is fixed on the underlying life or cause, ignoring the temporary circumstances. Every substance, plant, and animal teaches us about the unity of cause behind the variety of appearances.

Beyond Forms and Figures

We are supported and surrounded by this creative nature, which is as soft and changeable as a cloud or the air. So why should we be rigid thinkers, obsessed with just a few specific forms? Why should we place so much importance on time, size, or shape?

The soul, the deep inner self, isn’t concerned with these things. Genius, following the soul’s lead, knows how to treat these limitations playfully, like a child playing among serious adults.

Genius focuses on the causal thought, the original idea. It looks deep into the origin of things and sees how rays of light, starting from one point, spread out in countless directions.

• Genius sees the single, unchanging core (the monad) behind all its different masks as it changes forms throughout nature.
• Genius recognizes the constant individual through the stages of fly, caterpillar, grub, and egg.
• It sees the stable species through countless individuals.
• It sees the genus through many species.
• It sees the enduring type through all genera.
• It perceives the eternal unity underlying all kingdoms of life.

Nature is like a constantly changing cloud – always and never the same. She expresses the same core idea in countless different forms, just like a poet might write twenty different stories to illustrate one single moral. A subtle spirit shapes all matter, no matter how rough or resistant, bending it to its will. Even the hardest diamond takes on soft, precise forms before this spirit, and these forms change even as we watch.

Form is incredibly fleeting, yet it never completely loses its connection to its origin. In humans, we can still see traces or hints of features found in simpler life forms. Yet, in humans, these traces often enhance nobility and grace. Think of the myth of Io, who was turned into a cow – an image that might seem awkward. But when she appears later as the goddess Isis in Egypt, she is a beautiful woman, with only small horns left as a reminder of her transformation, now appearing as a splendid ornament.

History: Unity and Diversity

History works the same way. Its underlying identity is just as real, and its surface diversity is just as clear.

• On the surface, there’s an infinite variety of events and people.
• At the core, there’s a simplicity of cause, a unifying principle.

Think about how many different actions one person takes, yet we recognize the same character running through them all.

Consider how we learn about the ancient Greeks:

1. Civil History: Historians like Herodotus and Thucydides tell us who they were and what they did.
2. Literature: Their epics, poems, plays, and philosophy express the same national mind in a different form.
3. Architecture: Buildings like the Parthenon show their spirit through clean lines and balanced proportions – like geometry made solid.
4. Sculpture: Their statues express freedom and action while maintaining a sense of ideal calm, like dancers performing a sacred ritual.

So, we have four different views of the Greek spirit. To our senses, what could be more different than a Pindar poem, a marble centaur statue, the columns of the Parthenon, and the final deeds of the statesman Phocion? Yet, they all express the same underlying Greek genius.

Recognizing Deep Similarities

Everyone has surely seen faces or forms that, despite having no features in common, create a similar impression. A specific painting or poem might evoke the same feeling as a walk in the mountains, even though the resemblance isn’t obvious to the senses. The connection is hidden, beyond simple understanding.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of just a few basic laws. She hums the same familiar tune through countless variations.

Nature is full of a profound family likeness throughout all her creations. She often surprises us with similarities in unexpected places.

• I’ve seen the head of an old Native American chief that instantly reminded me of a bare mountain peak, his brow’s furrows like layers of rock.
• Some people have manners with the same simple, impressive quality found in ancient Greek sculptures.
• Writings with the same essential spirit can be found in books from all different ages.
• Guido Reni’s painting “Aurora” (Dawn) feels like a “morning thought,” and the horses in it seem like morning clouds.

If you pay attention to the different activities you feel drawn to in certain moods, and those you dislike, you’ll see how deep these connections (affinities) run.

Understanding Through Empathy

A painter told me that to draw a tree well, you have to, in some sense, become a tree. You can’t draw a child just by copying outlines; you have to watch the child play, enter into their nature, and then you can draw them accurately in any pose. Similarly, the painter Roos was said to have “entered into the inmost nature of a sheep.”

I knew a mapmaker who found he couldn’t sketch rock formations accurately until someone explained their geological structure to him first.

Very different works of art or creation can spring from the same state of mind. It is the spirit or understanding that is the same, not the outward fact. The artist gains the power to inspire similar feelings or activities in others not primarily through technical skill, but through a deeper grasp of the subject’s essence.

The Power of Being

It’s been said that “common souls pay with what they do; nobler souls with that which they are.” Why? Because a person of deep character awakens the same sense of power and beauty in us through their actions, words, looks, and manners – just as a gallery of great sculptures or paintings does.

Conclusion: All History is Personal

All forms of history – the history of societies, nature, art, and literature – must be explained through individual experience, or they remain just empty words.

Everything is related to us; everything holds potential interest for us – whether it’s a kingdom, a college, a tree, a horse, or an iron horseshoe. The roots of all things are found in the human experience.

Famous landmarks like the Santa Croce church or St. Peter’s Basilica are just imperfect copies inspired by a divine, internal model. Strasburg Cathedral is a physical manifestation of the soul of its architect, Erwin of Steinbach.

The real poem exists in the poet’s mind. The real ship is the idea in the shipbuilder’s head.

If we could truly see inside a creator, we would understand the reason behind every tiny detail of their work. It’s like how every pattern and color on a seashell already exists within the creature that made it.

Good manners contain the essence of all nobility and ceremony. A person with truly fine manners can say your name in a way that gives it more honor than any fancy title ever could.

Everyday Clues to Deeper Truths

The small things we experience every day often confirm old ideas or sayings we hadn’t paid attention to before. They turn words and symbols into real things.

For example, a woman I rode with in the woods once told me the forest always felt like it was waiting. It seemed as if the spirits living there paused their activities until travelers passed by. This feeling connects to old poems and stories about fairies whose dancing stops when humans approach.

Anyone who has seen the full moon suddenly appear from behind clouds at midnight has witnessed something like the creation of light itself.

I remember one summer day when a friend pointed out a long, flat cloud. It looked exactly like the paintings of cherubs (angels) you see in churches – a round shape in the middle for the face, with long, symmetrical wings on each side. What appears once in the sky can appear again. That cloud shape was probably the original model, the archetype, for that common symbol.

I’ve seen chains of summer lightning that instantly showed me where the ancient Greeks got the idea for the thunderbolt held by their god Jove. I’ve seen how snowdrifts pile up against stone walls in a shape that clearly inspired the curved stone supports (scrolls) used in architecture.

Nature Inspires Design

By thinking about the original environments people lived in, we can rediscover how architectural styles and decorations developed. We see how different cultures simply decorated their first, basic homes.

• The classic Greek Doric temple still looks a bit like the simple wooden cabin the early Dorians lived in.
• The Chinese pagoda clearly resembles a Tartar tent.
• Ancient Indian and Egyptian temples show connections to the burial mounds and underground houses of their ancestors.

An expert on Ethiopia, Heeren, noted that the practice of carving homes and tombs directly into cliffs naturally led to the huge, colossal style of Nubian and Egyptian architecture. Living in these giant natural caves made people used to massive shapes. When they started building artificially, small designs would have looked out of place. Statues and porches of normal size would seem tiny next to gigantic halls that needed colossal statues as guardians.

Forests Inspire Cathedrals

The Gothic church style clearly began as a rough attempt to copy forest trees, using their branches to create arches for festivals or ceremonies. You can still see bands around some pillars in cathedrals, reminding us of the green branches that were likely tied together in the original structures.

Anyone walking through a pine forest, especially in winter, will be struck by how much the trees look like architecture. When other trees are bare, the low, arched branches of pines resemble the Saxon architectural arch.

On a winter afternoon in the woods, you can easily see the inspiration for stained-glass windows. The colors of the sunset seen through the network of bare branches look just like the windows in Gothic cathedrals.

Anyone who loves nature and visits the old buildings of Oxford or English cathedrals feels that the forest deeply influenced the builders. Their tools seem to have recreated the shapes of ferns, flowers, and trees like locust, elm, oak, pine, fir, and spruce in the stone itself.

The Gothic cathedral is like stone blooming into flower, shaped by the deep human need for harmony. A mountain of granite transforms into an eternal blossom. It has the lightness, delicate details, grand scale, and perspective found in the beauty of plants.

Connecting the Public and Private

In the same way that nature inspires design, we should connect big public events to our individual lives. We should also see the general truths revealed in our private experiences.

• When we do this, History stops being rigid and becomes flexible and true.
• Biography stops being just a personal story and becomes deep and meaningful.

Think of the Persians:

• Their architecture copied the specific shapes of local plants, like the stem and flower of the lotus and palm (connecting the general world to individual forms).
• Their royal court, even in its most magnificent days, never fully abandoned the nomadic habits of their ancestors. They traveled with the seasons from city to city – spending spring in Ecbatana, summer in Susa, and winter in Babylon (showing a general pattern from their past in their specific actions).

The Age-Old Conflict: Staying vs. Going

In the early history of Asia and Africa, the two main ways of life were often in conflict:

• Nomadism: Wandering life.
• Agriculture: Settled farming life.

The geography of these continents often required a nomadic life. But nomads were often feared by those who had settled down to farm or build towns near markets. Because nomads posed a threat, settling down and farming was sometimes taught as a religious duty to ensure stability.

Even today, in “civilized” countries like England and America, these two tendencies – the urge to roam versus the desire to settle – still compete within the nation and within individuals.

• Old Nomadism: African nomads were sometimes forced to move by insects like the gad-fly, which drove their cattle crazy. Asian nomads followed grazing lands month by month.
• Modern Nomadism: In America and Europe, people “wander” for business or tourism. This is certainly an improvement over being chased by insects!
• Checks on Wandering (Past): Religious pilgrimages to sacred cities, or strict laws and customs, helped create national unity and discourage constant roaming.
• Checks on Wandering (Present): The practical advantages of staying in one place (owning property, building community) restrain our urge to move constantly.

This conflict between wandering and settling is also active within each person. It depends on whether the love of adventure or the love of comfort is stronger at the time.

• A healthy, energetic person might easily adapt to different places, living comfortably in a wagon and traveling widely. Whether at sea, in the forest, or in the snow, they sleep well, eat well, and connect with others happily.
• This adaptability might also come from having sharp observation skills, finding interest wherever they look.
• Downside of Wandering: Historically, nomads were often poor and desperate. In modern terms, too much “intellectual nomadism” – flitting from one interest to another – can weaken the mind by scattering its energy.
• Downside of Staying Put: On the other hand, the person who stays home finds everything they need locally. But they risk becoming bored, stuck, and mentally stale if they don’t seek out new ideas and experiences.

The World Reflects Your Mind

Everything you observe outside yourself corresponds to your inner state of mind. And you can understand everything in the world once your thinking develops enough to grasp the truth behind that particular fact or event.

I can explore the ancient world – the “Fore-World,” as Germans call it – by looking within myself. This is just as valid as searching for it physically in tombs, libraries, or broken statues.

Why We Connect with Ancient Greece

What is the source of the deep interest almost everyone feels in Greek history, writing, art, and poetry? Why do we care about everything from their heroic age to their daily life centuries later?

It’s because every person, in their own development, goes through a “Greek period.”

The Greek era represents a time focused on:

• The physical body and its perfection.
• The senses and their peak performance.
• A spirit that is expressed in complete harmony with the body.

During that time, people existed who served as the models for the famous sculptures of heroes and gods like Hercules, Apollo, and Jove. Their bodies weren’t like many modern people’s, with indistinct features. They had strong, sharply defined, symmetrical features. Their eye sockets suggested eyes that looked directly ahead, not glancing shiftily side to side.

Their manners were simple and direct, sometimes fierce. They respected personal qualities above all:

• Courage
• Skill
• Self-control
• Justice
• Strength
• Speed
• A strong voice
• A broad chest

Luxury and refined elegance were not valued then. Life was sparse, and resources were limited. This forced everyone to be self-sufficient – their own servant, cook, butcher, and soldier. Constantly providing for their own needs trained their bodies to achieve amazing things. Think of Homer’s heroes like Agamemnon and Diomedes. Xenophon’s description of himself and his soldiers during their retreat is similar.

Xenophon tells how, after crossing a river in snowy Armenia, his troops were miserable lying on the frozen ground. But Xenophon himself got up, naked, grabbed an axe, and started chopping wood. Seeing this, others got up and did the same.

His army had complete freedom of speech. Soldiers argued over loot and challenged their generals’ orders. Xenophon himself was known for his sharp tongue. Doesn’t this sound like a group of strong, independent young people (“great boys”) with their own rough code of honor and loose discipline?

The Appeal of Naturalness

The great appeal of ancient tragedies, and indeed all old literature, is that the characters speak simply. They express great common sense without being overly aware of it. This was before excessive self-analysis became the dominant way of thinking.

Our admiration for ancient things isn’t just because they are old; it’s because they feel natural. The Greeks weren’t constantly overthinking. They were physically healthy, perfectly attuned to their senses, perhaps having the finest physical development in the world at that time. Adults acted with the simplicity and grace we usually associate with children.

They created art – vases, plays, statues – that reflected their healthy senses; their work was naturally in good taste. Things made with this kind of healthy, natural sensibility have continued to be made throughout history, wherever healthy people exist. But the Greeks, as a group, perhaps surpassed all others due to their exceptional physical and sensory development.

They combined the energy of adulthood with the charming lack of self-consciousness found in childhood. Why do these qualities attract us?

• Because they are fundamentally human – we all experience childhood.
• Because we still see individuals today who retain these childlike, natural qualities.

A person with this kind of innocent genius and natural energy is like a modern-day Greek, reminding us why we love the spirit of ancient Greece (Hellas).

I admire the love of nature shown in Sophocles’ play Philoctetes. When I read the character’s beautiful addresses to sleep, stars, rocks, mountains, and waves, time seems to fade away like a receding tide. I feel the timelessness of humanity, the sameness of human thought across ages. It seems the Greek experienced the same world I do. The sun, moon, water, and fire touched his heart just as they touch mine.

Seen this way, the supposed big differences between Greek and English, or between Classic and Romantic styles, seem minor and academic.

• When a thought from Plato also becomes my thought…
• When a truth that inspired the poet Pindar also inspires me…
• …then time disappears.

When I feel that connection, that meeting of minds across centuries, where our souls seem to share the same color and merge into one – why should I care about geographical distance or counting ancient years?

Understanding History Through Your Own Life

A student understands the age of knights and chivalry by relating it to their own “age of chivalry” – perhaps a time of intense loyalty or idealism in their own youth. They understand the era of great sea voyages and exploration by comparing it to smaller, parallel adventures or discoveries in their own life.

The same key unlocks the world’s sacred or religious history. When the words of an ancient prophet echo a feeling from your own childhood or a prayer from your youth, you cut through confusing traditions and distorted histories to reach the core truth.

Spiritual Insights Across Time

Occasionally, rare and extraordinary individuals appear among us. They reveal new facts about nature and the spirit. Throughout history, truly spiritual people (“men of God”) have walked among ordinary people, making their presence and message felt deep in the hearts of listeners. This experience undoubtedly led to beliefs in oracles, priests, and priestesses inspired by a divine force.

Jesus surprises and confuses people who are focused only on the material world. They can’t easily fit him into standard history or reconcile his teachings with their own lives. However, as people begin to trust their own inner feelings (intuitions) and try to live more spiritually, their own growing piety helps them understand every word and action of Jesus.

How easily the ancient wisdom traditions – from Moses, Zoroaster, Menu (Hindu lawgiver), Socrates – feel at home in our minds. They don’t feel ancient at all. They feel like they belong to me as much as they belonged to their original followers.

I feel I have met the first monks and hermits without traveling across oceans or centuries. More than once, I’ve encountered someone living today with such a disregard for normal work and such powerful focus on contemplation – a kind of proud beggar asking for support in the name of God – that they brought figures like Simeon the Stylite (pillar hermit) and the early monks vividly into the present.

Understanding Power Dynamics

The systems of control used by priests in the East and West (Magian, Brahmin, Druid, Inca) can be understood through events in individual private life.

Consider a child whose spirit and courage are crushed by a strict, rigid authority figure. This figure paralyzes the child’s understanding, causing not anger but only fear, obedience, and even a strange sympathy for the oppressor. This is a common experience. The child only truly understands it when they grow up and realize that their oppressor was also a “child,” trapped and controlled by the very names, words, and forms they used to dominate the youth.

This personal realization teaches the grown child more about how ancient gods like Belus were worshipped, or how the Pyramids were built, than discovering the names of all the workers or the cost of construction ever could. He finds the ancient power structures of Assyria or the temple mounds of Cholula right in his own experience; he realizes he himself has participated in laying the foundations of such systems.

Repeating the Past: Reform and Its Challenges

Similarly, when any thoughtful person protests against the accepted superstitions or irrational beliefs of their own time, they are repeating, step by step, the actions of past reformers. And like those reformers, in their search for truth, they often find new dangers to their own virtue or moral standing.

They learn firsthand how much inner strength is needed to break free from the grip of superstition. Often, a period of great freedom or license follows closely after a period of strict reformation. How many times in history has the great reformer of the day (the “Luther of the day”) had to sadly observe a decline in piety or moral seriousness within his own circle, even his own family? Martin Luther’s wife reportedly asked him, “Doctor, how is it that when we were under the Pope, we prayed so often and so fervently, while now we pray so coldly and so rarely?”

Literature: A Universal Confession

As a person matures, they discover how deeply literature belongs to them – all myths and fables, as well as all history. They find that the poet wasn’t just some strange person describing impossible things. Instead, the poet was acting as a channel for universal humanity, writing a confession that is true for one person and true for everyone.

A person finds their own secret life story written in lines penned long before they were born, lines that feel incredibly understandable. In their own personal experiences, one after another, they encounter the situations and truths found in every old fable – from Aesop, Homer, Hafiz, Ariosto, Chaucer, Scott – and they confirm these truths with their own minds and actions.

Myths as Timeless Truths

The beautiful myths of the Greeks are universal truths because they spring from the deep imagination (not just superficial fancy).

Consider the story of Prometheus. It has a vast range of meanings and remains relevant forever.

• Historical Layer: It can be read as the first chapter of European history. The mythology lightly covers real events like the invention of practical arts and the migration of peoples.
• Religious Layer: It closely mirrors the history of religion in later times. Prometheus is like the Jesus of ancient mythology. He is humanity’s friend, standing between the harsh “justice” of the ruling god and the human race, willingly suffering for them.
• Skeptical Layer: But the myth differs from strict Calvinistic views when it shows Prometheus defying Jove (Zeus). This represents a state of mind that often appears when God is presented as a crude, external power. It reflects human discontent with such a view and a feeling that forced reverence is a burden. This mindset wants to “steal the Creator’s fire,” to live independently from God. Aeschylus’s play Prometheus Bound is like the great story of skepticism.

The details within these grand old myths are also timelessly true.

• Apollo: The poets said Apollo once tended sheep for King Admetus. This implies that when divine greatness appears among humans, it often goes unrecognized. Jesus wasn’t recognized; Socrates and Shakespeare weren’t fully appreciated in their time.
• Antaeus: The giant Antaeus was invincible as long as he touched his mother, Earth. Hercules defeated him by lifting him off the ground. This symbolizes how humans (like broken giants) regain strength, both physically and mentally, by maintaining contact with nature.
• Orpheus: Orpheus could charm solid nature with his music and poetry, making rocks and trees move. This explains the power of art to “unfix” reality, to give wings to solid things.
• Proteus: The sea-god Proteus could change into any shape but always remained himself. This represents the philosophical insight that identity remains constant through endless changes of form. Don’t I experience this myself – laughing one day, weeping the next, sleeping like a log, then running around? Everywhere I look, I see the transformations of Proteus. I can use the name of any creature or fact to symbolize my thoughts because every creature represents humanity in some way, either acting or being acted upon.
• Tantalus: Tantalus is just a name for you and me. He stood in water he couldn’t drink and under fruit he couldn’t reach. Tantalus represents the impossibility of fully grasping the “waters of thought” that constantly shimmer just within sight of our soul.
• Transmigration: The idea of souls moving between bodies isn’t just a fable. Sadly, men and women often seem only half-human. It seems every animal – from the barnyard, field, forest, earth, and water – has managed to leave its mark, its features and form, on some of us upright, heaven-facing humans. (Ah, my friend, stop your soul from ebbing downward, sliding into the animalistic habits you’ve indulged in for years!)

That old fable of the Sphinx is also close and relevant to us. She sat by the road, posing riddles to travelers.

• If they couldn’t answer, she devoured them.
• If they could solve the riddle, the Sphinx herself was destroyed.

What is our life but an endless stream of changing facts and events? These changes come in magnificent variety, all posing questions to the human spirit.

Those who cannot face these facts and questions of life with a higher wisdom become servants to them. Facts weigh them down, control them, and turn them into people who just follow routines. By obeying facts literally, they lose the inner spark, the light that makes us truly human.

But if a person stays true to their better instincts and feelings, they refuse to be ruled by mere facts. They act as if they belong to a higher order of beings. They hold onto their connection with the soul and look for the underlying principle.

When they do this, the facts naturally fall into their proper places. Facts recognize their master. Even the smallest fact then helps to reveal the greatness of the person who understands the principle behind it.

Symbols Have Real Power

In Goethe’s work Helena, we see this same desire for every word or symbol to represent something real. Goethe suggested that figures like Chiron (a wise centaur), Griffins (mythical beasts), Helen of Troy, and others are not just names. They are real forces that have a specific effect on the mind.

Because they affect us, they are timeless realities, just as real today as they were in ancient Greece. By thinking deeply about them, Goethe brought these figures to life in his imagination and wrote about them.

Even though his poem Helena is vague and dreamlike, it’s often more captivating than his more conventional plays. Why?

• It frees the mind from the usual, everyday images.
• It sparks the reader’s own creativity and imagination through its wild, free structure.
• It constantly surprises the reader with unexpected turns.

Myths Hint at Future Truths

The universal spirit of nature is stronger than the individual writer. It often seems to guide the writer’s hand, even when they think they are just creating fantasy. The result is often a story with a deep, hidden meaning – an allegory. This is why Plato said that poets often say wise things they don’t fully understand themselves.

All the fantasy stories from the Middle Ages can be seen as playful or hidden expressions of the serious goals that people of that time were striving for. Magic, and all the powers associated with it, was like an early intuition of the future powers of science.

• Shoes of speed hint at faster travel.
• Swords of sharpness hint at better tools and weapons.
• Controlling the elements hints at technology and engineering.
• Using the secret powers of minerals hints at chemistry and materials science.
• Understanding the voices of birds hints at deeper communication and understanding of nature.

These are all examples of the mind reaching in the right direction, even if unclearly. The incredible abilities of heroes in myths, the gift of eternal youth, and similar ideas all show the human spirit trying to “bend the shows of things to the desires of the mind” – trying to shape reality according to our wishes.

Timeless Truths in Stories

In old romance stories like Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul, a magical garland or rose blooms on the head of a faithful woman but fades on the unfaithful one. This symbolically shows a moral truth.

In the story of “The Boy and the Mantle” (where a magical cloak reveals infidelity), even an adult reader can feel a warm sense of virtuous pleasure when the gentle, faithful character triumphs.

Indeed, many assumptions found in fairy tales feel true even today, right here in my town of Concord, just as they might have felt in ancient Cornwall or Brittany:

• That fairies don’t like to be named.
• That their gifts are unpredictable and shouldn’t be fully trusted.
• That someone seeking treasure must remain silent.

These strange rules resonate because they touch on lasting truths about luck, hidden forces, and human nature.

Is it any different in the latest novels? I read Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor.

• The character Sir William Ashton is just a mask representing common, vulgar temptation.
• Ravenswood Castle is a fancy name for pride struggling with poverty.
• The important foreign mission is just a symbolic disguise for the need to find honest work.

We can all defeat the “wild bull” (representing injustice and base desires) that threatens the good and beautiful people in our lives by fighting down these negative forces within ourselves. Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity – a quality that is always beautiful but often suffers in this world. Even realistic stories use characters and situations as symbols for universal truths.

Humans and Nature: A Deep Connection

Alongside the history of human society and thought, another history unfolds daily: the history of the external world. We are deeply involved in this history too.

A person is not only a summary of time but also a counterpart to nature. Our power comes from our countless connections – our affinities – with everything around us. Our lives are woven into the entire chain of living and non-living things.

Think of ancient Rome. Roads went out from the central Forum in all directions, reaching the heart of every province. These roads made towns in Persia, Spain, and Britain accessible to Roman soldiers. Similarly, pathways lead out from the human heart to the core of every object in nature, bringing it into the realm of human understanding and influence.

A person is a bundle of relationships, a knot of roots. The world is the flower and fruit that grows from these roots. Our abilities point towards the world outside us and predict the environment we need to live in:

• A fish’s fins predict the existence of water.
• An eagle’s wings, even inside the egg, presuppose the existence of air.

We cannot live fully without a world to interact with.

• Put Napoleon on an empty island prison. If his abilities find no people to lead, no mountains (Alps) to cross, nothing important to strive for, he would seem frustrated and ineffective (“beat the air and appear stupid”).
• But put him in large countries with dense populations, complex problems, and opposing forces, and you see his true potential emerge.

The physical person we see is not the complete “virtual” person, the full potential. As Shakespeare wrote in Henry VI about a great leader whose physical presence was absent:

“His substance is not here. For what you see is but the smallest part And least proportion of humanity; But were the whole frame here, It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch, Your roof were not sufficient to contain it.”

Potential Predicts Reality

Our inner potential implies the existence of the world needed to fulfill it.

• Columbus needs a planet to navigate.
• Scientists like Newton and Laplace need vast ages and countless stars to study; their minds, naturally drawn to gravity, already seem to predict a solar system.
• The minds of chemists like Davy or Gay-Lussac, exploring how particles attract and repel since childhood, anticipate the laws of how matter is organized.
• Doesn’t the eye forming in an embryo predict the existence of light?
• Doesn’t the musical ear of Handel predict the magic of harmony?
• Don’t the skilled fingers of inventors like Watt, Fulton, and Arkwright predict the existence of metals that can be melted, hardened, and shaped, as well as the useful properties of stone, water, and wood?
• Don’t the lovely qualities of a young girl predict the development of refined manners and beautiful decorations in society?

Here, we are also reminded of how people affect each other. A mind could think for ages and not gain as much self-knowledge as the intense emotion of love can teach it in a single day. Who truly knows themselves before they have felt strong anger at injustice, or been moved by powerful words, or shared the excitement or fear of thousands during a national event?

No one can live their experiences ahead of time. You can’t guess today what new ability or feeling a new situation will unlock tomorrow, any more than you can draw the face of someone you will meet for the first time tomorrow.

The Foundation for Understanding History

I won’t try now to explain the deep reasons why our minds and nature correspond so perfectly. Let it be enough to say that we should read and write history based on two fundamental facts:

1. The Mind is One: There is a single, shared, universal mind.
2. Nature is its Correlative: The natural world reflects and corresponds to this universal mind.

The Individual as Living History

In all these ways, the universal soul gathers and presents its treasures for each person to learn from. You, too, will pass through the entire cycle of human experience within yourself. You will gather the scattered rays of nature’s wisdom into a single focus point within your understanding.

History will no longer be just a dull book. It will walk among us, embodied in every just and wise person. Don’t just tell me the titles of the books you’ve read. Make me feel the historical periods and insights that you have truly lived and understood.

A person should become a living Temple of Fame. Like the goddess Fame described by poets, they should walk wrapped in a robe painted with all the wonderful events and experiences of humanity – their own body and mind, through their deep understanding, become that colorful robe.

I should be able to find all of history within such a person:

• The ancient Foreworld
• The mythical Age of Gold
• The symbolic Apples of Knowledge from Eden
• The adventures of the Argonauts
• The calling of Abraham
• The building of Solomon’s Temple
• The coming of Christ
• The Dark Ages
• The Revival of Learning (Renaissance)
• The Reformation
• The discovery of new lands
• The opening of new sciences and new understandings of the human mind.

Such a person will be like a priest of Pan (the god of nature). They will bring the blessings of the cosmos, the wisdom of the ages, into humble, everyday life.

A Call for Deeper History

Does this claim sound too grand, too arrogant? If it does, then I take back everything I’ve written. What’s the point of pretending to know things we don’t?

But the problem might be with our language. It’s hard to state one strong truth without seeming to ignore another. I admit that our actual, factual knowledge is very limited.

Listen to the rats in the wall. See the lizard on the fence, the fungus under your feet, the lichen on a log. What do I really know, with deep sympathy or moral understanding, about these other worlds of life right beside me? These creatures are as old as humanity, perhaps older, yet they have kept their secrets. There’s no record of any meaningful communication between us.

What connection do our history books show between the fifty or sixty chemical elements and the different eras of human history? What does history even record about the inner, spiritual story of humanity? What light does it shed on the great mysteries we call Death and Immortality?

Yet, every history should be written from a place of wisdom. It should sense the full range of our connections and see facts not just as facts, but as symbols pointing to deeper truths.

I am ashamed to see how shallow our current version of “History” often is, like a small town gossip column. How many times do we have to repeat the names Rome, Paris, Constantinople! What does Rome know about the rat and the lizard sharing its space? What do historical periods like Olympiads or Consulates mean to these neighboring forms of life?

Furthermore, what real nourishment, experience, or help does this kind of history offer to the Inuit seal-hunter, the islander in his canoe, the fisherman, the dockworker, the porter?

We must write our histories more broadly and deeply. Our accounts should arise from a renewed sense of ethics, from an inflow of fresh, healing conscience. Only then can we truly express our central, widely connected human nature, instead of just repeating the old timeline of selfishness and pride we’ve focused on for too long.

That better way of seeing already exists for us, shining in on us unexpectedly. But the usual paths of science and literature are not necessarily the way into the heart of nature’s wisdom. Often, the supposedly simple or unschooled – the “idiot,” the indigenous person, the child, the farm boy – stand closer to the true light by which nature should be understood than the expert focused on dissecting details or the scholar studying dusty artifacts.

Self-Reliance

(The core idea of this essay is captured in phrases like “Do not seek outside yourself” and “Man is his own star.” It emphasizes trusting your inner voice and capabilities.)

Listen to Your Own Soul

I recently read some poems by a talented painter. They were original and fresh, not just copies of what others have done. Whenever we encounter something truly original, our soul pays attention, no matter the subject. The feeling these original works give us is more valuable than any specific thought they contain.

What is Genius?

• To believe in your own thoughts.
• To believe that what feels true in your private heart is true for all people.
• That is genius.

Speak what you deeply believe. Eventually, it will be seen as a universal truth. What starts as your innermost thought can eventually become widely accepted. Our first, genuine thoughts often come back to us later, recognized as profound truths.

We are all familiar with the voice of our own mind. Yet, we admire figures like Moses, Plato, and Milton most because they didn’t just follow books and traditions. They spoke what they thought, not just what others expected them to think.

A person should learn to notice and value the flashes of insight that come from within their own mind. These inner lights are more important than the brilliance of even the most famous poets and thinkers.

But often, we dismiss our own thoughts simply because they are ours. In every great work of genius, however, we recognize thoughts we ourselves once had but ignored. They return to us with a kind of distant authority.

Great art teaches us this powerful lesson: Stick to your spontaneous feelings and insights with calm determination. Do this especially when everyone else disagrees with you. If you don’t, tomorrow someone else might express your own thoughts and feelings with perfect clarity, and you’ll have to accept your own opinion, with shame, from a stranger.

Accepting Your Unique Self

There comes a time in everyone’s education when they realize fundamental truths:

• Envy is ignorance. Wishing you were someone else is foolish.
• Imitation is suicide. Trying to copy others kills your own potential.
• You must accept yourself, for better or worse, as your unique portion in life.
• The world is full of good things, but you can only receive nourishment by working hard on the specific “plot of ground” you’ve been given.

The power inside you is a new, unique force in nature. No one else knows what you can do. Even you don’t know until you try.

There’s a reason why certain faces, characters, or facts make a strong impression on you, while others don’t. This pattern in your memory isn’t random; it reflects a deeper harmony. Your perspective is designed to notice certain specific things.

We often express only half of ourselves. We feel ashamed of the unique divine idea that each of us represents. But you can trust this inner idea. It is valuable and will lead to good results if you express it faithfully. God doesn’t want his work hidden by cowards.

Find Peace in Your Own Work

A person feels relieved and happy when they put their whole heart into their work and do their best. But anything less than your best, anything done without heart, will bring no peace. It feels like a release that doesn’t truly free you. When you try to work without genuine inspiration, your inner genius leaves you. No muse helps, no creativity flows, no hope arises.

Trust Yourself

Trust yourself. Every heart beats in rhythm with that truth. Accept the place and time that divine providence has given you. Embrace the society you live in and the flow of events.

Great people have always done this. They trusted the spirit of their age and relied, like children, on the wisdom within their own hearts. They sensed that the ultimate trustworthy guide was inside them, working through their hands and guiding their whole being.

We are adults now. We must accept this same high destiny. We shouldn’t act like children or invalids hiding in a protected corner. We shouldn’t be cowards running from challenges. Instead, we must be:

• Guides
• Redeemers
• Benefactors

We must obey the powerful inner force that urges us forward, moving against chaos and darkness.

Lessons from the Young and Natural

Nature gives us beautiful hints about self-trust when we look at children, babies, and even animals. They don’t have our divided minds. They don’t distrust a feeling just because logic calculates the difficulties.

• Their minds are whole.
• Their outlook is not yet defeated by doubt.
• Looking at their direct faces can make us adults feel uneasy.

Babies conform to no one; everyone conforms to them. One baby often turns several adults into playful companions.

God has given youth and adulthood their own unique appeal and power. These stages of life are attractive and their claims deserve respect, if the person stands confidently by themselves.

Don’t think a young person lacks power just because they don’t speak like you or me. Listen! In the next room, their voice is clear and strong among their friends. They know how to communicate with their own generation. Whether shy or bold, they have ways of making older generations seem unnecessary.

The Trap of Self-Consciousness

The casual confidence of boys who know they’ll get dinner, and who wouldn’t dream of trying to please others like a lord might, shows the healthy attitude of human nature.

A boy in the living room is like the audience in the cheapest seats at a play: independent, not responsible to anyone, observing the world from his corner. He judges people and events quickly and decisively based on their merits – good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, annoying. He doesn’t worry about consequences or what’s in it for him. He gives an honest, independent verdict. You have to earn his respect; he won’t try to earn yours.

But the adult man often feels trapped by his own self-consciousness. As soon as he acts or speaks successfully, he feels committed. He feels watched by hundreds who either admire or hate him. He now has to consider their feelings. There’s no escaping this awareness. Oh, if only he could return to that state of natural neutrality!

Anyone who can avoid making binding promises, observe something, and then observe again with the same fresh, unbiased, unbribable, unafraid innocence – such a person will always be powerful. They would express opinions on current events that wouldn’t seem personal, but necessary and true. These opinions would strike others like darts and make them uneasy.

Society vs. The Individual

These are the clear voices of truth we hear when we are alone. But they fade and become hard to hear when we enter the world of society.

Society everywhere seems to conspire against the true individuality and strength of each of its members. Society is like a corporation (a “joint-stock company”). The members agree to give up some personal liberty and individual culture in return for basic security (like ensuring everyone gets fed).

The quality most valued by society is conformity. Self-reliance is what society dislikes. It prefers names, labels, and customs over authentic reality and original creators.

Be a Nonconformist

Whoever wants to be a true, complete person must be a nonconformist. Anyone who wants to achieve something truly great and lasting cannot be held back by simply following what others call “goodness.” You must investigate for yourself whether it is actually good.

Nothing is truly sacred except the integrity of your own mind. Stay true to yourself, approve your own actions based on your inner compass, and eventually, the world will come to respect you.

I remember advice I received when I was young. A respected advisor kept urging me to follow the traditional doctrines of the church. I asked, “What do traditions matter to me if I live entirely from my inner guidance?” My friend warned, “But these impulses might come from below [evil], not from above [God].” I replied, “They don’t seem evil to me. But if I am the Devil’s child, then I will live according to the Devil’s nature.”

Your Nature is Your Only Law

No law can be sacred to me except the law of my own nature.

• “Good” and “bad” are just names that can be easily applied to anything.
• The only right is what aligns with my own constitution, my true self.
• The only wrong is what goes against it.

A person should face all opposition as if everything external is temporary and insignificant compared to their own inner reality.

I feel ashamed when I think how easily we give in to badges, names, large organizations, and dead institutions. Every conventionally decent and well-spoken person influences me more than they should. I ought to stand tall and strong, and speak the plain, sometimes rough, truth in every situation.

• If someone hides malice and vanity under the guise of philanthropy, should we let it pass?
• If an angry bigot uses the noble cause of Abolitionism to push their agenda, and comes to me with news from far away (Barbadoes), why shouldn’t I tell them directly: “Go love your own child; love your neighbor who chops your wood. Be kind and modest in your own life first. Develop that grace. Stop covering your hard, uncharitable ambition with this unbelievable concern for people thousands of miles away. Your ‘love’ for those far off is really just spite towards those close to you.”?

Such a greeting would be rough and perhaps graceless, but truth is more beautiful than pretending to feel love. Your goodness must have some strength, some edge to it – otherwise, it’s not real goodness. Sometimes, we need to preach the “doctrine of hatred” as a reaction against a weak, whining, ineffective kind of “love.”

I would distance myself from father, mother, wife, or brother if my inner calling, my genius, demanded it. I would almost write “Whim” on my doorpost as my guiding principle. I hope my impulses are better than mere whim in the end, but we can’t spend all day explaining ourselves. Don’t expect me to justify why I seek company or why I avoid it.

And don’t tell me, as a well-meaning person did today, that I have an obligation to help all poor people find good situations. Are they my poor? I tell you, foolish philanthropist, that I resent every dollar, dime, or cent I give to people I have no real connection to, who don’t belong to me and to whom I don’t belong.

There is a class of people to whom I am deeply connected by spiritual affinity. For them, I would go to prison if necessary. But I reject miscellaneous popular charities:

• Sending fools to college.
• Building meeting-houses for vain purposes.
• Giving money to drunkards (“alms to sots”).
• The thousands of generic “Relief Societies.”

I confess with shame that I sometimes give in and donate a dollar. But it feels like a wicked dollar, given out of weakness. Someday I hope to have the strength to withhold it.

Live Your Life, Don’t Apologize for It

In popular opinion, virtues are seen as exceptions rather than the normal way of being. People separate “the man” from “his virtues.” They perform “good actions,” like acts of courage or charity, almost like paying a fine to make up for not living up to expectations daily. Their good works are like apologies for their existence, like invalids or mentally ill people paying high fees for their care. Their virtues are like punishments they inflict on themselves (“penances”).

I don’t want to apologize for my life (“expiate”); I want to live it. My life is for itself, not for show. I would rather it be simple and genuine, even if modest, than flashy and unstable. I want my life to be sound and sweet, naturally healthy, not needing constant fixes (“diet and bleeding”).

I demand primary evidence that you are a person of worth. I refuse to judge you solely based on your actions. I know that for myself, it makes no ultimate difference whether I perform or avoid actions that others consider excellent. I won’t “pay” for the privilege of approval when I have an inherent right to exist and be valued. My gifts may be few and humble, but I actually am. I don’t need secondary proof, like lists of actions, to assure myself or others of my existence and worth.

Stay Independent in the Crowd

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what other people think. This rule is difficult to follow in both practical life and intellectual life, but it marks the essential difference between greatness and mediocrity. It’s harder because you will always find people who believe they know your duty better than you do.

• It’s easy to live according to the world’s opinion when you are in the world.
• It’s easy to live according to your own opinion when you are alone.
• But the great person is the one who can maintain the independence of solitude while living in the midst of the crowd, and do so with perfect inner peace and kindness.

The Cost of Conformity

The problem with conforming to customs or beliefs that feel dead to you is that it scatters your energy. It wastes your time and blurs the clear impression of your unique character.

• If you support a church you don’t believe in…
• If you contribute to a charity whose purpose feels empty…
• If you vote with a political party without real conviction…
• If you arrange your life just to meet social expectations…
• …behind all these screens, it’s hard for me to see the real you.

And naturally, all the energy spent on conforming is energy taken away from your true life and purpose.

But do your unique work, and I will recognize you. Do your work, and you will strengthen yourself.

A person needs to realize that this game of conformity is like blindman’s buff. If I know which group you belong to, I can usually predict your arguments. I hear a preacher announce he will discuss the value of one of his church’s institutions. Don’t I know beforehand that he cannot possibly say anything new or spontaneous? Don’t I know that despite pretending to examine the issue objectively, he won’t? Don’t I know he’s already committed to defending only the approved side, not as an independent thinker, but as a representative of his institution? He’s like a hired lawyer (“retained attorney”), and his airs of impartiality are just an empty show.

Well, most people have tied blindfolds over their eyes in one way or another. They have attached themselves to some community of opinion. This conformity doesn’t just make them false in a few small ways, telling a few lies. It makes them false in everything. Their “truth” is never quite the whole truth. Their “two plus two” doesn’t equal the real four. Every word they say feels slightly off, and we don’t know where to begin to set things right.

Meanwhile, nature gradually shapes us into the “prison uniform” of the group we belong to. We start to look and act alike, slowly acquiring the blank expression of unquestioning followers (“gentlest asinine expression”).

There’s one particularly embarrassing experience that reflects this larger pattern: the “foolish face of praise.” It’s that forced smile we put on in social situations where we feel uncomfortable, responding to conversation that doesn’t interest us. The facial muscles, moved not by genuine feeling but by a weak, forced effort, tighten around the face with a very unpleasant sensation.

Facing Disapproval

Because you don’t conform, the world will punish you with its disapproval. Therefore, a person must learn how to handle a negative reaction (“estimate a sour face”). People on the street or in social gatherings might look at you disapprovingly.

If their disapproval came from their own strong principles and resistance (like your own nonconformity), then perhaps you should feel sad. But the disapproving faces of the crowd, just like their approving faces, usually have no deep cause. They are put on and taken off easily, like masks, changing with the wind or the latest news.

However, the discontent of the masses is often more intimidating than the disapproval of the educated elite (like politicians or academics). It’s relatively easy for a strong person who understands the world to handle the anger of the “cultivated classes.” Their anger is usually polite and careful, because they are often timid, knowing they are vulnerable themselves.

But when the anger of the ignorant and poor is added to the mix, when the raw, unthinking force at the bottom of society begins to growl – then it requires great inner strength, perspective, and perhaps religious faith (magnanimity and religion) to treat it with composure, like something ultimately insignificant.

The Fear of Inconsistency

The other major fear that prevents us from trusting ourselves is our desire for consistency. We develop a reverence for our past actions or words because other people have no other way to judge our character or predict our future behavior. We are reluctant to disappoint their expectations.

Embrace Contradiction

But why should you always be looking over your shoulder? Why drag around the dead weight (“corpse”) of your memory, afraid you might contradict something you said publicly in the past?

Suppose you contradict yourself; so what? It seems to be a wise rule never to rely solely on memory. Always bring the past into the bright light of the present (“the thousand-eyed present”) for judgment. Live each day anew.

Perhaps in your philosophical thinking, you decided God has no personal form. Yet, when deep feelings of devotion arise in your soul, yield to them fully, even if they make you imagine God with shape and color. Leave your abstract theory behind, like Joseph leaving his coat in the hands of Potiphar’s wife, and follow the living truth you feel now.

Greatness and Misunderstanding

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. It is adored by small-minded politicians, philosophers, and religious figures. A truly great soul simply isn’t concerned with appearing consistent. Worrying about consistency is like worrying about your shadow on the wall.

Speak what you think now in strong words. Tomorrow, speak what tomorrow thinks in strong words, even if it contradicts everything you said today.

Someone might object, “Ah, but then you are sure to be misunderstood!”

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood. Socrates was misunderstood. Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton – every pure and wise spirit who ever lived was misunderstood.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Your True Nature is Consistent

I suspect that no person can truly violate their fundamental nature. All the choices and actions driven by their will are ultimately contained within the larger law of their being. Just as the jagged peaks of the Andes or Himalayas are insignificant details within the smooth curve of the whole Earth, the apparent inconsistencies in a person’s life fit within their overall nature.

It doesn’t matter how you measure or test a person. A true character is like an acrostic poem or a palindrome – read it forward, backward, or across, it still reveals the same core message.

In this simple, reflective life in nature that God allows me, let me record my honest thoughts each day, without worrying about the future or the past. I have no doubt that my thoughts, recorded honestly, will reveal an underlying symmetry and coherence, even if I don’t intend it or see it myself.

My writing should smell like pine trees and echo with the buzz of insects. The swallow flying past my window should weave the thread or straw it carries into the fabric of my work as well.

We ultimately appear to others as we truly are. Our character teaches things about us far beyond our conscious control. People often imagine they only communicate their virtues or vices through obvious actions. They don’t realize that virtue and vice radiate from us constantly, like a subtle breath, every moment.

Underlying Harmony

There will be an underlying agreement in all your actions, no matter how varied they seem, as long as each action is honest and natural for you in its own specific moment. Because they all spring from one unified will (your true self), your actions will be harmonious, even if they look different on the surface.

These surface variations disappear when viewed from a little distance, or from a slightly higher level of thought. One single underlying tendency unites them all.

The voyage of the best ship is actually a zigzag line made of hundreds of adjustments (tacks). But if you view that line from far enough away, it straightens out into the ship’s average direction.

Your genuine actions will explain themselves, and they will explain your other genuine actions. Trust the process. Be true to yourself in each moment, and your life will reveal its own coherent meaning.

Simply conforming explains nothing about you. Act as an individual, and what you have already done as an individual will justify your actions now.

Greatness and Honor Come From Within

Greatness looks toward the future. If I can be strong enough today to do what’s right and ignore what others think, it means I must have already built up enough inner strength from past right actions to support me now. Regardless of the past, do what is right now. Always ignore superficial appearances, and you will always have the strength to do so.

The force of character builds up over time. All the past days you lived virtuously contribute their health and strength to this present moment.

What gives the heroes of history – leaders in government or on the battlefield – their impressive majesty? It’s the awareness of a long history of great days and victories behind them. This past success shines a combined light on them as they move forward. They seem to be accompanied by a visible escort of angels.

That inner strength and history of integrity is what puts thunder in a great speaker’s voice (like Chatham), dignity in a leader’s bearing (like Washington), and the spirit of a nation in a statesman’s eye (like Adams).

We respect honor because it’s not temporary. It is timeless virtue. We admire it today because it doesn’t just belong to today; it connects to something ancient and lasting. We love and pay homage to honor because it’s not a trick to get our admiration. It is self-dependent and self-created. It has a long, pure history, even when we see it in a young person.

Reject Conformity, Embrace Truth

I hope that in our time, we have finally heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let these words become outdated jokes. Instead of the polite gong calling us to dinner, let’s hear the clear, simple whistle of a Spartan fife. Let’s stop bowing and apologizing for being ourselves.

A great person is coming to eat at my house. My goal isn’t to please him; my goal is that he should want to please me. I will stand firm for authentic humanity. I want humanity to be kind, but above all, I want it to be true.

Let’s challenge and rebuke the smooth mediocrity and pathetic contentment we often see. Let’s confront custom, business, and government with the essential fact revealed by all history: There is a great, responsible Thinker and Actor (the Universal Mind or Spirit) working wherever a person works.

A true person belongs to no particular time or place. They are the center of things. Where a true individual stands, there is nature. That person becomes the measure of you, and all people, and all events.

Usually, everyone we meet in society reminds us of something else, or some other person. But true character, true reality, reminds you of nothing else. It takes the place of the whole creation; it is completely itself. A person must be so fully themselves that external circumstances become unimportant.

Individuals Shape History

Every true individual is:

• A cause: They start something new.
• A country: They create their own world.
• An age: They define a period.

They require infinite space, time, and resources to fully realize their vision. Future generations seem to follow their path like devoted followers (“a train of clients”).

• A person like Caesar is born, and for centuries afterward, we have a Roman Empire.
• Christ is born, and millions of minds are so drawn to his spirit that he becomes identified with virtue itself and the highest potential of humanity.

An institution is simply the extended shadow of one individual:

• Monasticism is the shadow of the Hermit Antony.
• The Reformation is the shadow of Luther.
• Quakerism is the shadow of Fox.
• Methodism is the shadow of Wesley.
• The Abolition movement is the shadow of Clarkson.

The poet Milton called the Roman general Scipio “the height of Rome.” All history can be easily understood as the life stories of a few strong and dedicated individuals.

Know Your Worth

Therefore, let a person understand their own worth and master their circumstances (“keep things under his feet”). Let them not peek around timidly, or steal influences, or sneak about like a charity case, an unwanted guest, or an imposter in the world that truly exists for them.

But the average person on the street, not finding a sense of worth within themselves that matches the power needed to build a tower or sculpt a god, feels poor and inadequate when looking at these great works. To them, a palace, a statue, or an expensive book seems foreign and intimidating, like a fancy carriage passing by. These things seem to say, “Who are you, Sir?”

Yet, all these creations truly belong to that person. They are seeking his attention (“suitors for his notice”). They are asking his inner abilities to come forward and take possession of them. The painting waits for my judgment; it doesn’t command me. I am the one to decide if it deserves praise.

That popular old story about the drunkard found passed out in the street illustrates this well. He was carried to a duke’s house, cleaned up, dressed in fine clothes, put in the duke’s bed, and treated like the duke himself upon waking. He was told he had been insane. The story is popular because it perfectly symbolizes the state of humanity. We often live in the world like unaware drunkards. But now and then, we wake up, use our reason, and discover that we are true princes, with inherent dignity and power.

Read and Live Originally

Our reading habits are often passive and overly admiring, like those of beggars or flatterers (“mendicant and sycophantic”). In history, our imagination can mislead us. Kingdoms, titles, power, and large estates use a more glamorous vocabulary than the simple life of “private John and Edward in a small house and common day’s work.” But the essential things in life are the same for both the king and the commoner. The total value of their lives is the same.

Why do we show so much deference to historical figures like King Alfred, Scanderbeg, or Gustavus Adolphus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they use up all the virtue in the world? Your private actions today have just as much significance as their famous public deeds. When ordinary individuals begin to act with original perspectives, the real glory will shift from the actions of kings to the actions of authentic gentlemen.

The world has been taught by its kings, who captured the attention of nations. Through this larger-than-life symbol of the king, humanity learned about the mutual respect that all people owe each other. The joyful loyalty people showed towards kings, nobles, or great landowners – allowing them to live by their own rules, create their own standards, receive honor instead of money, and embody the law – was like a complex picture-symbol (hieroglyphic). Through this symbol, people were vaguely expressing their awareness of their own inherent rights and dignity – the rights of every person.

The Source of Self-Trust: Intuition

The magnetic power that all original action possesses can be explained when we ask about the reason for self-trust.

• Who is the ultimate source we are trusting?
• What is this fundamental Self (“aboriginal Self”) on which universal reliance can be based?
• What is the nature of that mysterious inner star – baffling to science, impossible to measure – that shoots a ray of beauty even into imperfect actions, as long as they show the slightest mark of independence?

This inquiry leads us to the source of genius, virtue, and life itself. We call this source Spontaneity or Instinct. We call this primary wisdom Intuition, while all later learning that comes from outside is merely instruction (“tuitions”).

In that deep force – the final reality behind which analysis cannot go – all things find their common origin. The sense of pure being that sometimes rises within us during calm moments feels connected to everything – things, space, light, time, other people. It is one with them. It clearly comes from the same source from which their life and being also come.

First, we share the fundamental life by which all things exist. Only afterward do we see them as separate appearances in nature, forgetting that we share their underlying cause. Here is the fountain of action and thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration that gives humans wisdom. To deny this source is foolish and godless (“impiety and atheism”).

We exist within an immense intelligence. This intelligence makes us receivers of its truth and instruments (“organs”) of its activity. When we recognize justice or truth, we aren’t doing anything ourselves; we are simply allowing a pathway for its light to shine through us.

If we ask where this comes from, if we try to investigate the soul that is the ultimate cause, all philosophy fails. We can only affirm its presence or absence.

Every person can tell the difference between the voluntary actions of their mind (like deciding what to think) and their involuntary perceptions (like sudden insights or gut feelings). Everyone knows that these involuntary perceptions deserve complete faith. You might make mistakes in expressing them, but you know that the perceptions themselves are real and undeniable, like day and night.

My deliberate actions and things I acquire are often just wandering distractions. But the quietest daydream, the faintest natural feeling – these command my curiosity and respect.

Thoughtless people tend to contradict statements based on perception just as readily as they contradict opinions – actually, even more readily. They don’t distinguish between direct perception and a mere notion or idea. They imagine that I choose to see this or that. But perception is not a matter of choice; it is inevitable (“fatal”). If I perceive a true trait or quality, my children will likely see it after me, and eventually, all humankind will see it – even if, by chance, no one saw it before me. My perception of it is as much a fact as the sun itself.

Direct Connection to the Divine

The relationship between the individual soul and the divine spirit is so pure that trying to add intermediaries or “helps” is disrespectful (“profane”). It must be that when God speaks, He communicates not just one thing, but all things. His voice should fill the world. He should scatter light, nature, time, and souls outward from the center of the present thought, continually refreshing and recreating the whole world.

Whenever a mind becomes simple and receptive to divine wisdom:

• Old things pass away.
• External means, teachers, texts, and temples lose their importance.
• The mind lives fully in the now, absorbing the past and future into the present moment.
• All things become sacred through their connection to this present awareness – one thing as sacred as another.
• All things are understood by returning to their central cause. In the light of the universal miracle, small, particular miracles fade in significance.

Therefore, if someone claims to know and speak about God but constantly refers you backward to the language and ideas of some long-dead nation in another part of the world, do not believe him.

• Is the acorn better than the oak tree, which is its complete fulfillment?
• Is the parent better than the child into whom they have poured their mature being?

Why, then, this worship of the past? The centuries often seem like conspirators against the health and authority of the individual soul living now. Time and space are just like colored filters created by our physical eyes; the soul itself is pure light.

• Where the soul truly is, there is day.
• Where the soul merely was, that is night.

History is an irrelevant distraction and even harmful (“an impertinence and an injury”) if it is treated as anything more than a cheerful story or parable illustrating my own being and becoming right now.

Live in the Present

Humans are often timid and apologetic. We no longer stand upright with confidence. We dare not simply say “I think” or “I am”; instead, we quote some saint or sage. We feel ashamed standing before a blade of grass or a blooming rose.

These roses under my window don’t refer to previous roses or better roses. They simply are what they are. They exist with God today. Time doesn’t exist for them. There is simply the rose, perfect in every moment of its existence.

• Before a leaf bud even opens, its entire life force is active.
• In the fully opened flower, there is nothing more than was already potential.
• In the leafless root in winter, there is nothing less. Its nature is fulfilled, and it fulfills nature’s purpose, equally in every moment.

But humans postpone living or dwell on memories. We don’t live in the present. We look backward with regret, or we ignore the riches around us now while anxiously trying to foresee the future. A person cannot be happy and strong until they learn to live with nature in the present, above time.

Trust Direct Experience Over Texts

This should be obvious enough. Yet, notice how even highly intelligent people don’t dare to listen to God directly unless He speaks using the specific words of some ancient figure like David, Jeremiah, or Paul. We shouldn’t place such enormous value on just a few texts or a few past lives.

We are like children who repeat sentences learned from grandparents or tutors by rote. As they grow older, they might memorize the exact words of talented people they meet. Only later, when they reach the same viewpoint or level of understanding as the person who originally spoke those words, do they truly grasp the meaning. Then they are willing to let the specific words go, because they realize they can express the same truth just as well themselves when needed.

If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for a strong person to be strong as it is for a weak person to be weak. When we gain a new perception, a fresh insight, we will gladly clear out our memory’s stored-up treasures as if they were old rubbish. When a person lives in direct connection with God, their voice will be as sweet and natural as the murmur of a brook or the rustle of corn.

And now, the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid. Perhaps it cannot be said in words, because everything we say is just a distant memory of the direct intuition. That core thought, as best I can try to express it, is this:

When good is near you, when you feel life powerfully within yourself, it doesn’t arrive through any known or familiar path.

• You won’t recognize the footprints of anyone else.
• You won’t see the face of another person guiding you.
• You won’t hear any specific name or label.
• The way, the thought, the good itself will feel wholly strange and new.

It will exclude all past examples and experiences. You take this way from the ultimate source, not from other people. All the people who ever existed are just forgotten servants of this direct experience.

Fear and hope are both beneath this state. There is something limited even in hope. In the moment of true vision, there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor really even joy in the ordinary sense. The soul, raised above passion, beholds oneness (identity) and eternal causation. It perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right. It finds peace in knowing that all things are ultimately unfolding well.

Vast stretches of nature (like the Atlantic Ocean), long periods of time (years, centuries) become irrelevant. This deep reality that I think and feel underlies every past state of life and circumstance, just as it underlies my present situation, and what we call life, and what we call death.

Life is Becoming

Only living matters, not having lived. Power stops the moment you rest. Power resides in the moment of transition from a past state to a new one, in the leap across the gap (“shooting of the gulf”), in the striving toward a goal (“darting to an aim”).

The world hates this one fact: that the soul becomes—that it is always growing, changing, unfolding. Why? Because this constant becoming forever degrades the past, turns all accumulated riches into poverty, all reputation into shame. It confounds our neat categories of saint and rogue. It pushes both Jesus and Judas equally aside as historical figures superseded by present becoming.

Why, then, do we talk so much about self-reliance? Insofar as the soul is present, there will be power. This power is not just confident; it is active, an agent. To talk of “reliance” is a poor, external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies – the soul itself – because it works and it is.

Anyone who shows more obedience to their inner law than I do masters me, even if they don’t lift a finger. I must revolve around them by the natural gravity of spirits. We think it’s just fancy language (“rhetoric”) when we speak of great virtue. We don’t yet see that virtue is Height – a higher state of being. A person or a group of people who are open and responsive (“plastic and permeable”) to universal principles must, by the law of nature, overpower and lead all cities, nations, kings, rich people, and poets who are not so open.

All Resolves into the ONE

This is the ultimate fact we quickly arrive at on this topic, as on every topic: the resolution of everything into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the defining characteristic of the Supreme Cause. It constitutes the measure of goodness by the degree to which it enters into all lesser forms.

All real things are real precisely because of how much virtue (inherent power, connection to the source) they contain. Activities like commerce, farming, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, or personal influence engage my respect only as impure examples of this universal power present and active in the world. I see the same law working in nature for preservation and growth.

Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Nature does not allow anything to remain in her kingdoms that cannot help itself. The creation and maturing of a planet, its balance and orbit, the bent tree straightening itself after a strong wind, the vital resources within every animal and plant – these are all demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying, soul inherent in all things.

Stay Centered

Everything points back to this center. Let us stop wandering. Let us sit at home with the cause – the inner source. Let us stun and astonish the distracting crowd of external influences – people, books, institutions – by a simple declaration of the divine fact within us. Bid these invaders be respectful (“take the shoes from off their feet”), for God is here within. Let our inner simplicity be the judge of them. Let our obedience to our own inner law demonstrate the poverty of external nature and fortune compared to our native inner riches.

Go Alone, Spiritually Elevated

But right now, we often act like a disconnected mob. People don’t stand in awe of the potential within each other. Our genius is not encouraged to stay home and connect with the “internal ocean” of wisdom, but instead goes out begging for validation (“a cup of water”) from others.

We must go alone. I prefer the silent church before the service begins to any preaching. In that silence, people seem distant, calm, pure – each surrounded by their own sacred space. Let us always try to maintain that inner space.

Why should we automatically adopt the faults of our friend, spouse, parent, or child simply because they are close to us or share our blood? All people share my blood, and I share theirs. But that doesn’t mean I will adopt their negativity or foolishness, or even feel ashamed of it if they do.

But your isolation must not be merely physical; it must be spiritual – meaning, it must be an elevation. At times, the whole world seems to conspire to bother you with urgent-seeming trivialities. Friends, clients, children, sickness, fear, need, charity – they all knock at your door at once, saying, “Come out and deal with us!” But keep your inner state; do not get drawn into their confusion. The power other people possess to annoy me is power I give them through my own weak curiosity or lack of focus. No one can truly come near me except through my own act or permission. As the saying goes: “What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love.” (Meaning: True love possesses its object calmly; desperate desire pushes it away).

Live in Truth, Even When Hard

If we cannot immediately rise to the sacred heights of perfect obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations to conform. Let us enter a state of war against falsehood. Let us awaken the ancient spirits of courage and constancy (symbolized by Thor and Woden) within us. In our polite, modern times, this is done primarily by speaking the truth.

• Check fake hospitality.
• Check fake affection.
• Stop living according to the expectations of the deceived and deceiving people we interact with.

Say to them – father, mother, spouse, brother, friend: “Up until now, I have lived with you according to appearances. From this point forward, I belong to the truth. Know that from now on, I obey no law less than the eternal law within me. I will have no binding agreements (‘covenants’) except those based on genuine closeness (‘proximities’). I will try to nourish my parents, support my family, be a faithful spouse – but I must fulfill these relationships in a new and unprecedented way, according to my own truth. I appeal against your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or for anyone. If you can love me for what I truly am, we shall be happier together. If you cannot, I will still seek to be worthy of your love, but I will do it by being true to myself. I will not hide my tastes or my dislikes. I will trust so strongly that what is deep within me is holy that I will do, openly and powerfully (‘before the sun and moon’), whatever inwardly brings me joy and whatever my heart commands. If you are noble, I will love you. If you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by offering hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but your truth is different from mine, then stick with your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not out of selfishness, but humbly and truthfully. It is in your best interest, and mine, and that of all people, no matter how long we have lived in lies, to live in truth.”

Does this sound harsh today?

Soon, you will value what your own nature dictates just as much as I value mine. If we both follow the truth within us, it will lead us safely in the end.

Someone might object: “But acting this way may cause pain to your friends.”

Yes, but I cannot sell my freedom and my power just to protect their feelings. Besides, all people have moments of clarity when they glimpse absolute truth. In those moments, they will understand and justify my actions, and likely do the same things themselves.

Your Inner Law is Supreme

Ordinary people might think that rejecting popular standards means rejecting all standards – that you are just promoting lawlessness. Boldly selfish people might even misuse the name of philosophy to excuse their wrongdoings.

But the law of consciousness, your inner sense of right and wrong, still exists. There are two ways we are judged, two “confessionals”:

1. External Judgment: You can clear yourself by fulfilling your duties to others – father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, even cat and dog. Have you satisfied these relationships? Can any of them rightly blame you?
2. Internal Judgment: But I can also choose to disregard this external standard and satisfy myself according to my own inner judge. I have my own strict standards and my own perfect circle of integrity. This inner law might deny the name of “duty” to many things society calls duties. But if I can meet the demands of my own inner law, it allows me to disregard the popular rules.

If anyone thinks this inner law is relaxed or easy, let them try to follow its commandments perfectly for just one day.

The Strength Required

Truly, it requires something godlike in a person who has rejected the common motivations of humanity (like seeking approval or avoiding blame) and has dared to trust themselves completely as their own guide and taskmaster.

• May their heart be high and courageous.
• May their will be faithful to their inner vision.
• May their sight be clear.

Only then can they genuinely be their own doctrine, society, and law. Only then can a simple, inner purpose guide them as strongly as iron necessity guides others.

A Critique of Modern Society

If anyone looks closely at the current state of what we call society, they will see the urgent need for these ethics of self-reliance. The strength and courage (“sinew and heart”) seem to have been drained from people. We have become timid, depressed complainers.

• We are afraid of truth.
• We are afraid of fortune (both good and bad luck).
• We are afraid of death.
• We are afraid of each other.

Our time does not produce great and complete individuals. We desperately need men and women who can renew life and improve our society. But we see that most people seem spiritually bankrupt (“insolvent”). They cannot even satisfy their own basic needs. Their ambitions are wildly out of proportion to their actual abilities. They are constantly leaning on others and begging for support, day and night.

Our whole way of life seems dependent:

• Our housekeeping relies on others.
• Our arts often imitate.
• Our occupations are often chosen for security, not passion.
• Our marriages may lack deep connection.
• Our religion is often something society chose for us, not something we found ourselves.

We are like “parlor soldiers” – people who talk about battle but avoid the real, rugged struggles of fate where true strength is born.

Fragility vs. Resilience

If our young people fail in their first attempts, they lose all courage. If a young merchant fails, people say he is ruined forever. If the brightest student attends a top college but doesn’t get a prestigious job in a major city within a year, his friends and even he himself think he has a right to be discouraged and complain for the rest of his life.

Contrast this with a sturdy young person from the countryside (like New Hampshire or Vermont). They might try many different professions over the years – driving teams, farming, selling goods door-to-door, teaching, preaching, editing a newspaper, going to Congress, developing land. They try various things, and always, like a cat, they land on their feet. Such a person is worth a hundred of the fragile city types (“city dolls”).

This resilient person walks in step with their time. They feel no shame about not having a single, specialized “profession,” because they don’t postpone living. They live fully now. They don’t have just one chance; they have a hundred chances.

Let a teacher with the wisdom of the ancient Stoics explain the true resources available to humans. Let them tell people:

• You are not weak, leaning willows; you can and must stand alone.
• As you exercise self-trust, new powers will appear within you.
• A true human being embodies the divine potential (“the word made flesh”), born to bring healing to the world.
• You should be ashamed to accept pity.
• The moment you act from your true self – tossing aside external laws, books, idols, and customs – we no longer pity you, but thank and respect you.

That kind of teacher will restore human life to its potential splendor and make their name honored throughout history.

The Revolution of Self-Reliance

It’s easy to see that greater self-reliance must cause a revolution in all areas of human life and relationships:

• In religion
• In education
• In careers and pursuits
• In ways of living
• In social interactions
• In attitudes toward property
• In philosophical views

1. Rethinking Prayer

Consider the prayers people allow themselves! What they call a holy duty is often not even brave or strong. Prayer typically looks outward, asking for some external thing to be added through some external power. It gets lost in endless confusing ideas about the natural and supernatural, about mediators and miracles.

Prayer that asks for a specific favor – anything less than the highest universal good – is wrong (“vicious”).

True prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the inner monologue of a soul that observes the world with understanding and joy. It is the spirit of God recognizing His own works as good.

But using prayer as a tool to achieve a private goal is petty and dishonest (“meanness and theft”). It assumes a separation (dualism) between you and the divine, rather than unity. As soon as a person feels at one with God, they will not beg. They will then see prayer in all focused action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling to weed his field, the prayer of the rower focused on the stroke of his oar – these are true prayers heard throughout nature, even if their immediate goals are simple. Caratach, a character in Fletcher’s play Bonduca, when told to ask the god Audate’s will, replies:

“His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors; Our valors are our best gods.”

Another kind of false prayer is our regrets. Discontent is the lack of self-reliance; it is weakness of will. Feel regret over calamities only if you can actually help the person suffering. If not, attend to your own work, and that itself begins to repair the damage.

Our typical sympathy is often just as weak. We go to those who weep, perhaps foolishly, and sit down and cry with them for company. Instead, we should impart truth and strength to them, like invigorating “rough electric shocks,” helping them reconnect with their own reason.

The secret of good fortune is finding joy in what we can do with our own hands and minds. The self-helping person is always welcome to gods and humans. For them, all doors are open; all people greet them; all honors are given; all eyes follow them with admiration. Our love goes out to embrace them because they didn’t need it. We eagerly praise and celebrate them because they stayed true to their path and ignored our disapproval. The gods love them perhaps because ordinary people, stuck in conformity, hated them. As Zoroaster said, “To the persevering mortal, the blessed Immortals are swift [to help].”

2. Rethinking Creeds

Just as common prayers reveal a weakness of will, common belief systems (“creeds”) reveal a weakness of intellect. People often say, like the foolish Israelites in the Bible, “Let God not speak to us directly, or we might die. Let a human speak for God, and we will obey.”

Everywhere I go, I am prevented from meeting the divine spark in my brother because he has shut the doors of his own inner temple. Instead, he just recites stories (“fables”) about his brother’s God, or his brother’s brother’s God.

Every new, original mind creates a new way of classifying and understanding the world. If it’s an uncommonly active and powerful mind (like Locke in philosophy, Lavoisier in chemistry, Hutton in geology, Bentham in law, Fourier in social theory), it imposes its classification system on others, and suddenly, there’s a “new system.” The deeper the thought, the more things it touches and explains, and the more satisfied the followers become.

This is especially apparent in religious creeds and churches. These are also classification systems created by some powerful mind thinking about duty and humanity’s relationship to the Highest Reality (examples: Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism). The follower takes great delight in fitting everything into the new terminology, like a girl who has just learned botany enjoys seeing the world through the new categories of plants and seasons.

For a time, the follower might find their intellectual power grows by studying the master’s system. But in all unbalanced minds, the classification itself becomes idolized. It is treated as the ultimate goal, not just as a useful tool that will eventually be outgrown. The walls of their system seem to blend with the very walls of the universe. The stars in the sky seem to hang only on the arch their master built.

They cannot imagine how outsiders (“you aliens”) have any right to see truth, or how you even can see it. They think, “You must have somehow stolen the light from us.” They don’t yet realize that light – truth itself – is unsystematic, untamable, and will break into any enclosure, even theirs. Let them chirp for a while and claim the light is their private property. If they are honest and continue to grow, soon their neat little enclosure (“pinfold”) will become too tight and small. It will crack, lean, rot, and vanish. And the immortal light – forever young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored – will beam over the entire universe as it did on the first morning.

3. Rethinking Travel

It is because people lack inner development (“self-culture”) that the superstition of Traveling holds such fascination for educated Americans. Italy, England, Egypt become idols. But the people who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in our imagination did so by sticking firmly where they were, like an axis of the earth.

In our strong, clear-minded (“manly”) hours, we feel that our duty is right where we are. The soul is not a traveler. The wise person stays at home. When necessities or duties occasionally call them away from home, even to foreign lands, they remain centered (“at home”) within themselves. They make people aware, just by their presence and expression, that they travel as missionaries of wisdom and virtue, visiting cities and people like visiting royalty (“a sovereign”), not like an unwelcome guest (“interloper”) or a servant.

I have no grumpy objection to traveling around the world for art, study, or helping others – provided that the person is first centered and grounded (“domesticated”) in themselves, or at least doesn’t go abroad hoping to find something greater than what they already know within.

He who travels to be amused, or to get something externally that he doesn’t carry within him, travels away from himself. He grows old even in his youth, surrounded by old things. In ancient cities like Thebes or Palmyra, his own will and mind become old and ruined like the stones around him. He carries ruins to ruins.

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys reveal the indifference of places. At home, I might dream that in Naples or Rome, I can be overwhelmed with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, say goodbye to friends, sail across the sea, and finally wake up in Naples. And right there beside me is the stern fact, the same sad self – relentless, identical – that I was trying to flee from. I visit the Vatican and the palaces. I try to pretend I’m intoxicated with the sights and ideas, but I am not. My inner giant – my core self with all its issues – goes with me wherever I go.

4. Rethinking Imitation

The obsession with travel is just one symptom of a deeper problem affecting all our intellectual activity. The intellect has become a wanderer (“vagabond”), and our education system encourages this restlessness. Our minds travel even when our bodies have to stay home. We imitate others. And what is imitation but the traveling of the mind?

• Our houses are built according to foreign tastes.
• Our shelves are decorated with foreign ornaments.
• Our opinions, tastes, and ways of thinking lean on and follow the Past and the Distant.

The soul created the arts wherever they truly flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. Art was the application of the artist’s own thought to the specific task and the conditions at hand.

Why do we need to copy the Greek Doric or the medieval Gothic styles? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and unique expression are just as available to us, right here and now, as they were to anyone else. If the American artist studies with hope and love the precise thing he needs to create, considering the local climate, soil, length of day, needs of the people, and form of government, he will create a house perfectly suited to all these factors, satisfying both taste and feeling.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

• You can present your own unique gift every moment with the accumulated power of your whole life’s cultivation.
• But if you adopt someone else’s talent, you only have a temporary, partial possession of it.

That which each person can do best, only their Maker (or their deepest nature) can teach them. No person truly knows what their unique gift is, nor can they, until they actually express it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great person is unique. The essential “Scipio-ness” of Scipio was precisely that part he could not borrow from others. You will never create a new Shakespeare by studying Shakespeare.

Do the work that is assigned uniquely to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is available to you, at this very moment, an expression as brave and grand as the sculptures of Phidias, the buildings of the Egyptians, or the writings of Moses or Dante – but it will be different from all of these. The creative soul, infinitely rich and eloquent, will never condescend to simply repeat itself. But if you can truly hear what these great figures from the past are saying, surely you can reply to them in the same powerful tone of voice; for the ear (understanding) and the tongue (expression) are two organs of the same nature. Stay true to the simple and noble regions of your own life, obey your heart, and you will bring forth the timeless truths (“reproduce the Foreworld”) again in your own unique way.

5. Rethinking Social Progress

Just as our Religion, Education, and Art tend to look outward and backward, so does our general spirit of society. All men pride themselves on the improvement of society, but no man improves.

Society never truly advances. It recedes on one side just as fast as it gains on the other. It undergoes constant changes – it might be called barbarous, then civilized, Christianized, rich, or scientific – but this change is not necessarily improvement (“amelioration”). For everything that is given, something is taken away. Society acquires new arts and technologies, but it loses old instincts and strengths.

What a contrast between the well-dressed, reading, writing, thinking American – with a watch, pencil, and money in his pocket – and the naked New Zealander, whose property is just a club, a spear, a mat, and shared space in a shed! But compare the physical health of the two, and you see that the “civilized” white man has lost his original strength. If travelers tell the truth, striking the “savage” with an axe might result in the flesh healing in a day or two, as if struck into soft tar. The same blow could send the white man to his grave.

The civilized person has built a coach but has lost the use of their feet. They are supported by crutches but lack muscle strength. They have a fine Swiss watch but have lost the skill to tell the time by the sun. They have a nautical almanac for navigation, ensuring the information is available when needed, so the average person doesn’t know a single star in the sky. They don’t observe the solstices or equinoxes; the whole bright calendar of the natural year exists without a corresponding dial in their mind.

• His notebooks impair his memory.
• His libraries overload his understanding.
• The insurance office seems to increase the number of accidents.

It’s worth asking whether machinery doesn’t ultimately burden us; whether we haven’t lost some vital energy through refinement; whether a Christianity embedded in large institutions and forms hasn’t lost some vigor of “wild virtue.” For every ancient Stoic was truly a Stoic; but in modern Christendom, where is the true Christian?

There is no more fundamental progress in the moral standard than there is in the average physical height or size of humans. No greater people exist now than ever existed before. A remarkable equality can be observed between the great individuals of the earliest ages and those of the latest. All the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century cannot produce fundamentally greater individuals than Plutarch’s heroes from twenty-three or twenty-four centuries ago.

The human race does not progress fundamentally over time. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes were great men, but they didn’t leave behind a “class” of followers just like them. He who is truly of their class will not be called by their name but will be his own person and, in turn, the founder of his own school of thought or influence.

The arts and inventions of each period are merely its outward dress (“costume”); they do not make people stronger or better internally. The harm done by improved machinery may balance out its good. Early explorers like Hudson and Behring accomplished astonishing feats in simple fishing boats, amazing later explorers like Parry and Franklin, whose expeditions used all the resources of modern science and art. Galileo, using a simple telescope (“opera-glass”), discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than almost anyone since. Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat.

It is strange to see how tools and machines, introduced with great fanfare centuries or years before, periodically fall into disuse and perish. The greatest genius often returns to essential human capabilities. We considered improvements in the art of war as triumphs of science, yet Napoleon conquered Europe largely through the “bivouac” – relying on naked valor and stripping away all cumbersome aids. Napoleon himself believed, according to Las Cases, that a perfect army required abolishing most modern arms, supply depots, and transport, returning to the Roman custom where the soldier carried his own grain, ground it himself, and baked his own bread.

Society is like a wave. The wave form moves forward, but the water it’s made of does not travel with it. The same particle of water does not rise all the way from the trough to the crest. The wave’s unity is only an appearance (“phenomenal”). The individuals who make up a nation today will die next year, and their specific experience dies with them.

6. Rethinking Property

Therefore, reliance on Property, including reliance on governments that protect it, indicates a lack of self-reliance. People have looked away from themselves and toward external things for so long that they have come to value religious, learned, and civil institutions primarily as guards of property. They fear attacks on these institutions because they feel them as attacks on their property. They measure their respect for each other by what each person has, not by what each person is.

But a truly cultivated person becomes ashamed of their property, out of a new respect for their own inner nature. They especially hate possessions that came to them accidentally – through inheritance, gift, or even crime. They feel that this is not true having; the property doesn’t really belong to them, has no root in them, and merely sits there passively because no revolution or robber has taken it away yet.

But that which a person is does always, by necessity, acquire what it needs. And what the person acquires through their own being and effort is living property. This property does not depend on the whims of rulers, mobs, revolutions, fire, storms, or bankruptcies. It perpetually renews itself wherever the person breathes and lives authentically.

The Caliph Ali wisely said, “Your lot or portion of life is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.” (Meaning: What is meant for you will come to you; stop anxiously chasing external things.)

Our dependence on external validation leads us to a slavish respect for numbers. Political parties hold large conventions. The bigger the crowd, the more announcements (“The delegation from Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire!”), the stronger the young follower feels, thinking they have thousands more eyes and arms on their side. Reformers do the same thing, holding conventions, voting, and passing resolutions in large groups.

No, my friends! The divine spirit will not enter and live within you that way. It works by the exact opposite method. It is only when a person lets go of all external support and stands alone that I see them become truly strong and successful. They actually become weaker with every new recruit who joins their cause, diluting their unique vision. Isn’t one strong, independent person better than a whole town following along?

Ask nothing from other people. In this world of endless change, if you stand firm in your own integrity, you will eventually become the stable pillar that supports everything around you.

When someone realizes that true power is born within, that they have been weak only because they looked for good outside themselves – and, understanding this, throws themselves without hesitation onto their own thought – they instantly stand upright. They gain command of themselves. They work miracles. It’s just like how a person standing properly on their feet is much stronger than a person trying to stand on their head.

Master Fortune, Trust Principles

So, use everything that is called Fortune (luck, chance, external circumstances) in the right way. Most people gamble with Fortune. They win everything and lose everything as her wheel turns. But you should disregard these winnings gained by chance as if they were unlawful.

Instead, deal with Cause and Effect – these are the reliable chancellors, the true laws of God. Work and acquire things through the power of your own Will (your inner intention and focused effort). When you do this, you have effectively chained the wheel of Chance. You will sit safely, no longer fearing its random ups and downs.

A political victory, a rise in your income, the recovery of a sick loved one, the return of an absent friend, or some other positive event might lift your spirits. You might think good days are surely ahead. Do not believe it. External events cannot bring you lasting peace.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Friendship

(This essay explores the deep value and nature of true friendship, suggesting it’s a rare, profound connection rooted in truth and tenderness, surpassing ordinary social ties.)

Hidden Kindness Connects Us All

We feel much more kindness towards others than we ever actually speak. Despite all the selfishness that can make the world feel cold, the entire human family is bathed in an element of love, like a fine, invisible atmosphere.

Think about how many people we meet briefly in homes, people we barely speak to, yet we silently respect them, and they respect us. Think of how many people we see on the street or sit near in church; though we don’t speak, we feel a warm sense of shared presence. Our eyes often communicate these feelings. The heart knows.

The Warmth of Affection

Allowing ourselves to feel and express this human affection creates a kind of warm, uplifting feeling inside. In poetry and everyday language, we often compare feelings of goodwill and positive regard towards others to the effects of fire. These fine, inner feelings are just as swift, active, and cheering as flames – perhaps even more so. From the highest intensity of passionate love down to the simplest level of goodwill, these feelings are what make life sweet.

Friendship Enhances Our Abilities

Our intellectual and active powers actually increase when fueled by affection. A scholar might sit down to write, and years of solitary thinking might not produce a single good idea or well-phrased sentence. But then, needing to write a letter to a friend, suddenly wonderful thoughts appear easily, clothed in perfect words.

Consider a household known for its virtue and self-respect. The approach of a stranger, especially one who comes recommended, causes a stir, a mix of excitement and nervousness. His arrival can almost bring fear to the kind hearts eager to welcome him. The house is quickly cleaned, things are put in order, best clothes are put on, and a special dinner is planned if possible.

We hear only good reports about this recommended stranger. He seems to represent ideal humanity; he is what we aspire to be. Having built up this image, we worry about how to interact with such a person. This anticipation elevates our conversation with him. We find ourselves speaking better than usual. Our imagination is quicker, our memory richer; our usual shyness disappears for a time. For hours, we can engage in sincere, graceful, rich conversation, drawing from our deepest experiences. People who know us well might be surprised by our unusual abilities.

But this magic often fades. As soon as the stranger begins to reveal his personal biases, his specific opinions, his flaws, the special connection is over. He has heard the best he will ever hear from us. He is no longer a symbol, just an ordinary person. Vulgarity, ignorance, misunderstanding – these are familiar acquaintances. Now, when he visits, he might get the polite reception, the clean house, the dinner – but the excited heartbeat and the deep communication of the soul are gone.

The Joy of True Connection

What is as pleasant as those sudden bursts of affection (“jets of affection”) that make the world feel young and fresh again? What is as wonderful as a true and firm meeting of two minds, sharing a thought or a feeling? How beautiful it is when gifted and genuine people enter our lives!

The moment we allow ourselves to truly feel affection, the world is transformed. There is no winter, no night; all tragedies, all boredom, even all duties seem to vanish. The only thing filling eternity are the radiant forms of beloved people. If the soul could be assured that somewhere in the universe it would eventually rejoin its true friend, it could live content and cheerful, even if alone, for a thousand years.

Gratitude for Friends

I woke this morning with deep gratitude for my friends, both old and new. Shouldn’t I call God “the Beautiful,” since He reveals Himself to me daily through the gift of these people? I often criticize society and embrace solitude, yet I am not so ungrateful that I fail to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded people who pass my way from time to time.

Anyone who truly hears me, who truly understands me, becomes mine – a possession for all time. Nature is generous enough to give me this joy multiple times. Through these connections, we weave our own social threads, creating a new web of relationships. As our shared thoughts take root, we gradually find ourselves living in a new world of our own creation, no longer feeling like strangers or pilgrims just passing through a world defined by old traditions.

My friends have often come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By the oldest right, by the divine affinity (natural attraction) that virtue has for itself, I find them. Or rather, it is not I, but the Deity working within me and within them, that breaks down the thick walls of individual character, relationship, age, sex, and circumstance – barriers He usually allows – and makes many individuals feel like one.

High thanks I owe to you, my excellent friends (“lovers”), who expand my world to new and noble depths and enrich the meaning of all my thoughts. These friendships are like new poems from the first Poet – poetry without end – hymns, odes, epics, constantly flowing, like Apollo and the Muses still chanting.

Will these friends, too, eventually separate from me, or some of them? I don’t know, but I do not fear it. My relationship with them is so pure, based on simple, natural affinity, that the same life force (“Genius of my life”) that connected us will continue to connect me with other noble souls, wherever I may be.

The Idealized Friend

I admit I am extremely sensitive when it comes to friendship. It feels almost dangerous for me to indulge too deeply in the sweet “poison” of affections, perhaps misused. Meeting a new person feels like a major event; it can even keep me from sleeping. I’ve often had wonderful fantasies about people that gave me hours of delight, but the joy usually ends with the fantasy; it doesn’t bear real fruit in terms of deeper thought or changed actions.

In true friendship, I must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were my own. I must feel I have a share (“a property”) in his virtues. I feel as warm and happy when he is praised as a lover feels when hearing applause for his beloved.

We tend to overestimate our friend’s conscience. His goodness seems better than ours, his nature finer, his temptations less challenging. Everything about him – his name, his appearance, his clothes, books, tools – seems enhanced by our imagination. Our own thoughts even sound newer and more significant when spoken by him.

The Ebb and Flow of Friendship

Yet, just as the heart beats in and out (systole and diastole), love also has its ebb and flow. Friendship, like the idea of the soul’s immortality, often seems too good to be truly believable. The lover looking at his beloved might sense, deep down, that she is not exactly the perfect ideal he worships. Even in the golden hours of friendship, moments of suspicion and disbelief can arise. We might doubt whether we are projecting virtues onto our hero and then worshipping the image we ourselves created.

Strictly speaking, the soul does not respect other people as much as it respects itself. From a purely objective viewpoint, all individuals remain infinitely distant from each other. Should we fear analyzing the foundations of friendship (“this Elysian temple”), afraid we might cool our love? Should I not strive to be as real and objective as the things I observe? If I am real, I should not fear knowing my friends for what they truly are. Their essential being is no less beautiful than their appearance, even if it takes a finer perception to grasp it. The root of a plant isn’t ugly to a scientist, even though we cut the stem short when making garlands.

I must risk stating the plain, hard fact amidst these pleasant thoughts about friendship, even if it seems jarring (like finding an “Egyptian skull at our banquet”). A person who is truly united with their own thoughts has a magnificent conception of themselves. They feel a sense of universal success, even if they experience many specific failures. No external advantages – no powers, no gold, no force – can truly match this inner strength. “I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than on your wealth.” I cannot make your consciousness equal to mine. Only the star shines with its own light; the planet merely reflects a faint, moon-like ray. I hear what you say about the admirable qualities of the person you praise, but I know that despite all their fine appearances (“purple cloaks”), I won’t truly connect with them unless, at their core, they share my fundamental values (“unless he is at last a poor Greek like me”).

Oh, my friend, I cannot deny that even you are part of the vast shadow of the Phenomenal world – the world of appearances, colorful and immense. Compared to you, perhaps everything else seems like a shadow, yet even you are not ultimate, absolute Being in the way that Truth is, or Justice is. You are not my own soul, but a picture or reflection (“effigy”) of it. You came into my life recently, and already it feels like you might be preparing to leave.

Is it possible that the soul puts forth friends like a tree puts forth leaves, and then, as new buds grow, pushes the old leaves off? The law of nature is eternal alternation, constant change. Each state seems to induce its opposite. The soul surrounds itself with friends so that it can achieve a deeper self-understanding or solitude. Then it goes alone for a time so that it can later engage in richer conversation or society. This pattern reveals itself throughout the history of our personal relationships. The instinct for affection sparks the hope of union with others, but the returning sense of our fundamental separateness (“insulation”) pulls us back from the chase. Thus, every person spends their life searching for friendship. If they were to honestly record their feelings, they might write a letter like this to each new potential friend:

DEAR FRIEND:— If I were completely sure of you – sure of your capacity, sure that my moods would always match yours – I would never again think about trivial matters concerning your comings and goings. I am not perfectly wise; my moods are quite ordinary and understandable. I respect your potential genius, which is still largely unknown to me. Yet, I dare not assume that you perfectly understand me, and so, you remain for me a delicious torment. Yours forever, or perhaps never.

True Friendship vs. Superficiality

Yet, these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are subjects for curiosity, not the foundation for a life. They are not meant to be indulged. To focus on them is like weaving cobwebs, not durable cloth. Our friendships often rush to short and disappointing conclusions because we build them from flimsy materials like excitement and dreams (“wine and dreams”), instead of the tough fiber of the human heart.

The laws of true friendship are demanding (“austere”) and eternal. They are part of the same fabric as the laws of nature and morality. But often, we aim for a quick and shallow benefit, trying to “suck a sudden sweetness.” We snatch impatiently at the slowest-growing fruit in God’s entire garden, a fruit that requires many summers and winters to ripen.

We often seek friends not with reverence, but with a selfish, impure (“adulterate”) passion that seeks to possess them for ourselves. This is futile. We are all armed with subtle defenses and conflicting impulses (“antagonisms”) that immediately begin to operate when we meet, turning potential poetry into stale prose.

Almost all people compromise themselves (“descend”) to meet others. Most association requires compromise. What’s worse is that the very essence, the unique beauty (“flower and aroma”), of each person seems to disappear as they try to get closer. What a constant disappointment actual society is, even among virtuous and gifted people! After arranging meetings with great anticipation, we are often tormented by clumsy interactions (“baffled blows”), sudden, inappropriate apathy, or awkward failures (“epilepsies”) of wit and enthusiasm, right when friendship and thought should be at their peak. Our abilities fail us, and often both people feel relieved to be alone afterward.

Integrity in Relationships

I ought to be strong enough and true enough (“equal”) for every relationship. It makes no difference how many friends I have or how much contentment I find in talking with each one, if there is even one person whom I am not equal to. If I have backed down (“shrunk unequal”) from even one significant relational contest or challenge, the joy I find in all my other friendships becomes cheap (“mean”) and cowardly. I should hate myself if I then used my other friends as a hiding place (“asylum”).

“The valiant warrior famoused for fight, After a hundred victories, once foiled, Is from the book of honor razed quite, And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.”

Our impatience for instant connection is sharply rebuked by these realities. Bashfulness and apathy can be like a tough protective husk around a sensitive nature (“delicate organization”), shielding it from ripening too soon. It might be damaged if it fully revealed itself before the best souls were mature enough to recognize and appreciate it.

Respect the natural slowness (Naturlangsamkeit), the gradual pace that hardens a ruby over millions of years and works over vast timescales where mountains like the Alps and Andes appear and disappear like rainbows. The good spirit guiding our lives doesn’t offer heaven as a reward for rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for frivolous behaviour, but demands the total worth of a person. Let us not seek childish indulgence in our relationships, but the most demanding, genuine worth. Let us approach our friends with bold trust in the truth of their hearts and in the unshakable breadth of their character’s foundations.

The Sacred Bond

The attractions of this subject are too powerful to resist. I will leave aside, for now, discussions of lesser social benefits to speak of that select and sacred relationship which feels absolute. This connection is so pure that it makes even the usual language of love seem suspicious or commonplace. Nothing feels so divine.

I do not wish to treat friendships delicately, but with the roughest courage. When friendships are real, they are not fragile like glass threads or frost patterns, but the most solid things we know.

For now, after so many centuries of experience, what do we truly know about nature, or about ourselves? Humanity hasn’t taken a single step toward solving the ultimate problem of its destiny. The entire human race stands together under the condemnation of foolishness. But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace that I draw from this alliance with my brother’s soul – that is the core reality (“the nut itself”), while all of nature and all thought are merely the outer husk and shell.

Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built beautifully, like a festival arch, just to entertain him for a single day. Happier still if the friend understands the seriousness (“solemnity”) of that relationship and honors its sacredness (“awe”)!

He who offers himself as a candidate for this sacred bond (“covenant”) approaches like an ancient Olympian athlete coming to the great games, where the noblest souls (“first-born of the world”) are the competitors. He enters contests where Time, Need, and Danger are formidable opponents. The only victor is the one who has enough truth in their character to preserve the delicate beauty of their soul from the wear and tear of all these challenges. Gifts of external fortune may or may not be present, but success (“speed”) in this contest depends entirely on intrinsic nobleness and the ability to disregard trivial matters.

The Two Elements of Friendship

There are two elements that make up friendship. Each is so essential (“sovereign”) that I cannot detect any superiority in either, nor any reason why one should be named before the other.

1. Truth: A friend is a person with whom I can be completely sincere. Before him, I can think aloud. I have finally arrived in the presence of someone so real and equal to me that I can drop even the deepest layers of pretense – politeness, hidden motives, calculated words (“dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought”) – which people almost never take off. I can deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is a luxury allowed, like crowns and authority, only to the highest rank – those who are permitted to speak the truth because they have no one above them to impress or conform to. Every person is sincere when they are alone. The moment a second person enters, hypocrisy begins. We deflect and defend against the approach of others using compliments, gossip, amusements, or business talk. We cover up our true thoughts under a hundred layers. I knew a man who, in a state of religious intensity, cast off all these coverings. Omitting all compliments and small talk, he spoke directly to the conscience of every person he met, with great insight and beauty. At first, people resisted him, and everyone agreed he was mad. But he persisted in this course for some time (as indeed, he couldn’t help doing). Eventually, he gained the advantage of bringing every person he knew into a true relationship with him. No one would think of speaking falsely to him or putting him off with chatter about markets or news. His profound sincerity compelled everyone else to engage in similar plain dealing. Whatever love of nature, poetry, or symbols of truth a person had, they showed it to him. But to most of us, society shows not its true face and eyes, but only its side and back. Isn’t it worth risking a period of seeming “insanity” to achieve true relationships in a generally false age? We can seldom stand fully upright. Almost every person we meet requires some civility, some careful handling (“requires to be humored”). They have some reputation, some talent, some peculiar religious or philanthropic idea in their head that must not be questioned, and which spoils any real conversation with them. But a true friend is a sane person who challenges me, my core being, not just my cleverness. My friend provides companionship (“entertainment”) without requiring any special conditions (“stipulation”) on my part. A friend, therefore, is a kind of paradox in nature. I, who feel fundamentally alone (“I who alone am”), who see nothing else in nature whose existence I can affirm with the same certainty as my own, now behold something like my own being – in all its depth, variety, and curiosity – repeated in another person (“a foreign form”). A friend may truly be called nature’s masterpiece.

2. Tenderness: The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are connected to people by all sorts of ties: blood, pride, fear, hope, money, lust, hate, admiration, circumstance, status symbols, and trivial things. But we can hardly believe that enough character can exist in another person to draw us to them purely through love. Can another person be so blessed, and can we be so pure, that we can offer them genuine tenderness? When a person becomes truly dear to me, I feel I have reached the highest goal of fortune. I find very little written in books that speaks directly to the heart of this matter. Yet, I remember one text. My author says, “I offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted.” (Perhaps meaning deep devotion needs fewer outward displays). I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself firmly on the ground before it attempts to leap over the moon. (Meaning: Friendship must be grounded in reality and practicality before reaching for the highest ideals).

I wish friendship to be a little bit practical and grounded (“a little of a citizen”) before it becomes purely angelic (“quite a cherub”). We sometimes criticize practical people because they seem to make love and friendship into a mere transaction – an exchange of useful gifts or favors. For them, it’s just good neighborliness; it involves practical help like watching with the sick or carrying the casket at a funeral. This approach completely loses sight of the delicate and noble qualities of the relationship.

But while we can’t find the divine (“the god”) hidden under this practical disguise (like a merchant “sutler” following an army), we also cannot forgive the idealistic poet if he spins his theories too finely. The poet must support his romantic ideas with the down-to-earth (“municipal”) virtues of justice, reliability, faithfulness, and compassion.

I hate seeing the noble name of friendship misused (“prostituted”) to describe fashionable or worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of simple, honest people (“plowboys and tin-peddlers”) to the silky, perfumed associations that celebrate themselves with frivolous displays, like fancy carriage rides and dinners at expensive restaurants.

The true purpose (“end”) of friendship is a kind of exchange (“commerce”) that is the strictest and most basic possible; stricter than any business deal we know. It is for mutual aid and comfort through all the experiences and transitions of life and death. Friendship is suited for peaceful days, graceful gifts, and pleasant country walks, but it is also for rough roads, hard times, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with moments of witty insight and deep religious feeling.

Friends should help each other dignify the everyday needs and tasks of life. They should enhance life with courage, wisdom, and unity. Friendship should never become merely routine or settled. It should remain alert and inventive, adding meaning (“rhyme and reason”) to what might otherwise feel like drudgery.

The Rarity of True Friendship

It might be said that true friendship requires natures so rare and valuable, each one so well-balanced (“tempered”) and so well-suited to the other, and also brought together by fortunate circumstances (for even love demands perfect pairing, as a poet says), that its complete satisfaction can very seldom be guaranteed.

Some experts in this warm knowledge (“lore”) of the heart say that friendship cannot exist in its perfect form between more than two people. I am not quite so strict in my definition, perhaps because I have never experienced a connection as high as others claim is possible. I prefer to imagine a circle of godlike men and women, related to each other in various ways, sharing a high level of understanding among them.

However, I do find that the rule of one-to-one seems essential for deep conversation, which is the main practice and fulfillment (“consummation”) of friendship. Don’t mix waters too much; even mixing good things can spoil the result. You can have very useful and cheering talks separately with two different individuals. But if all three of you get together, you might not share a single new or heartfelt word. Two people can talk while one listens, but three people cannot really participate equally in a conversation of the most sincere and searching kind.

Even in good company, the conversation between two people across a table is never quite as deep as what happens when you leave those same two people alone together. In a group, individuals tend to merge their personal egos into a kind of “social soul” that reflects the collective awareness present. Specific bonds – friend to friend, brother to sister, wife to husband – become less relevant in that setting. Only the person who can tune into and speak to the common thought of the group can easily participate, not someone limited to their own private thoughts. This social convention, required by good sense in groups, destroys the high freedom needed for great conversation, which requires the absolute merging of two souls into one.

Affinity Determines Connection

When any two people are left alone, they naturally enter into simpler, more direct relations. Yet, it is affinity – that natural spark or connection – that determines which two people will actually converse meaningfully. People who lack this connection find little joy in each other’s company; they will never suspect the hidden potential (“latent powers”) within each other.

We sometimes talk about a “great talent for conversation” as if it were a permanent quality someone possesses. But conversation is just a fleeting relationship, nothing more. A person might be known for their deep thoughts and eloquent speech, but they might be unable to say a meaningful word to their cousin or uncle. These relatives might blame their silence, just as they might blame a sundial for being useless in the shade. The sundial marks the hour when it’s in the sun. Similarly, the eloquent person will find their voice again when they are among people who appreciate their way of thinking.

The Balance of Likeness and Unlikeness

Friendship requires that rare balance between likeness and unlikeness. This balance keeps things interesting (“piques each”) because each person recognizes both shared understanding (“consent”) and distinct strength (“power”) in the other party.

I would rather be alone forever than have my friend, even by a single word or look, pretend to feel more sympathy than they actually do. I am equally put off by disagreement (“antagonism”) and by overly compliant agreement. Let my friend never cease, for even an instant, to be himself. The only real joy I have in his connection to me (“his being mine”) is that his distinct self (“the not mine”) is now part of my world. I hate it when I look for honest support, or at least honest resistance, and instead find a weak “mush of concession.” It is better to be a nettle in the side of your friend (a source of challenging truth) than merely his echo.

The condition required for the highest friendship is the ability to do without it. This high relationship demands great and sublime qualities in both individuals. There must be two strong, distinct individuals (“very two”) before there can be a true union (“very one”). Let friendship be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, who mutually respect and even somewhat fear each other’s strength, before they come to recognize the deep identity which unites them beneath their surface differences.

Reverence and Space in Friendship

Only the person who is generous of spirit (“magnanimous”) is truly fit for this high society of friendship. This person is sure that greatness and goodness are always efficient and wise (“economy”). They are not quick to interfere unnecessarily with the unfolding of destiny (“fortunes”). Let such a person not interfere with the natural unfolding of friendship either. Leave the diamond its ages to grow; do not expect to speed up the births of eternal things.

Friendship demands to be treated with reverence, almost religiously. We talk about choosing our friends, but often friends are self-elected through natural affinity. Reverence is a large part of it. Treat your friend somewhat like a spectacle, a unique phenomenon to be appreciated.

Of course, your friend has merits and qualities that are not yours, qualities you cannot fully honor or even see if you hold him too close to your own personality. Stand aside sometimes; give those unique merits room; let them rise and expand. Are you the friend of your friend’s superficial details (“buttons”), or of his essential thought? To a great heart, even a close friend will remain a stranger in a thousand small ways. This respectful distance allows you to come near on the deepest, most sacred level (“holiest ground”). Leave it to immature boys and girls to regard a friend as property, seeking a quick, shallow, and ultimately confusing pleasure instead of the noblest benefits friendship can offer.

The Sacred Bond: Beyond Familiarity

Let us earn our entrance into this special guild of friendship through a long period of testing and growth (“probation”). Why should we disrespect (“desecrate”) noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them too quickly or too easily? Why insist on rushed personal familiarity with your friend? Why feel the need to go to his house all the time, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why need him to visit you constantly at your own home? Are these external things truly essential to our sacred bond (“covenant”)?

Leave aside this constant need for physical closeness and possessiveness (“touching and clawing”). Let my friend be primarily a spirit to me. A message, a shared thought, an act of sincerity, a meaningful glance from him – these are what I truly want, not just news updates or practical help (“pottage”). I can get politics, casual chat, and neighborly conveniences from less significant companions.

Shouldn’t the society of my friend feel poetic, pure, universal, and as grand as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is somehow less sacred (“profane”) than that distant bar of cloud sleeping on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass dividing the brook? Let us not cheapen friendship, but raise it to that high standard.

That great, challenging look in your friend’s eye (“great, defying eye”), that sometimes aloof or “scornful” beauty in his manner and actions – do not pride yourself on trying to reduce or tame these qualities. Instead, fortify and enhance them. Worship his superiorities; do not wish him less by a single thought, but cherish and acknowledge (“hoard and tell”) all his strengths. Guard him as your essential counterpart. Let him be to you forever a sort of “beautiful enemy” – untamable, devoutly revered – and not just a trivial convenience to be quickly outgrown and cast aside. The subtle colors of the opal, the brilliant light of the diamond, cannot be seen if the eye is too close.

To my friend, I write a letter, and from him, I receive a letter. That might seem like a small thing to you. It is enough for me. It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give and of me to receive. It disrespects (“profanes”) nobody. In these warm lines exchanged from a respectful distance, the heart will trust itself, as it often cannot do with the spoken tongue. It will pour out prophecies of a godlier existence than all the recorded annals of heroism have yet managed to achieve.

Be Yourself First

Respect the holy laws of this fellowship so much that you do not damage its perfect potential (“perfect flower”) by being impatient for it to open fully. We must be our own before we can be another’s. There is at least this dark satisfaction in crime, according to the Latin proverb: you can speak to your accomplice on even terms. (Crimen quos inquinat, æquat - Crime makes equal those it stains.) To those whom we admire and love, we often cannot speak so freely at first, feeling unequal.

Yet, the least defect of self-possession (inner security and centeredness) spoils, in my judgment, the entire relationship. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never true mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands strong and complete, representing their own whole world.

Approach Friendship with Reverence

Since friendship is so great, let us carry it with whatever grandeur of spirit we can muster. Let us be silent sometimes – so we may hear the whisper of the gods (inner guidance). Let us not interfere or try too hard. Who appointed you to figure out what you should say to select souls, or how to say anything to such people? It doesn’t matter how clever, graceful, or charming you try to be. There are countless degrees of foolishness and wisdom, and for you to consciously try to say something profound is likely to be frivolous. Wait, and your heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting truth overwhelms you, until day and night naturally make use of your lips.

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer to a person merely by getting into their house. If you are fundamentally unlike them, their soul only flees faster from you, and you will never catch a true glance of their eye. We often see noble people from afar, and they seem to repel us or intimidate us; why should we intrude?

Late – very late – we realize that no social arrangements, no introductions, no customs or habits of society can establish the deep relationships we desire. These connections happen only when our own inner nature rises to the same level as theirs. Then we shall meet as naturally as water meets water. And if we reach that level and still don’t happen to meet those specific people we once admired, we shall not miss them, for we have become what we admired in them. In the last analysis, love is often only the reflection of a person’s own worthiness mirrored back from other people. Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if to signify that in their friend, each loved his own soul.

Hope and Solitude

The higher the standard (“style”) we demand of friendship, of course, the less easy it is to establish it fully with actual people of flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we truly desire, often seem like dreams and fables. But a sublime hope always cheers the faithful heart: that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, souls who can love us, and whom we can love.

We may congratulate ourselves that the period of immaturity (“nonage”), of follies, blunders, and shame, is often passed in solitude. When we become fully developed individuals (“finished men”), we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands.

For now, be warned by what you already see: do not try to form deep friendships (“strike leagues”) with shallow or unsuitable people (“cheap persons”), where no true friendship can possibly exist. Our impatience often betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which lack any divine blessing or true foundation. By persisting in your own path, though you may forfeit the little connections, you gain the great ones. You demonstrate your true self so clearly that you put yourself out of the reach of false relationships. And you draw to you the “first-born of the world” – those rare pilgrims of the spirit, of whom only one or two may wander in nature at any given time, and before whom the merely “vulgar great” (the powerful or famous lacking inner substance) show as mere ghosts and shadows.

Parting to Meet Again

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if by doing so we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our popular views comes from true insight, nature will surely support us. And though it may seem to rob us of some simple joy at first, it will repay us with a greater one.

Let us feel, if we will, the absolute insulation of each individual human being. We are ultimately sure that we have everything we need within us. We go to Europe, or we pursue relationships with people, or we read books, driven by an instinctive faith that these external things will call out our potential and reveal us to ourselves. We are beggars all! The persons we seek are just like us; Europe is just an old faded garment left behind by dead people; books are merely their ghosts.

Let us drop this idolatry of external things. Let us give over this spiritual begging (“mendicancy”). Let us even be willing to bid our dearest friends farewell, challenging them by saying, “Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more.” Ah! Don’t you see, my brother, that sometimes we part only to meet again on a higher platform? We become more truly each other’s, precisely because we have become more fully our own.

A true friend is like the two-faced god Janus: he looks both to the past and the future. He is the child of all my previous hours and experiences, the prophet of those yet to come, and the herald (“harbinger”) of an even greater friend or connection still possible.

Friendship on Its Own Terms

Therefore, I treat my friends as I treat my books. I want them available, where I can find them, but I seldom “use” them in a demanding way. We must have society, but on our own terms, admitting or excluding it based on the slightest inner cause. I cannot afford to speak too much with my friend. If he is truly great, his presence makes me feel so great, so drawn into my own thoughts, that I cannot descend to ordinary conversation.

On my great days of inspiration, insights (“presentiments”) hover before me like constellations in the sky. I ought to dedicate myself entirely to them then. I turn inward (“go in”) that I may seize them; I engage with the world (“go out”) that I may express or understand them. My only fear is that I may lose them as they recede into the vastness where they first appeared as just a patch of brighter light.

So, though I prize my friends, I cannot always afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed bring me a certain simple comfort (“household joy”) to quit this lofty inner seeking, this “spiritual astronomy” or search for inner stars, and come down to enjoy warm sympathies with you. But then I know well I would always mourn the vanishing of my own “mighty gods” – my deepest inspirations.

It is true, next week I might have less inspired (“languid”) moods. Then I can well afford to occupy myself with external things (“foreign objects”). Then I shall regret the lost “literature of your mind” and wish you were by my side again. But if you come then, perhaps your presence will only fill my mind with new visions inspired by you – by your radiance (“lusters”), not by direct conversation with you. Perhaps I still won’t be able to converse simply.

So, I will owe my friends this fleeting, inspired connection (“evanescent intercourse”). I will receive from them not what they have, but what they are. They shall give me that which they cannot consciously give, but which naturally radiates (“emanates”) from them. But they shall not hold me by any relationship less subtle and pure than this. We will meet as though we never fully meet, and part as though we never fully part.

One-Sided Friendship and Unrequited Love

It has seemed to me lately more possible than I once knew, to carry on a friendship greatly, mostly from one side, without requiring perfect correspondence from the other. Why should I burden myself with regrets that the receiver is not capable (“capacious”) enough? It never troubles the sun that some of its rays fall uselessly into empty space, and only a small part lands on the reflecting planet. Let your own greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he remains unequal, he will naturally pass out of your sphere; but you are enlarged by your own shining. You are no longer a mate for frogs and worms; you soar and burn with the gods of the highest heaven (“empyrean”).

It is commonly thought a disgrace to love someone who does not love you back (“love unrequited”). But the truly great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the specific, perhaps unworthy, object. It dwells upon and cherishes the eternal qualities the person represents. When the poor, imperfect mask (“interposed mask”) of the individual eventually crumbles, the lover is not sad. Instead, they feel rid of so much earthly limitation and feel their own independent connection to the eternal ideal is even surer.

Yet, these things can hardly be said without sounding like a kind of treachery to the actual relationship. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total generosity (“magnanimity”) and trust. It must not assume weakness (“surmise or provide for infirmity”) in the other. It treats its object as a god, so that it may elevate (“deify”) both itself and the friend.

The Over-soul

(Original poems and quotes retained for context):

“But souls that of his own good life partake, He loves as his own self; dear as his eye They are to Him: He ’ll never them forsake: When they shall die, then God himself shall die: They live, they live in blest eternity.” Henry More.

Space is ample, east and west, But two cannot go abreast, Cannot travel in it two: Yonder masterful cuckoo Crowds every egg out of the nest, Quick or dead, except its own; A spell is laid on sod and stone, Night and Day ’ve been tampered with, Every quality and pith Surcharged and sultry with a power That works its will on age and hour.

Understanding Our Deepest Moments

Some moments in life feel much more important and have a bigger impact than others. Our moments of deep faith or understanding might be rare, while bad habits can feel constant. Yet, those brief, powerful moments feel more real than all our other experiences.

This is why arguing against hope by pointing to past failures doesn’t work. People may try to silence dreamers by saying, “Look at experience! Humans always fail.” But even if we admit the past looks bleak, we still hold onto hope. Why? That hope needs explaining.

We agree that everyday human life can seem small or disappointing. But how did we even realize it was disappointing? What causes this deep feeling of dissatisfaction we all sometimes have? This universal sense that we lack something, that we’re ignorant, is actually a subtle hint from our soul. It’s the soul suggesting its own vast potential.

Why do we feel that the true story of humanity hasn’t been written yet? Why does any description of people quickly feel outdated? Why do books about deep philosophy eventually seem incomplete? Thousands of years of thinking haven’t fully explored the inner world of the soul. Past attempts to understand it always left something unexplained.

The Hidden Source Within

Humans are like streams flowing from a hidden source. We don’t know where our core being comes from; it seems to flow down into us. Even the best planner can’t be sure that something unexpected won’t disrupt everything in the next instant. Every moment, I feel forced to admit that events have a higher origin than just my own personal will.

Thoughts Come to Us

The same is true for our thoughts. When I observe my own mind, it’s like watching a river. Ideas flow into me for a time, coming from places I can’t see. I realize I’m not the source of these thoughts, but more like a surprised witness receiving them. I can desire insight, look for it, and try to be open. But the actual visions and ideas seem to come from some energy beyond myself.

Introducing the Over-soul

There is a great, fundamental nature that judges all past and present errors and predicts the future. We exist within this nature, just like the Earth rests in the atmosphere. This is the Unity, the Over-soul.

• Every person’s individual being is contained within it.
• It makes everyone one with all others.
• It’s the common heart we connect with in sincere conversation.
• Doing the right thing is submitting to it.
• It’s an overwhelming reality that cuts through our pretensions. It forces everyone to be seen for who they truly are. It makes us speak honestly from our character, not just with clever words.
• This reality constantly tries to flow into our thoughts and actions, becoming wisdom, goodness, power, and beauty.

We usually experience life moment by moment, in pieces and parts. But inside each person is the soul of the whole. This is the wise silence, the universal beauty. Every single part of existence is equally connected to it. It is the eternal ONE.

This deep power, which we exist in and whose happiness is available to us, is complete and perfect all the time. More than that, in this state, the act of seeing and the thing being seen become one. The observer and the observed, the subject and the object, merge.

Normally, we see the world in fragments – sun, moon, animals, trees. But the whole, which these fragments belong to, is the soul. We can only understand the grand sweep of history by glimpsing this underlying Wisdom. We access it by listening to our best thoughts, by yielding to the natural prophetic spirit inside everyone.

Words spoken from this deep place might sound meaningless to those who aren’t connected to the same thoughts themselves. I hesitate to speak for it. My words feel inadequate; they can’t capture its profound meaning. Only the Over-soul itself can truly inspire people. When it does, their words become beautiful, poetic, and universally understood, like the wind rising. Still, I want to try, even with ordinary words, to point towards this amazing reality. I want to share the hints I’ve gathered about the incredible simplicity and power of this Highest Law.

Finding Hints of the Soul

We can find clues about this hidden nature if we pay attention to certain experiences:

• Deep conversations
• Daydreams or moments of reflection (reveries)
• Feelings of remorse
• Times of strong emotion (passion)
• Moments of surprise
• Lessons from dreams (where strange disguises often highlight something real about us)

These hints can grow into a deeper understanding of nature’s secret. Everything points to the fact that the soul in humans isn’t just one part or organ. Instead, it animates and uses all the organs.

• It’s not just one ability, like memory or reasoning. It uses these abilities like hands and feet.
• It’s not just a skill (faculty), but a light.
• It’s not the intellect or the will. It is the master of the intellect and the will.
• It’s the fundamental background of our being, where intellect and will exist. It’s a vastness we don’t own and can’t possess.

A light shines through us from within or behind, illuminating things. This makes us realize that we are not the important part; the light is everything. A person is like the front entrance (façade) of a temple where all wisdom and goodness reside.

The ordinary person we see – eating, drinking, working, counting – isn’t the true self. That everyday person often misrepresents the deeper reality within. We don’t respect that surface self. But the soul, which uses the person as its instrument, would inspire awe if it could truly shine through their actions.

• When the soul breathes through someone’s intellect, it’s genius.
• When it breathes through their will, it’s virtue (goodness).
• When it flows through their emotions, it’s love.

The intellect starts to go wrong when it tries to be independent from the soul. The will becomes weak when a person tries to act purely from their separate self. All efforts to improve ourselves or society (reform) aim, in some way, to let the soul guide us – to get us to obey this deeper wisdom.

Everyone Knows This Deep Nature

Every person feels this pure, deep nature sometimes. Language struggles to describe it; it’s too subtle. We can’t define or measure it. But we know it surrounds us and fills us. We know that all spiritual reality exists within people.

An old proverb says, “God comes to see us without bell.” This means there’s no barrier between our minds and the infinite heavens. Similarly, there’s no wall inside the soul separating the person (the effect) from God (the cause). The walls are gone. We are open to the depths of spiritual nature, to the qualities of God. We can directly see and know Justice, Love, Freedom, Power. No person can rise above these fundamental natures; they tower over us, especially when our selfish interests tempt us to ignore them.

The Soul Is Beyond Limits

The power of this deep nature we’re talking about is shown by its freedom from the limits that restrict us. The soul contains everything. As mentioned before, it goes against everyday experience. It also cancels out time and space.

For most people, the input from their senses has become so dominant that the “walls” of time and space seem completely real and unbreakable. To talk lightly about these limits seems like madness to most people. Yet, time and space are just reflections of the soul’s strength (specifically, inverse measures). The spirit plays with time:

“Can crowd eternity into an hour, Or stretch an hour to eternity.”

We often feel there’s a different kind of youth and age than the one measured by birthdays. Some thoughts always make us feel young and keep us that way. One such thought is the love of universal and eternal beauty. Anyone who contemplates this feels it belongs more to eternity than to a short human life.

Even small uses of our intellect lift us slightly out of the limits of time. When sick or tired, hearing a line of poetry or a deep thought refreshes us. Thinking about great minds like Plato or Shakespeare instantly gives us a sense of lasting existence (longevity). Notice how profound, divine thought shrinks centuries and millennia, making itself present across all ages. Are Jesus’ teachings less powerful now than when he first spoke them? The importance of facts and people in my mind has nothing to do with when they happened.

So, the soul always operates on one scale, while our senses and logical understanding operate on another. When the soul reveals itself, Time, Space, and Nature seem small and insignificant.

In everyday talk, we relate everything to time. We act as if stars, which are incredibly far apart, are all stuck on the inside of one big bowl. Similarly, we talk about future events like Judgment Day, the Millennium, or social reforms being near or far. But what we often mean is that some things we think about are temporary and external, while others are permanent and deeply connected to the soul.

The things we currently think are solid and permanent will eventually detach from our experience, like ripe fruit falling from a tree. The wind will blow them away. Landscapes, people, cities like Boston or London, are just as temporary as past institutions or puffs of smoke. Society and the world itself are also temporary.

The soul, however, looks steadily forward. It creates new worlds ahead of it, leaving old worlds behind. It doesn’t care about dates, rituals, specific people, specialties, or individuals. The soul only knows the soul. The stream of events is just the robe it wears.

How the Soul Grows

The soul’s progress isn’t calculated like math. It doesn’t advance step-by-step in a straight line. Instead, its growth is like a change of state, a transformation (metamorphosis) – like changing from an egg to a worm, then from a worm to a fly.

The growth of genius is total. It doesn’t just make one person slightly better than John, then Adam, then Richard, causing jealousy. Instead, with each growth spurt, the person expands their understanding right where they are, instantly moving beyond whole groups and populations of people. With each divine impulse, the mind breaks through the limits of the visible, finite world. It enters eternity, breathing its air. It connects with truths that have always been known. A person feels more kinship with ancient thinkers like Zeno or Arrian than with people in their own house.

Moral and Mental Growth Are Linked

This is how moral and mental progress happens too. Simple, good people rise naturally, not just into one specific virtue, but into the whole region where all virtues exist. They live in the spirit that contains all goodness.

The soul requires purity, but it isn’t just purity. It requires justice, but it isn’t just justice. It requires kindness (beneficence), but it is something even better. So, when we stop talking about the soul’s overall nature and start focusing on a specific virtue it demands, it feels like a step down, an adjustment.

For a child naturally connected to this inner goodness (the well-born child), all virtues feel natural, not painfully learned. Speak to their heart, and they instantly become virtuous.

The same principle applies to intellectual growth. People who possess humility, justice, love, and aspiration are already standing on a foundation that gives them access to sciences, arts, effective speech, poetry, graceful action. Anyone living in this state of moral goodness (moral beatitude) already has a head start towards the special skills people value highly.

Think of a lover: they might not have specific talents, but their beloved sees great worth in them, regardless of their own skills. Similarly, the heart that opens itself to the Supreme Mind (the Over-soul) finds itself connected to all its creations. This person will find a direct path (“royal road”) to specific knowledge and abilities. By connecting to this primary, original feeling, we instantly travel from our distant spot on the edge to the very center of the world. There, as if in God’s private room, we see the causes of things and understand the universe, which unfolds slowly from those causes.

Learning from Others and the Impersonal God

One way the divine teaches us is by taking form – in other people, like me. I live in society with people who resonate with my own thoughts or who follow the same great instincts that guide me. I see the Over-soul present in them. This confirms our shared nature. These other souls, these separate selves, attract me powerfully.

They stir up new emotions in me – love, hate, fear, admiration, pity. From these interactions come conversation, competition, persuasion, cities, and even war. People are secondary teachers, supplementing the primary teaching of the soul itself.

When we are young, we are fascinated by people. Children and teenagers see the whole world reflected in the individuals around them. But with more life experience, we start to see the same underlying nature shining through all people. Individuals themselves teach us about the impersonal.

In any conversation between two people, there’s always an unspoken reference to a third party: their common nature. This third party isn’t just social agreement; it’s impersonal – it is God, the Over-soul.

So, in groups where people are seriously discussing important questions, everyone might become aware of a shared understanding rising within them. They all feel ownership of the insights being expressed, not just the speaker. Everyone becomes wiser together. This unity of thought arches over them like a temple. In this state, every heart feels a nobler sense of power and duty. People think and act with unusual seriousness and depth. Everyone feels they’ve reached a higher level of self-awareness (self-possession). This light shines for everyone.

There’s a kind of wisdom of humanity that the greatest minds share with the simplest people. Our standard education often tries to ignore or block this wisdom. The mind is fundamentally one. The best minds, those who love truth for its own sake, care little about “owning” truth. They gratefully accept it wherever they find it. They don’t label it with anyone’s name, because truth belongs to everyone, eternally.

Scholars and deep thinkers don’t have a monopoly on wisdom. Sometimes their intense focus in one direction makes it harder for them to think truly in a broad sense. We often learn valuable things from people who aren’t considered sharp or profound. They might simply say something we’ve been searching for, without effort.

The soul’s influence is often felt more strongly in what is left unsaid than in what is actually spoken. It hangs over every group of people, and they unconsciously search for it in each other. We know more than we act on. We don’t fully possess ourselves yet, but we know we are much more than we seem. I often feel this same truth in casual chats with neighbors: something higher in each of us is watching the surface interaction, like gods acknowledging each other from behind our human forms.

Hiding Our True Selves

People often lower themselves to interact with others. In their everyday, often shallow service to the world, they abandon their natural inner nobility. They are like those Arabian leaders (sheiks) who lived in simple houses and pretended to be poor to avoid attracting the greed of the rulers (Pacha). They saved their displays of wealth for their private, guarded homes.

The Soul is Ageless

Just as the Over-soul is present in all people, it exists in every stage of life. It is fully present (adult) even in a baby. When dealing with my child, my knowledge of Latin and Greek, my accomplishments, and my money are useless. What matters is how much soul I bring to the interaction. If I am stubborn and willful, my child meets my will with their own. Then my only option is the degrading one of using my greater strength to overpower them. But if I let go of my personal will and act from the soul, making it the judge between us, then the same soul looks out from my child’s young eyes. The child respects and loves with me.

Knowing Truth Instantly

The soul is what perceives and reveals truth. We know truth when we see it, no matter what doubters (skeptics and scoffers) say. When you say something people don’t want to hear, they might foolishly ask, “How do you know that’s true and not just your own mistake?” We recognize truth instantly, just as we know when we are awake that we are awake.

Emanuel Swedenborg made a profound statement that shows his great insight: “Being able to argue for anything you want is not proof of understanding. Being able to see that what is true is true, and what is false is false—that is the mark of real intelligence.”

When I read a book, a good thought strikes me as an image of the whole soul, as all truth does. When I encounter a bad thought in the book, that same soul acts like a sharp sword, discerning it and cutting it away. We are wiser than we realize. If we don’t interfere with our own deep thoughts, but simply act wholly, or see things from God’s perspective, we understand the specific situation, and everything, and every person. Because the Maker of all things and all people stands behind us, projecting His awesome awareness (omniscience) through us onto the world.

Revelation: The Soul Giving Itself

Beyond just recognizing its own nature in specific moments of our lives, the soul also reveals new truth. Here, we should try to draw strength from its presence and speak more worthily about this arrival (advent) of truth.

The soul communicating truth is the highest event in nature. Why? Because the soul doesn’t just give something from itself. It gives itself. It flows into and becomes the person it enlightens. Or, depending on how much truth the person receives, the soul takes that person into itself.

We call these announcements of the soul, these expressions of its own nature, Revelation. They are always accompanied by a feeling of awe and grandeur (the sublime). This communication is a flowing (influx) of the Divine mind into our mind.

This feeling is like your personal stream flowing back for a moment, just before the great ocean of life surges in. Every time someone truly grasps this central truth, they feel both awe and joy. When a new truth is understood, or when someone performs a great action that comes straight from the heart of nature, everyone feels a thrill.

In these moments of connection:

• The power to see truth isn’t separate from the will to act on it.
• Insight comes from following this deeper guidance (obedience).
• Obedience comes from a joyful sense of understanding.

Every moment a person feels touched by this higher power is unforgettable. Our very nature means we feel a kind of excitement (enthusiasm) when we sense this divine presence. How strong and long-lasting this feeling is depends on the person.

• Rarely: It appears as intense ecstasy, a trance, or prophetic inspiration.
• Commonly: It shows up as the gentlest glow of good feeling (virtuous emotion). In this form, it warms people, families, and communities like a fireplace, making society possible.

Historically, when people first tapped into this deep religious sense, it sometimes looked like a form of insanity, as if they were overwhelmed by too much light. Examples include:

• The trances of Socrates
• The spiritual “union” described by Plotinus
• The visions of Porphyry
• The conversion of Paul
• The spiritual awakenings (aurora) of Behmen
• The intense experiences (convulsions) of George Fox and the Quakers
• The illumination of Swedenborg

What seemed like overwhelming experiences (ravishment) for these famous figures also happens in countless ordinary lives, just in less dramatic ways. The history of religion everywhere shows this tendency towards intense spiritual feeling (enthusiasm). Think of the passion of groups like the Moravians and Quietists, the idea of finding deeper meaning in religious texts (like in the New Jerusalem Church), the emotional revivals in Calvinist churches, or the personal experiences shared by Methodists. These are all different ways individuals feel that shiver of awe and delight as their personal soul connects with the universal soul.

What Revelations Really Are

The nature of these revelations is always the same. They are moments of understanding the absolute law – the fundamental truths of existence. They are the soul finding answers to its own deep questions.

Importantly, they don’t answer the kinds of questions our logical mind (understanding) asks. The soul never answers with words. It answers with the reality of the thing being asked about.

Revelation Isn’t Fortune-Telling

Revelation is the soul showing itself. The common idea of revelation is wrong – people think it means predicting the future. People look at ancient spiritual messages (oracles) trying to find answers to everyday, superficial (sensual) questions. They try to get God to tell them how long they’ll live, what jobs they’ll have, or who their friends will be, wanting specific names, dates, and places.

But we shouldn’t try to force these kinds of answers (“pick no locks”). We need to control this shallow curiosity. An answer given in words is misleading; it’s not a real answer to the deep questions you have. Don’t ask for a map of the countries you’re sailing towards. A description can’t truly describe them anyway. Tomorrow, you’ll arrive and know them by actually being there.

People ask about whether the soul is immortal, what heaven is like, what happens to sinners, and so on. They even imagine that Jesus left specific answers to these questions. But that profound spirit never spoke in such limited terms (patois). Truth, justice, and love are qualities of the soul, and they are inherently timeless (immutable). Jesus lived these moral truths. He didn’t care about predicting earthly fortunes; he cared only about expressing these qualities. He never separated the idea of how long something lasts from the essence of these timeless truths. He never said a word about how long the soul lasts.

It was his followers who later separated the idea of duration from the moral core. They taught the immortality of the soul as a specific belief (doctrine) and tried to prove it with evidence. The moment immortality is taught as a separate thing, humanity has already lost sight of the deeper reality (“fallen”). When you are experiencing love, or feeling deep humility, the question of “how long will this last?” doesn’t even come up. No truly inspired person ever asks this or bothers with proofs. The soul is true to itself. The person connected to it cannot wander from the present moment (which is infinite) to worry about a future (which seems finite).

Why We Ask the Wrong Questions

These questions we desperately want to ask about the future are really a sign that we’ve lost our connection (“a confession of sin”). God has no answer for them. No words can answer a question about reality itself.

A veil hides the future from us. This isn’t because of some random decision by God (“arbitrary decree”). It’s part of human nature. The soul doesn’t want us to try to figure things out any way other than understanding cause and effect. By hiding future events, this veil teaches us to live today.

The only way to get answers to these questions driven by our senses is to:

1. Give up all shallow curiosity.
2. Accept the flow of life (tide of being) that carries us towards nature’s secrets.
3. Simply work and live, work and live.

Do this, and without you even noticing, your advancing soul will build a new state of being for itself. In that new state, the question and the answer become one. You live the answer.

Knowing Each Other Deeply

The same essential, sacred, heavenly fire burns within us. It’s the fire that will eventually dissolve everything into an ocean of light. This fire also lets us truly see and know each other – to understand what kind of spirit each person has.

Can anyone explain exactly how they know the character of their different friends? No. Yet, their friends’ actions and words usually confirm their inner sense of them. You might distrust one person, even if you know nothing bad about them. You might trust another instantly, even if you’ve barely met, because some genuine sign showed they care about their own integrity. We know each other very well on this deep level. We sense who has been true to themselves. We know whether what we teach or see in others is just a wish (aspiration) or also their honest effort.

Observing Character

We are all natural judges (discerners) of spirits. This ability to diagnose character is a higher, often unconscious, power we possess. All social interaction – business, religion, friendships, arguments – is really one big investigation of character. Whether in a formal court, a small meeting, or face-to-face conflict, people present themselves to be judged. Against their will, they show those small but telling details (“decisive trifles”) that reveal their true character.

But who is doing the judging? And what is being judged? It’s not our logical understanding. We don’t figure people out through learning or clever tricks (craft). No, the wisdom of a truly wise person is that they don’t actively judge. They let people judge themselves, and simply observe and register the verdict that people reveal on their own.

Our True Selves Shine Through

Because of this unavoidable inner nature, our personal will gets overridden. No matter how hard we try or what flaws we have, your true self (genius) will speak through you, and mine through me. What we are is what we will teach – not intentionally, but automatically (involuntarily).

Thoughts enter our minds through pathways we never consciously opened. Thoughts leave our minds through pathways we never chose to open. Our character teaches people without our conscious control (“over our head”).

The surest sign (infallible index) of true inner progress is the person’s tone. Not their age, upbringing, friends, books, actions, or talents – none of these can stop a person from showing respect (deference) to a higher spirit than their own, if they feel connected to it.

• If someone hasn’t found their inner home in God, their manners, speech patterns, sentence structure, even the way their opinions are formed, will unintentionally reveal it, no matter how they try to act (brave it out).
• If someone has found their center, the divine will shine through them. This happens despite any disguises like ignorance, a difficult personality (un genial temperament), or challenging life situations (unfavorable circumstance).

The tone of someone seeking truth is different from the tone of someone possessing it.

Speakers from Within vs. Speakers from Without

There’s a major difference between various kinds of teachers:

• Religious vs. Literary teachers
• Poets like George Herbert (inner focus) vs. poets like Alexander Pope (social focus)
• Philosophers like Spinoza, Kant, Coleridge (inner source) vs. philosophers like Locke, Paley, Mackintosh, Stewart (external observation)
• Smooth social talkers vs. the occasional passionate mystic, seeming half-mad from the vastness of their thoughts.

The difference is this:

• One class speaks from within. They speak from direct experience. They are participants and possessors of the truth.
• The other class speaks from without. They speak as mere observers. They might know about the truth from secondhand reports.

It’s useless for someone to preach to me from the outside. I can easily do that myself. Jesus always speaks from within, and with a power beyond all others. That is the miracle. I expect this – it feels right that true teaching should be this way. We all constantly hope for such a teacher to appear. But if someone does not speak from that deep inner place (“within the veil”), where the word is inseparable from the reality it describes, they should humbly admit it.

Genius: Divine Awareness in the Mind

The same all-knowing awareness (Omniscience) flows into our intellect and creates what we call genius. Much of what the world calls wisdom isn’t true wisdom. The most truly enlightened people are probably beyond caring about fame and don’t become writers. When we read many scholars and authors, we don’t feel a sacred (hallowing) presence. We sense skill (knack) rather than inspiration. They have a light but don’t know where it comes from, so they call it their own. Their talent is often just one ability blown out of proportion (exaggerated faculty), like a body part that grew too large. In these cases, their strength becomes a weakness or imbalance (disease).

These intellectual gifts sometimes feel almost like a vice, not a virtue. We feel that a person’s specific talents can get in the way of their progress towards truth.

But true genius is spiritual (religious). It comes from deeply absorbing the common heart – the Over-soul. Genius is not strange or abnormal (anomalous); it makes a person more like other people at the core, not less. All great poets share a basic “wisdom of humanity” that is greater than any specific talents they use. The identity of “author,” “wit,” “supporter,” or “fine gentleman” doesn’t replace the fundamental human being.

True humanity shines through writers like Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton. They are content with truth itself. They speak directly and plainly (“use the positive degree”). They might seem cold or unemotional (frigid and phlegmatic) to readers used to the dramatic passion and intense style of less profound but popular writers. They are great poets because they allow the informing soul to flow freely through them. Through their eyes, the soul sees and blesses the world it created once again.

The soul is greater than its knowledge; it is wiser than anything it creates. A great poet makes us feel our own inner wealth. Then we think less about the poet’s specific poems or plays. The best thing they give us is teaching us to value the source within ourselves more than their creations. Shakespeare lifts our minds to such a high level of activity that we sense an inner richness that makes even his amazing works seem small (beggars his own). Then we feel that his wonderful plays, which at other times we praise as perfect creations, are no more real compared to nature than a passing traveler’s shadow on a rock. The same inspiration that produced Hamlet and Lear could produce equally great things endlessly. So why should I treat Hamlet and Lear as ultimate treasures, as if we don’t have access to the very soul from which they came, like words from a tongue?

How the Soul’s Energy Comes

This divine energy doesn’t enter a person’s life unless it takes entire possession.

• It comes to the humble and simple.
• It comes to anyone willing to let go of what is artificial (foreign) and proud.
• It comes as insight.
• It comes as serenity and grandeur.

When we meet people filled with this energy, we become aware of new levels of greatness. A person touched by this inspiration comes back changed. They speak differently. They don’t talk to people hoping for approval (with an eye to their opinion). Instead, they gently test people’s authenticity. This presence requires us to be plain and true.

Contrast this with vanity:

• The vain traveler tries to make their life seem important by name-dropping lords, princes, or countesses.
• The status-seeking person (ambitious vulgar) shows off their fancy spoons, jewelry, or calling cards.
• More cultured people carefully select (cull out) only the pleasing, poetic parts of their experience to share – the trip to Rome, the famous person they met, the brilliant friend, or maybe the beautiful landscape enjoyed yesterday. They try to paint their lives with a romantic color.

But the soul that connects with the great God is plain and true. It doesn’t need rosy colors, fancy friends, heroic tales (chivalry), or exciting adventures. It doesn’t crave admiration. It lives fully in the present hour, in the real experience of the ordinary day. It does this because the present moment and even small details (the mere trifle) have become open (porous) to thought, ready to absorb (bibulous) the sea of light.

Simplicity Speaks Volumes

Talk with a mind that is grandly simple, and complex literature starts to look like playing games with words (word-catching). The simplest statements are the most worthy of being written. Yet they seem so common, so everyday, that compared to the infinite richness of the soul, writing them down feels like gathering a few pebbles or trapping a little air in a bottle (phial), when the whole earth and atmosphere belong to us.

Nothing allows you to truly connect with these deep realities or join that circle except casting aside your pretenses (trappings). You must deal with others person-to-person in naked truth, plain confession, and an affirmation that acknowledges the whole picture (omniscient affirmation).

True Souls Don’t Flatter

Souls like this treat you as gods would. They walk the earth like gods. They accept your wit, generosity (bounty), or even your virtue without making a fuss. They see your acts of duty as natural. They recognize your virtue as stemming from the same divine source (proper blood) they share – a source that is royal and even above royalty, the father of gods.

Their plain, brotherly (fraternal) way of being is a strong rebuke to the mutual flattery authors often use to comfort each other, which ultimately harms them. These true souls do not flatter.

It’s not surprising that such people can meet powerful figures like Cromwell, Queen Christina, Charles II, James I, or the Sultan (Grand Turk) as equals. In their own inner elevation, they are peers (fellows) of kings. They must find the often insincere and subservient (servile) tone of worldly conversation disappointing. They are always a blessing (godsend) to leaders because they meet them directly, king to king, without bowing (ducking) or giving unnecessary ground (concession). They give powerful people the refreshing experience of honest resistance, plain humanity, equal companionship, and new ideas. They leave leaders wiser and better people.

Souls like these make us feel that sincerity is more excellent than flattery. Deal with men and women so plainly that you force them to be completely sincere. Destroy any hope they might have of deceiving or manipulating (trifling with) you. This is the highest compliment you can pay. As Milton said, their “highest praising is not flattery, and their plainest advice is a kind of praising.”

The Unspeakable Union

The union of a person and God in every act of the soul is beyond words (ineffable). The simplest person who worships God with sincerity (integrity) becomes God in that moment. Yet, forever and ever, this inflow (influx) of the better, universal self feels new and impossible to fully grasp (unsearchable). It inspires awe and astonishment.

How precious and comforting the idea of God is! It fills lonely places. It erases the scars of our mistakes and disappointments. When we break our attachment to traditional ideas of god, or gods made of mere words (god of rhetoric), then the real God can ignite our hearts with His presence. It’s like doubling the heart itself – no, it’s an infinite enlargement of the heart, giving it power to grow endlessly in every direction.

This connection inspires infallible trust in a person. They don’t just believe that the best is true; they see it. With that insight, they can easily let go of specific worries and fears. They can postpone solving their personal puzzles (riddles), trusting the sure revelation that comes with time. They are sure that their well-being is important to the heart of existence. Feeling the presence of this inner law, they are flooded with such universal reliance that it sweeps away all their personal hopes and even the most solid plans of earthly life. They believe they cannot escape their own ultimate good.

Trust the Universal Flow

The things that are truly meant for you are drawn (gravitate) to you. Are you running to find your friend? Let your feet run, but your mind doesn’t need to strive. If you don’t find him, can you accept (acquiesce) that it might be best you didn’t? There is a power that is in you and also in him. It could easily bring you together if that were truly for the best.

Are you eagerly preparing to go do some service project that your talents and tastes draw you to, perhaps hoping for appreciation or fame? Have you considered that you have no right to insist on going, unless you are equally willing to be prevented from going?

Oh, believe this as surely as you live: every sound spoken anywhere in the world that you need to hear will reach your ear! Every proverb, every book, every common saying (byword) that holds help or comfort for you will surely find its way to you, through direct or winding paths. Every friend whom your deep and tender heart truly desires (craveth) – not just your fleeting fancy (fantastic will) – will eventually embrace you.

Why is this so? Because the heart in you is the heart of all. There is no valve, no wall, no barrier (intersection) anywhere in nature. One blood rolls uninterruptedly in an endless circulation through all people. Just as all the water on the globe is truly one sea, and its tide, seen deeply, is one.

Listen to the Highest Within

So, let people learn the revelation that all nature and all thought offer to their hearts. It is this: the Highest dwells with you. The sources of nature are in your own mind, if the feeling of duty is there.

But if someone wants to know what the great God says, they must “go into his closet and shut the door,” as Jesus taught. God will not reveal himself (make himself manifest) to cowards. A person must listen deeply to themselves, withdrawing from all the noise of other people’s devotion. Even listening to others’ prayers can be harmful until one has made their own connection.

Our common forms of religion rely crudely (vulgarly) on the number of believers. Whenever an appeal is made to numbers – no matter how subtly – it’s an announcement (proclamation) right then and there that true religion is absent. Anyone who finds God to be a sweet, surrounding presence never feels the need to count their company. When I sit in that presence, who would dare intrude? When I rest in perfect humility, when I burn with pure love, what can external figures like Calvin or Swedenborg possibly add?

True Faith Needs No Authority

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to large numbers or to a single authority figure. Faith that depends on authority is not faith. Reliance on authority signals the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.

The position people have given to Jesus for many centuries is a position of authority. This says more about the followers than about Jesus. It cannot change the eternal facts. The soul is great, and plain.

The soul doesn’t flatter anyone, and it doesn’t follow others. It never looks outside itself for validation. It believes in itself.

Compared to the immense possibilities within a person, all past experiences, all life stories (biographies) – no matter how perfect or saintly – seem small. When we glimpse the kind of heaven our intuition (presentiments) shows us is possible, it’s hard to overly praise any way of life we’ve actually seen or read about.

We feel not only that there are few truly great people, but that, strictly speaking, there are none. We feel there’s no history, no record of any person or lifestyle, that completely satisfies us. The saints and heroes (demigods) that history celebrates – we feel forced (constrained) to accept them with some reservations (a grain of allowance).

In quiet moments, we might draw fresh strength from remembering them. But when society constantly pushes them on us in thoughtless, routine ways, they start to feel tiring and intrusive (invade).

The soul gives itself – alone, original, and pure – to the Lonely, Original, and Pure (the Over-soul or God). When it does this, that higher power gladly lives in, leads, and speaks through the soul. In this state, the soul feels glad, young, and quick (nimble).

• It isn’t “wise” in the usual sense, but it sees through everything.
• It isn’t called “religious” in a formal way, but it is innocent.
• It feels the light belongs to it.
• It senses that the grass growing and the stone falling happen according to laws that are less important than, and dependent on, its own nature.

The soul declares, “Look, I am born into the great, universal mind! I, the imperfect individual, adore my own Perfect source. Somehow, I am open (receptive) to the great soul. Because of this, I can look beyond the sun and the stars. I feel they are just beautiful, temporary events and effects (fair accidents and effects) that change and pass away. More and more, the waves (surges) of everlasting nature flow into me. My concerns and actions become universal and focused on humanity (public and human). This is how I come to live in timeless thoughts and act with energies that are immortal.”

By respecting the soul in this way, and by learning (as an ancient writer said) that “its beauty is immense,” a person will eventually see that the world itself is the continuous miracle that the soul creates. They will be less amazed by specific, isolated wonders. They will learn that:

• There is no ordinary (profane) history; all history is sacred.
• The entire universe is represented in a single atom, or in a single moment of time.

Such a person will no longer live a patchy, inconsistent life (“spotted life of shreds and patches”). Instead, they will live with a sense of divine unity. They will stop doing things that are low (base) or meaningless (frivolous). They will find contentment in any place and be satisfied with any service they can offer. They will face tomorrow calmly, with the relaxed trust (negligency of that trust) that comes from carrying God within. Because of this, they already hold the whole future deep in their heart.

The Poet

(Original poems retained for context):

A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray: They overleapt the horizons edge, Searched with Apollo’s privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.

Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.

Shallow Taste vs. Deep Beauty

People often considered experts (umpires) on good taste might just know a bit about famous artworks and prefer elegant things. But if you ask if they are beautiful souls, or if their actions are like beautiful pictures, you often find they are selfish and focused only on physical pleasure (sensual).

Their knowledge is shallow and isolated. It’s like rubbing just one spot on a dry log to make fire, while the rest stays cold. Their understanding of art is often just a collection of rules, details, or opinions about color and form. They use this knowledge for amusement or to show off.

This shows how superficial the common idea of beauty really is. People who consider themselves art lovers (amateurs) seem to have forgotten that physical form instantly depends on the inner soul. Our philosophy doesn’t have a deep understanding of how forms arise. We think of our bodies like pans holding fire, just containers to be carried around. We don’t see the precise connection between the spirit and the body (organ). We certainly don’t see the body as growing directly from the spirit (germination).

It’s the same with other forms. Intellectual people often don’t believe the physical world fundamentally depends on thought and will (volition). Religious thinkers (Theologians) might find it charming to talk about the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, a city or a contract. But they prefer to return to the “solid ground” of historical facts. Even poets often live conventional lives. They write poems based on imagination (fancy), keeping a safe distance from their own deep experiences.

However, the greatest minds throughout history never stopped exploring the hidden meanings in every physical fact. They looked for double, quadruple, or even countless layers of meaning. Think of figures like Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, painting, and poetry.

We aren’t just containers (pans and barrows) or carriers of fire. We are children of the fire, made of it. We are the same divine energy, transformed. We are just a few steps removed from it, especially when we are least aware of this connection.

This hidden truth – that the source (fountains) of time and all its creatures is fundamentally ideal and beautiful – leads us to think about the Poet. What is the nature and role of the Poet, the person of Beauty? What tools and materials do they use? And what is the state of art today?

The Poet Represents Humanity

This is a big topic because the poet is representative. Among people who only grasp parts of reality (partial men), the poet stands for the complete man. The poet reveals not just their own personal wealth, but our shared wealth – the commonwealth of human potential.

Young people admire geniuses. Why? Because geniuses express the young person’s own deeper self more fully than they can themselves. Geniuses receive insights from the soul, just like the young person does, but more intensely. Nature seems even more beautiful to loving observers when they believe a poet is also witnessing its beauty at the same time.

The poet might feel isolated from others because of their unique truth and art. But they have this comfort: their work will eventually draw all people to it. Why? Because all people live by truth and need expression. In everything we do – love, art, business (avarice), politics, work, games – we are trying to express our deep, often unspoken (painful) inner secret. A person is only half themselves; the other half is their expression.

Why We Need Poets

Even though everyone needs expression, finding truly adequate expression is rare. I don’t know why we need someone to translate our own experiences for us (an interpreter). But most people seem like children (minors) who haven’t yet claimed their own inner world. Or they are like people unable to speak (mutes), who can’t describe the conversations they’ve had with nature.

Everyone senses a deeper, non-physical (supersensual) purpose in the sun, stars, earth, and water. These natural elements seem to stand ready to offer us a special service. But something blocks us. Maybe it’s some inner sluggishness (excess of phlegm). This blockage prevents nature from having its full effect on us.

Nature’s impressions usually strike us too weakly to turn us into artists. Every touch of nature should thrill us. Every person should be enough of an artist to describe their experiences in conversation. But in reality, nature’s signals (rays or appulses) reach our senses but often don’t penetrate to our core (the quick). They don’t have enough force to make us reproduce them in speech.

The poet is the person whose inner powers are in balance. They are the person without internal blockage (impediment).

• They see and handle the realities that others only dream about.
• They experience the full range of life.
• They represent humanity because they have the greatest capacity to both receive insights and share (impart) them.

The Three Children of the Universe

The Universe has three fundamental aspects, like three children born together. These reappear with different names in every system of thought:

• Sometimes called: Cause, Operation, and Effect.
• More poetically: Jove (King/Sky), Pluto (Underworld/Wealth), Neptune (Sea/Movement).
• Theologically: The Father, the Spirit, and the Son.

Here, we will call them:

1. The Knower (representing the love of truth)
2. The Doer (representing the love of good)
3. The Sayer (representing the love of beauty)

These three are equal. Each is fundamentally what it is; it cannot be overcome or fully broken down (analyzed). Each one also contains the hidden potential (latent) of the other two, while its own power is obvious (patent).

The Poet is the Sayer

The poet is the Sayer, the Namer. The poet represents Beauty. The poet is independent (sovereign) and stands at the center of things. Why? Because the world isn’t just painted or decorated; it is beautiful from its very beginning. God didn’t just make some things beautiful. Beauty itself is the creator of the universe.

Therefore, the poet isn’t just someone granted permission (permissive potentate) to be creative. The poet is an emperor in their own right. Criticism is often infected with a materialistic bias (cant). This bias assumes that practical skill (manual skill and activity) is the most important quality. It looks down on those who primarily “say” rather than “do.” This overlooks the fact that some people – namely poets – are natural sayers. They were sent into the world for the purpose of expression. Materialistic critics confuse poets with people whose main role (province) is action, but who leave action behind to imitate the sayers.

But Homer’s words were just as valuable and admirable to Homer as Agamemnon’s victories were to Agamemnon. The poet doesn’t wait for the hero or the wise person (sage). Just as heroes act first and sages think first, the poet writes first what needs to be spoken. The poet considers the others – heroes and sages – as secondary in relation to poetry, even though they are primary in their own fields. They are like models (sitters) in a painter’s studio, or like assistants bringing materials to an architect.

Hearing the Original Poem

In a sense, all poetry was written before time began. Whenever we become spiritually sensitive (finely organized) enough, we can enter that realm where the air itself is music. There, we hear the original melodies (primal warblings) of the universe. We try to write them down. But we keep losing a word here, a verse there (ever and anon). We substitute something of our own. And so, we miswrite the true poem.

People with more sensitive inner hearing (delicate ear) capture these original rhythms (cadences) more accurately. These written versions (transcripts), though still imperfect, become the great songs and poems of nations.

Nature is truly beautiful, just as it is truly good and truly reasonable. Beauty must be expressed and seen, just as actions must be done and truths must be known. Words and deeds are equally valid ways (indifferent modes) for divine energy to express itself. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

Identifying the True Poet

The sign and proof (credentials) of a true poet are that they announce things nobody predicted.

• The poet is the true and only healer/teacher (doctor); they know and tell.
• They are the only real reporter of news, because they were present and aware (privy) of the reality (appearance) they describe.
• The poet sees ideas directly and speaks what is essential and causal.

We are not talking here about people who just have poetic talent, or skill with meter and rhyme. We are talking about the true poet.

I recently had a conversation about a writer of song lyrics. He had a sharp (subtle) mind. His head seemed like a music box full of delicate tunes. We all praised his skill with language. But when we asked if he was truly a poet, not just a lyricist (lyrist), we had to admit he was clearly just a man of his time (a contemporary), not an eternal man.

He doesn’t stand above our everyday limitations like a massive mountain (like Chimborazo near the equator). A great mountain rises from a hot base through every climate zone, showing plants (herbage) from every latitude on its sides. Instead, this talented writer’s genius is like the carefully designed garden (landscape-garden) of a modern house. It’s decorated with fountains and statues, with well-dressed people standing and sitting around. Through all the pleasant music, we hear the underlying tone (ground-tone) of ordinary, conventional life. Our poets today are often talented people who sing, but they aren’t true “children of music.” The message (argument) takes second place; the technical skill (finish of the verses) comes first.

The Living Thought Behind the Poem

It’s not meters that make a poem. It’s a meter-making argument – a thought so passionate and alive that it creates its own structure, like the spirit of a plant or animal. This living thought adorns nature with something new.

Thought and form appear together in time. But in the order of creation (genesis), the thought comes before the form. The poet has a new thought, a whole new experience to reveal. They will tell us how it was for them, and all people will be richer for sharing in their insight (fortune).

Each new era requires its own unique expression (new confession). The world always seems to be waiting for its poet. I remember when I was young, I was deeply moved one morning by news (tidings) that genius had appeared in a young man sitting near me. He had quit his job and gone wandering (nobody knew where – whither). He had written hundreds of lines of poetry. He felt everything had changed – humans, animals, heaven, earth, sea – but he couldn’t tell if his writing truly captured what was inside him.

How gladly we listened! How ready we were to believe (credulous)! It felt like society itself was being challenged (compromised). We felt we were sitting in the dawn (aurora) of a sunrise that would make all previous lights (stars) seem dim. Boston seemed twice as far away as the night before. Rome – what was Rome? Past masters like Plutarch and Shakespeare seemed outdated (in the yellow leaf). Homer would be forgotten.

It means a lot to know that poetry has been written today, under this roof, right beside you. What! That wonderful creative spirit hasn’t died out! These dull, hard moments (stony moments) are still sparkling with life! I had imagined the ancient oracles were all silent, that nature had used up her creative fire. But look! All night, from every pore of existence, these beautiful new inspirations (fine auroras) have been streaming out.

Everyone has some stake in the arrival (advent) of the poet. No one knows how much it might affect them. We know the secret of the world is profound. But we don’t know who or what will be our interpreter. A walk on a mountain, a new style of face, meeting a new person – any of these might put the key in our hands.

Of course, the value of genius to us lies in the truthfulness (veracity) of its report. Talent can play tricks and entertain (frolic and juggle). Genius understands reality and adds to it. Humanity truly needs the poet, the foremost watchman on the peak, to announce the latest news from the frontiers of understanding. It will be the truest word ever spoken for that time. The phrasing will be the most fitting, the most musical – the unmistakable (unerring) voice of the world for that moment.

The Hope and Risk of Reading Poetry

All sacred history shows (attests) that the birth of a poet is the most important event in time (chronology). Humans, though often disappointed, keep watching for the arrival of a brother or sister who can hold them steady to a truth until they make it their own.

What joy I feel when I start reading a poem I trust is truly inspired! I think: Now my limitations (chains) will be broken! I will rise above the confusion and unclear air (opaque airs) I live in. From the heaven of truth, I will see and understand my life and relationships. This will reconcile me to life. It will renew nature for me. I will see meaning (a tendency) in small events (trifles) and know what I am truly doing. Life will no longer be just noise. Now I will truly see people and know the signs to tell real humans from deceptive ones (fools and satans). This day will be better than my birthday! On my birthday, I became an animal. Now, I am invited into the understanding (science) of reality.

That is the hope. But often, the fulfillment (fruition) is delayed. It often happens that this inspiring poet (winged man), who promises to carry me to heaven, just whirls me into the clouds. Then he leaps and plays (frisks) around with me from cloud to cloud. He keeps insisting he’s heading heavenward. But I, being inexperienced (a novice), am slow to realize he doesn’t actually know the way. He just wants me to admire his skill at rising a little way off the ground, like a bird (fowl) or a flying fish briefly leaving the water. But that all-penetrating, all-nourishing, clear air (ocular air) of heaven – that poet will never reach it.

Soon, I tumble back down into my old limited viewpoints (nooks). I go back to living a life of exaggeration and illusion. And I lose my faith that any guide can lead me where I truly want to go (thither).

Nature Speaks Through Symbols

But let’s leave these poets who are victims of their own vanity. Let’s look with fresh hope at how nature itself uses better impulses to ensure the poet stays true to their job of announcing and affirming truth. Nature does this through the beauty of things. This beauty becomes a new, higher beauty when it is expressed in art.

Nature offers all its creatures to the poet as a picture-language. When an object is used as a symbol (type), it gains a wonderful second value. This symbolic value is far better than its ordinary use. For example, a carpenter’s stretched cord makes music in the breeze if you listen closely enough.

The philosopher Iamblichus said, “Things more excellent than every image are expressed through images.” Things can be used as symbols because nature itself is a symbol – both as a whole and in every part. Every line we draw in the sand has expression. There is no physical body without its spirit or inner genius.

• All physical form is an effect of inner character.
• All outward conditions result from the quality of the inner life.
• All harmony comes from health.
• (This is why perceiving beauty should involve sympathy – it should be natural only for good people).

The beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary. The soul creates the body, as the wise poet Spenser taught:

“So every spirit, as it is most pure, And hath in it the more of heavenly light, So it the fairer body doth procure To habit in, and it more fairly dight, With cheerful grace and amiable sight. For, of the soul, the body form doth take, For soul is form, and doth the body make.”

Suddenly, we find ourselves not just thinking critically (in a critical speculation), but in a holy place. We should proceed carefully (warily) and respectfully (reverently). We stand before the secret of the world – the place where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity turns into Variety.

The Universe Expresses the Soul

The Universe is the soul made visible, turned outward (externization). Wherever life exists, it bursts into appearance around it. Our current science relies only on the senses (is sensual), and therefore it is superficial. We treat the earth, stars, physics, and chemistry as if they exist on their own (self-existent). But really, they are just the attendants (retinue) of the deeper Being that we are.

The philosopher Proclus said, “The mighty heaven, in its transformations (transfigurations), shows clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; it moves in harmony with the unseen cycles (unapparent periods) of intellectual natures.”

Therefore, science always progresses alongside (abreast with) the true inner growth (just elevation) of humanity. It keeps step with religion and deep philosophy (metaphysics). The state of science in any era is a measure (index) of our self-knowledge. Because everything in nature corresponds to a moral or spiritual power, if any natural event (phenomenon) remains unexplained or seems meaningless (brute and dark), it just means the corresponding inner ability (faculty) in the observer isn’t active yet.

Everyone is a Poet

No wonder, then, that these waters of understanding are so deep! No wonder we approach them with caution and reverence (a religious regard). The beauty of ancient myths (fable) proves how important their inner meaning (sense) is – for the poet, and for everyone else.

You could say that every person is a poet to the extent that they can feel these enchantments of nature. Why? Because all people have the thoughts that the universe itself expresses (celebration).

I find that the fascination lies in the symbol. Who loves nature? Who doesn’t? Is it only poets, and people with leisure and education, who live closely with her? No. Hunters, farmers, horse caretakers (grooms), and butchers also love nature. They express their affection through their choice of lifestyle, not their choice of words.

A writer might wonder what the coachman or hunter truly values in riding, or in horses and dogs. It’s not the superficial qualities. If you talk with him, he values those surface things just as little as you do. His appreciation (worship) is intuitive (sympathetic); he doesn’t have definitions. But he feels commanded by the living power he senses present in nature. No imitation or mere play-acting with these things would satisfy him. He loves the realness (earnest) of the north wind, of rain, of stone, wood, and iron.

A beauty that cannot be explained is more precious than a beauty we can fully understand. What these practical people worship, with simple (coarse) but sincere actions (rites), is nature as the symbol. It is nature confirming (certifying) the supernatural. It is the physical body overflowing with life.

The Power of Emblems

The deep, inner, mysterious nature (inwardness, and mystery) of this connection to symbols drives people of every class to use emblems. Groups of poets and philosophers are no more obsessed (intoxicated) with their symbols than ordinary people (populace) are with theirs.

Think about our political parties. Calculate the power of badges and emblems. Remember the great ball they rolled from Baltimore to Bunker Hill! In political parades, the town of Lowell might be represented by a loom, Lynn by a shoe, Salem by a ship. Consider the power of symbols like the cider barrel, the log cabin, the hickory stick, the palmetto leaf, and all the other signs (cognizances) of political groups.

Think about the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent moon, a lion, an eagle, or some other figure – symbols that became popular who knows how – appear on an old piece of flag material (rag of bunting). When that flag blows in the wind on a fort somewhere at the ends of the earth, it makes the blood tingle in people, whether they appear rough (rudest) or highly conventional on the outside.

People think they hate poetry, but they are all poets and mystics in their deep response to symbols!

Beyond the fact that symbolic language is universal, we become aware (apprised) of its divine nature. We see that the world is like a temple. Its walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandments from God. We know this is divine because every single fact in nature carries the whole meaning of nature. The distinctions we usually make between events – calling some low and some high, some honest and some corrupt (base) – disappear when nature is used as a symbol.

Thought makes everything fit for use. The vocabulary of an all-knowing (omniscient) person would include words and images usually kept out of polite conversation. Something that seems crude (base), or even obscene, to a crude person becomes meaningful and important (illustrious) when spoken in a new context of thought. The deep faith (piety) of the Hebrew prophets cleanses (purges) the crudeness (grossness) of their language. The ancient ritual of circumcision is an example of poetry’s power to elevate something that seems low or offensive.

Small and ordinary (mean) things can serve as symbols just as well as great things. Often, the simpler (meaner) the symbol used to express a law, the more powerful (pungent) it is, and the longer it stays in people’s memories. It’s like how we choose the smallest possible box or case to carry a necessary tool (utensil).

Even bare lists of words can be highly suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind. It’s said that the statesman Lord Chatham used to read Bailey’s Dictionary when preparing to speak in Parliament. The poorest, simplest experience contains enough richness for all purposes of expressing thought.

Why desperately seek (covet) knowledge of new facts? Our everyday life – day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions – serves us just as well as knowing all trades or witnessing all great sights (spectacles). We are far from having used up (exhausted) the meaning of the few symbols we commonly use. We can learn to use them with a startling (terrible) simplicity.

A poem doesn’t need to be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship we form is a new word, a new expression. We can also use flaws and imperfections (defects and deformities) for a sacred purpose. Doing so expresses our sense that the evils of the world only appear evil to an evil perspective (eye). In old mythology, scholars (mythologists) note that flaws were attributed to divine beings – like lameness to Vulcan, or blindness to Cupid. These flaws were meant to signify an overflowing abundance (exuberances) of power.

The Poet Reconnects Reality

Things seem ugly when they are disconnected (dislocation and detachment) from the life of God. The poet is the one who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole. Through deeper insight, the poet reconnects even artificial things, and things that seem to violate nature, back to the larger natural order. Because of this, the poet can easily handle (dispose of) the most disagreeable facts.

Readers of poetry might see a factory town or a railway line and think the landscape’s poetry is broken. This is because these human creations (works of art) haven’t yet been accepted as sacred (consecrated) in their minds. But the poet sees these things fitting into the great Order just as much as a beehive or a spider’s geometric web. Nature quickly adopts them into her living systems (vital circles). Nature loves the gliding train of cars like her own creation.

Besides, to a mind that is centered, it doesn’t matter how many mechanical inventions exist. Even if you add millions of surprising new gadgets, the fundamental fact of mechanics hasn’t gained any importance (a grain’s weight). The underlying spiritual fact remains unchanged, whether there are many details or few. Just as no mountain is high enough (of any appreciable height) to break the perfect curve of the Earth (sphere).

Imagine a smart country boy (shrewd) visiting the city for the first time. The self-satisfied (complacent) city dweller isn’t happy with the boy’s calm reaction (his little wonder). It’s not that the boy doesn’t see the fancy houses or know he hasn’t seen such things before. It’s that he incorporates them (disposes of them) into his worldview as easily as the poet finds a place for the railway in the landscape. The main value of a new fact is to highlight the great, constant fact of Life. Life itself can make any single circumstance seem small (dwarf). Compared to Life, a Native American beaded belt (belt of wampum) and the entire commerce of America are fundamentally alike.

The Poet Gives Voice to the World

Since the world is placed under the mind’s power, ready to be used like words (verb and noun), the poet is the one who can give it voice (articulate it).

Life itself is great. It fascinates and absorbs us. And all people understand, to some degree, the symbols used to name life’s experiences. Yet, most people cannot use these symbols originally.

We ourselves are symbols, and we live surrounded by symbols. The worker, the work, the tools; words and things; birth and death – all are emblems. But we often just react emotionally (sympathize) to the symbols. We become obsessed (infatuated) with the practical (economical) uses of things. We forget that things are also thoughts.

The poet, using a higher level of perception (ulterior intellectual perception), gives symbols a new power. This power makes their old, practical use seem forgotten. The poet puts eyes and a tongue into every silent (dumb) and non-living (inanimate) object. The poet understands that the thought is independent of the symbol. The thought is stable; the symbol is accidental and temporary (accidency and fugacity).

Just as the mythical Lynceus was said to see through the earth, the poet turns the world into glass. They show us all things in their true order (series and procession). Through this better perception, the poet stands one step closer to things. They see the constant flow or transformation (metamorphosis). They perceive that thought takes many forms (is multiform). They see that within the form of every creature, there is a force pushing it to rise (ascend) into a higher form. The poet follows this life force with their eyes. They use the forms that express that life. And so, their speech flows naturally with the flowing of nature.

All the facts of biology (animal economy) – sex, nourishment (nutriment), pregnancy (gestation), birth, growth – are symbols. They represent the passage of the world into the human soul. There, these facts undergo a change and reappear as new and higher truths. The poet uses forms based on the life within them, not just based on the outer form itself. This is true science.

The poet alone truly understands astronomy, chemistry, botany (vegetation), and biology (animation). Why? Because the poet doesn’t stop at the surface facts. They use these facts as signs of deeper realities. The poet knows why the field (plain) of space was scattered (strown) with the flowers we call suns, moons, and stars. They know why the great ocean (deep) is filled (adorned) with animals, humans, and gods. Because in every word the poet speaks, they ride upon these realities as the horses of thought.

The Poet Creates Language

Because of this deeper science, the poet is the Namer, the Language-maker. They name things, sometimes based on their appearance, sometimes based on their inner reality (essence). They give each thing its own proper name, not someone else’s name. This delights the intellect, which loves clear distinctions (detachment or boundary).

Poets made all the words. Therefore, language is the storage house (archives) of history. And, perhaps, it is also a kind of tomb for the muses (the original sources of inspiration). Although the origins of most words are forgotten, each word was originally a stroke of genius. It became common (obtained currency) because, for a moment, it perfectly symbolized the world to the first person who spoke it and the person who heard it. The study of word origins (etymologist) shows that even the dullest (deadest) word was once a brilliant picture.

Language is fossil poetry. Just as continents of limestone are made of infinite masses of tiny ancient shells (animalcules), language is made up of images (tropes) that, in their current secondary use, no longer remind us of their poetic beginnings.

But the poet names things because they see them, or get one step closer to them than anyone else. This expression, this naming, isn’t just art. It’s a second nature, grown out of the first nature, like a leaf grows out of a tree. What we call nature is a kind of self-regulating motion or change. Nature does everything herself (by her own hands). She doesn’t wait for someone else to name (baptize) her; she baptizes herself. And she does this, again, through metamorphosis.

I remember a certain poet described it to me like this:

Genius is the activity that repairs the decay of things, whether those things are physical and limited or not. Nature, throughout all her kingdoms, ensures her own survival. Nobody worries about planting the humble fungus. So nature shakes down countless spores from the gills of one mushroom (agaric). Any single spore, if preserved, transmits new billions of spores tomorrow or the next day. The new mushroom of this hour has a chance the old one didn’t. This tiny seed (atom of seed) is thrown into a new place, not threatened by the accidents that destroyed its parent just a short distance (two rods) away.

Nature makes a person. When that person reaches maturity (ripe age), she won’t risk losing this marvelous creation (wonder) all at once. So she detaches a new self from the person – a child – so that the species (kind) can survive the accidents the individual faces.

In the same way, when the poet’s soul matures in thought, nature detaches and sends away its poems or songs. These are a fearless, sleepless, deathless offspring (progeny). They are not subject to the accidents of the weary world of time. They are a fearless, lively (vivacious) offspring, equipped with wings (such was the power (virtue) of the soul they came from). These wings carry them quickly and far. They embed themselves permanently (infix them irrecoverably) into the hearts of people. These wings are the beauty of the poet’s soul.

The songs, flying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by noisy swarms (clamorous flights) of criticisms (censures). The criticisms are far more numerous and threaten to destroy (devour) the songs. But the criticisms are not winged. After a very short jump, they fall heavily (plump down) and rot. The souls they came from gave them no beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet rise, leap, and pierce into the depths of infinite time.

Nature’s Goal: Ascension

That’s what the poet (bard) taught me, speaking freely. But nature has a higher goal in creating new individuals than just security. That goal is ascension – the passage of the soul into higher forms.

I knew a sculptor in my younger days who made the statue of a youth in the public garden. As I remember, he couldn’t directly explain what made him happy or unhappy. But he could express it through wonderful indirect means (indirections). One day, as usual, he got up before dawn. He saw the morning break, as grand as the eternity it came from. For many days afterward, he struggled (strove) to express the feeling of tranquility he experienced. And suddenly (lo!), his chisel had formed out of marble the shape of a beautiful youth (named Phosphorus, the morning star). The statue’s expression (aspect) is such that, people say, everyone who looks at it becomes silent.

The poet also gives in (resigns himself) to their mood. The thought that deeply moved (agitated) them gets expressed, but it comes out transformed (alter idem), in a totally new way. The expression is organic – it’s the new form that things themselves take when they are liberated into art.

Just as objects in the sun paint their images on the retina of the eye, those same objects, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe, try to paint a much finer copy of their inner essence in the poet’s mind. The transformation (metamorphosis) of things into higher living forms is similar to their change into melodies.

Over every single thing stands its guiding spirit (dæmon) or soul. Just as the physical form of the thing is reflected by the eye, the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountain range, Niagara Falls, every flower bed – they all exist beforehand (pre-exist), or exist on a higher level (super-exist), in potential songs (pre-cantations). These float like scents (odors) in the air. When anyone passes by with a sensitive enough ear, they overhear these melodies. They try to write down the notes without weakening (diluting) or corrupting (depraving) them.

This gives justification (legitimation) for literary criticism. It rests on the mind’s faith that existing poems are corrupt versions of some original text written in nature. Criticism tries to make the poem match (tally) that original text. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should be no less pleasing than the repeating bumps (iterated nodes) on a seashell, or the similar-yet-different pattern (resembling difference) in a group of flowers.

The pairing of birds is a true natural poem (idyl), not boring like our written idylls. A storm is a true rough poem (ode), without lies or exaggeration (rant). A summer, with its cycle of planting, harvesting, and storing, is a true epic song, containing many wonderfully crafted parts. Why shouldn’t the symmetry and truth that shape (modulate) these natural events glide into our spirits? Why shouldn’t we participate in the creativity (invention) of nature?

Imagination: Seeing Deeply

This insight, which expresses itself through what we call Imagination, is a very high kind of seeing. It doesn’t come from studying. It comes from the intellect being where and what it sees. It involves sharing the path or cycle (circuit) of things as they move through forms. This makes the forms clear (translucid) to others.

The path of things is silent. Will things allow (suffer) a speaker to accompany them? They won’t allow a spy. But a lover, a poet – who is the highest expression (transcendency) of their own nature – him they will allow. The condition for true naming by the poet is yielding to the divine aura that breathes through forms, and going along with it.

Accessing Universal Power

Every thinking person quickly learns this secret: beyond the power of their conscious mind (possessed and conscious intellect), they can access a new energy. It’s like having their intellect doubled. This happens through surrendering (abandonment) to the nature of things. Besides their private power as an individual, there is a great public power they can draw upon. They access it by unlocking their human limitations (“human doors”) at all risks, and allowing the universal energies (ethereal tides) to flow through them.

When this happens, the person is caught up into the life of the Universe.

• Their speech becomes powerful like thunder.
• Their thought becomes like law.
• Their words become universally understandable (intelligible), like plants and animals.

The poet knows they speak truly (adequately) only when they speak somewhat wildly, or “with the flower of the mind.” This means not using the intellect just as a tool (organ). It means using the intellect when it’s released from all routine service and allowed to take direction from its higher, celestial life. Or, as the ancients used to say (were wont), not speaking with intellect alone, but with the intellect drunk (inebriated) on nectar (divine inspiration).

Like a traveler who has lost their way throws the reins on the horse’s neck and trusts the animal’s instinct to find the road, so must we trust the divine animal that carries us through this world. If we can somehow stimulate this deep instinct, new pathways into nature open up for us. The mind flows into and through the hardest and highest things. And metamorphosis becomes possible.

Stimulants: False vs. True Inspiration

This is why poets (bards) sometimes love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the smoke (fumes) of sandalwood and tobacco, or any other kind of physical stimulation (animal exhilaration). All people use whatever means they can (avail themselves of) to add this extraordinary power to their normal abilities.

To this end, people value: conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theaters, traveling, war, crowds (mobs), fires, gambling, politics, love, science, or physical intoxication. These are all various coarser or finer artificial (quasi-mechanical) substitutes for the true nectar. The true nectar is the intense joy (ravishment) of the intellect that comes from getting closer to truth (the fact).

These substitutes help a person’s outward-moving (centrifugal) tendency. They help a person escape the confinement (custody) of the body they are trapped (pent up) in. They help escape the “jail-yard” of individual relationships they are enclosed in.

This explains why a great number of professional artists (expressors of Beauty) – painters, poets, musicians, actors – were often known (wont) to lead lives of pleasure and indulgence more than others. This applies to all but the few who received the true nectar from within. Because their method of seeking freedom was false (spurious) – an escape (emancipation) not into heaven, but into the freedom of lower (baser) places – they were punished for the advantage they gained. They suffered decline through distraction (dissipation) and inner decay (deterioration).

But nature can never be tricked to gain an advantage. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, does not appear in response to the magic tricks (sorceries) of opium or wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and healthy (chaste) body. What we get from narcotics is not inspiration, but some counterfeit excitement and frenzy (fury).

Milton says that the lyric poet (writing personal songs) may drink wine and live generously. But the epic poet, who sings of the gods and their interactions (descent) with humans, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not “Devil’s wine,” but God’s wine.

It’s like toys. We fill our children’s hands and rooms (nurseries) with all kinds of dolls, drums, and horses. This distracts (withdrawing) their eyes from the plain face and satisfying (sufficing) objects of nature – the sun, the moon, animals, water, stones – which should be their toys.

Similarly, the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain that the common influences of nature delight him.

• His cheerfulness should be the gift of sunlight.
• The air should be enough inspiration for him.
• He should be tipsy with water.

That spirit which satisfies quiet hearts – the spirit that seems to come forth from every dry hill (knoll) of withered (sere) grass, from every pine stump and half-buried (half-imbedded) stone shone on by the dull March sun – this spirit comes forth to the poor and hungry, and those with simple taste. If you fill your brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and greed (covetousness), and if you try to stimulate your worn-out (jaded) senses with wine and French coffee, you will find no shining wisdom (radiance) in the lonely, empty (waste) pinewoods.

Imagination Frees Everyone

If imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other people either. The sight of metamorphosis excites joy in the observer (beholder). The use of symbols has a power to free (emancipation) and uplift (exhilaration) all people. We feel touched by a magic wand, making us dance and run about happily, like children. We feel like people coming out of a dark cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of figurative language (tropes), fables, ancient sayings (oracles), and all poetic forms.

Poets, in this sense, are liberating gods. Through their work, people truly gain a new sense. They find within their familiar world another world, or even a nest of worlds. Because once we have seen metamorphosis happen, we sense (divine) that it doesn’t stop.

I won’t discuss now how much this contributes to the charm of algebra and mathematics (which also have their symbolic language, tropes). But this liberating feeling is present in every good definition. For example:

• When Aristotle defines space as an immovable container (vessel) holding things.
• When Plato defines a line as a flowing point, or figure as the boundary (bound) of a solid.
• And many similar definitions.

What a joyful sense of freedom we feel when the ancient writer Vitruvius reports the old opinion of artists: that no architect can build a house well without knowing something about anatomy!

Here are some more examples of this symbolic way of seeing:

• When Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue Charmides, tells us the soul is cured of sickness (maladies) by certain chants (incantations), and these chants are beautiful reasons that create self-control (temperance) in souls.
• When Plato calls the world an animal.
• When the character Timaeus (in another Platonic dialogue) says plants are also animals, or that a person is like a heavenly tree growing upside down, with their root (the head) reaching upward. George Chapman, following Plato, wrote: “So in our tree of man, whose nervie root / Springs in his top;”
• When the mythical Orpheus speaks of grey hair (hoariness) as “that white flower which marks extreme old age.”
• When the philosopher Proclus calls the universe the statue of the intellect.
• When Chaucer, praising true nobility (“Gentilesse”), compares good character (blood) in poor circumstances (mean condition) to fire. Even if carried to the darkest house between England and the distant Caucasus mountains, fire will still do its job and burn brightly, even if nobody (twenty thousand men) sees it.
• When John, in the Book of Revelation (apocalypse), saw the world destroyed by evil, with stars falling like a fig tree dropping unripe fruit (untimely fruit).
• When Aesop’s fables report on everyday human relationships through the disguise (masquerade) of birds and animals.

In all these examples, we get a cheerful hint of the immortality of our inner essence. We sense its flexible nature (versatile habit) and its ability to escape limitations. It’s like the old saying about gypsies: “It is in vain to hang them, they cannot die.”

Poets Set Us Free

The poets, then, are liberating gods. The ancient British poets (bards) had a title for their order: “Those who are free throughout the world.” They are free, and they make others free.

An imaginative book helps us much more at first by stimulating us with its figurative language (tropes). This initial stimulation is often more valuable than later, when we figure out the author’s exact logical meaning. I think the only truly valuable things in books are the insights that go beyond the ordinary – the transcendental and extraordinary.

If a writer is so carried away (inflamed) by their thought that they forget about authors and the public, and care only about this one dream that possesses them like insanity – let me read that writing. You can have all the logical arguments, histories, and criticisms.

All the value we find in unconventional thinkers like Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or others who included questionable ideas (angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism) in their theories of the universe (cosmogony), comes from this: they provide proof (certificate) that someone has departed from routine. Here is a new witness, seeing things differently.

That is also the best kind of success in conversation: the magic of liberty. It puts the world in our hands like a ball. How unimportant (cheap) even freedom seems then! How pointless (mean) it feels to study, when a single powerful emotion gives the intellect the ability to undermine (sap) and transform (upheave) nature! How vast the perspective becomes! Nations, historical periods, systems of thought – they enter and disappear like threads in a huge, colorful tapestry. Dream delivers us to dream. And while this inspired state (drunkenness) lasts, we feel so wealthy (opulence) that we would sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion.

The Prison of Single Thoughts

There’s a good reason why we should prize this liberation. Consider the poor shepherd, blinded and lost in a snowstorm, who freezes to death (perishes in a drift) just feet from his cottage door. His fate is a symbol (emblem) of the human condition. We are miserably dying right on the edge (brink) of the waters of life and truth.

The inability to access any thought except the one we are currently thinking (the inaccessibleness) is amazing. What if you get close to another thought? When you are nearest, you are still as far away as when you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. This is why we love the poet, the inventor – anyone who, in any form (an ode, an action, a look, a behavior), gives us a new thought. They unlock our chains and admit us to a new scene.

Imagination Endures

This freedom (emancipation) is precious to all people. The power to share it must come from greater depth and range (scope) of thought. Therefore, this power is a measure of intellect. That’s why all books of the imagination last. All books that rise to the truth – where the writer sees nature beneath them and uses it as their tool for expression (exponent) – endure. Every verse or sentence that has this quality (virtue) will ensure its own immortality. The religions of the world are the passionate outcries (ejaculations) of a few imaginative people.

Flowing Imagination vs. Frozen Mysticism

But the nature (quality) of imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet didn’t just stop at the color or shape of things; they read the meaning behind them. And the poet doesn’t rest in that meaning either. They use the same objects as expressions (exponents) of their new thoughts.

Here lies the difference between the poet and the mystic. The mystic attaches (nails) a symbol to one single meaning. That meaning might have been true for a moment, but it soon becomes old and false. Because all symbols are fluid (fluxional); all language is a vehicle (vehicular and transitive). Language is good for transportation (like ferries and horses are), not for permanent settlement (homestead, like farms and houses are).

Mysticism makes the mistake of taking a personal, temporary (accidental and individual) symbol and treating it as a universal one. For example, the morning sunrise (morning-redness) happens to be the favorite image (meteor) for the mystic Jacob Behmen. For him, it comes to stand for truth and faith. And he believes it should stand for the same realities for every reader. But the next reader might naturally prefer the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his plant bulb, or a jeweler polishing a gem. Any of these symbols, or countless (myriad) others, are equally good for the person to whom they are meaningful (significant).

The key is that symbols must be held lightly. We must be very willing to translate them into the equivalent terms that others use. And the mystic must be repeatedly (steadily) told: “All that you say is just as true without the tiresome (tedious) use of that specific symbol as it is with it. Let us have a little algebra instead of this cliché (trite) rhetoric – universal signs instead of these limited ‘village symbols’ – and we will both benefit.” The history of organized religions (hierarchies) seems to show that all religious error involved making symbols too rigid (stark and solid). Eventually, this rigidity becomes nothing more than an excessive focus on the mechanics (organ) of language itself.

Swedenborg: Nature into Thought

Swedenborg, more than anyone else in recent times, stands out (eminently) as a translator of nature into thought. I don’t know anyone else in history for whom physical things so consistently (uniformly) stood for words and ideas. For him, metamorphosis was constantly happening. Everything he looked at obeyed the impulses of moral nature. Figs became grapes while he ate them. When some of his angels confirmed (affirmed) a truth, the laurel twig they held blossomed in their hands. A noise that sounded like gnashing and thumping from a distance turned out to be the voices of people arguing (disputants) when he got closer. In one of his visions, men seen in heavenly light appeared like dragons to higher beings, and seemed to be in darkness. But to each other, they appeared as normal men. When the light from heaven shone into their room (cabin), they complained about the darkness and had to shut the window to be able to see.

Seeing Multiple Realities

Swedenborg had this perception, which makes the poet or seer an object of awe and terror: the same person, or group of people, can appear one way to themselves and their companions, and a completely different way (aspect) to higher beings (intelligences). He described certain priests who were talking together very learnedly. But to children watching from a distance, these priests looked like dead horses. He reported many similar “misappearances.”

This immediately makes the mind ask: Are these fish under the bridge, those oxen in the pasture, those dogs in the yard, unchangeably (immutably) fish, oxen, and dogs? Or do they only appear that way to me? Perhaps (perchance) to themselves, they appear as upright men? And do I appear as a man to all eyes? The ancient Hindu sages (Bramins) and Pythagoras asked (propounded) the same question. If any poet has witnessed such transformation, they doubtless found it matched (in harmony with) various other experiences. We have all seen changes just as significant (considerable) in the growth of wheat or the life cycle of caterpillars. The person who sees the unchanging nature (firm nature) beneath the shifting appearances (flowing vest) and can declare it – that person is the poet, and will draw us in with love and terror.

Where is Today’s Poet?

I search in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not face life with enough plainness or depth (profoundness). We don’t dare to sing (chaunt) about our own times and social situations. If we filled our days with bravery, we wouldn’t hesitate (shrink from) celebrating them. Time and nature give us many gifts, but not yet the ideal person for this time (the timely man), the new religion, the unifier (reconciler) whom all things await. Dante’s greatness (praise) is that he dared to write his autobiography in a grand symbolic code (colossal cipher), making it universal.

We have not yet had a genius in America with a powerful enough vision (tyrannous eye) to recognize the value of our unique (incomparable) American materials. No one yet sees, in the roughness (barbarism) and materialism of our times, another celebration (carnival) of the same gods whose pictures we admire in Homer, then in the Middle Ages, then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and political meetings (caucus), Methodism and Unitarianism – these seem flat and dull to dull people. But they rest on the same foundations of wonder as the ancient city of Troy or the temple of Delphi. And they are passing away just as quickly.

Our political deal-making (logrolling), our frontier politics (stumps), our fishing industries, our histories with Black people (Negroes) and Native Americans (Indians), our boats, our national debt failures (repudiations), the anger (wrath) of corrupt people (rogues) and the cowardice (pusillanimity) of honest people, the Northern trade, the Southern planting, the Western clearing, Oregon, and Texas – these are still unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its vast geography amazes (dazzles) the imagination. It will not wait long for its poetry (meters).

If I haven’t found that perfect combination of gifts in my countrymen, I also couldn’t clarify my idea of the poet just by occasionally reading Chalmers’s collection of five centuries of English poets. These writers are often clever (wits) more than they are true poets, though there have been poets among them. But when we hold strictly (adhere) to the ideal of the poet, we have difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too focused on literary style, and Homer is too literal and historical.

The Task of the Poet

But I am not wise enough to make judgments about national literature (national criticism). I must continue using the old broad perspective (largeness) a little longer, to deliver my message (errand) from the muse to the poet about their art.

Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths, or methods, are ideal and eternal. But few people ever see them clearly – not even the artist themself for years, or sometimes for a lifetime – unless they enter the right conditions.

The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic poet (rhapsodist), the orator – they all share one desire: to express themselves fully (symmetrically and abundantly), not in a stunted (dwarfishly) or incomplete (fragmentarily) way. They find or put themselves in certain conditions that inspire them:

• The painter and sculptor might stand before impressive human figures.
• The orator might enter the assembly of the people.
• Others find different scenes that excite their intellect.

And each one soon feels the new desire for creation. They hear a voice; they see a beckoning sign. Then they realize with wonder that they are surrounded (hem him in) by herds of creative spirits (dæmons). They can no longer rest. They say, like the old painter, “By God, it is in me, and must come out of me.” They pursue a half-seen beauty that flies before them.

The poet pours out verses constantly, even in solitude. Most of what they say is probably conventional. But sooner or later (by and by), they say something original and beautiful. That delights (charms) them. They wish they could say nothing but such things.

In our everyday talk, we say, “That idea is yours, this one is mine.” But the poet knows well that the inspired words are not his. The inspiration is as strange and beautiful to him as it is to you. He himself would gladly (fain) hear more of such eloquence. Once someone has tasted this immortal drink (ichor), they can never get enough. And because an amazing creative power exists in these moments of insight (intellections), it is extremely important (of the last importance) that these things get spoken.

What a tiny amount of all we know is actually said! What mere drops from the vast sea of our knowledge are brought up (baled up)! And by what accident are these few drops revealed, while so many secrets remain hidden in nature! This is why speech and song are necessary. This is why the orator’s heart pounds (throbs and heart-beatings) at the door of the assembly. The purpose (to the end, namely) is so that thought can be forcefully expressed (ejaculated) as the Logos, the Word.

Trust Your Inner Power

Do not doubt, O poet, but persist. Say, “It is in me, and shall come out.” Stand there, even if you are blocked (baulked) and silent (dumb), stuttering and stammering, mocked (hissed and hooted). Stand and strive until, finally, intense feeling (rage) draws out of you that dream-power. Every night, your dreams show you this power is yours. It’s a power that goes beyond (transcending) all limits and privacy. Through this power, a person becomes a conductor of the whole river of universal energy (electricity).

Nothing walks, creeps, grows, or exists that will not eventually have to rise and walk before the poet as an expression (exponent) of their meaning. When the poet comes into that power, their genius is no longer limited (exhaustible). All the creatures of the world, by pairs and by tribes, pour into their mind as if into Noah’s ark. They will come out again to populate a new world created by the poet’s words. This inner resource is like the supply of air for breathing or for a fire – not a measurable amount (measure of gallons), but the entire atmosphere if needed.

And therefore, the truly rich poets – like Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Raphael – obviously have no limits to their works, except the limits of their own lifetime. They resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to reflect (render) an image of every created thing.

The Poet’s Life and Reward

O poet! A new kind of nobility is granted (conferred) in groves and pastures, not in castles or by military power (sword-blade) anymore. The conditions are hard, but they are equal for everyone.

• You shall leave the conventional world and know only the muse (your inspiration).
• You shall no longer concern yourself with the times, customs, social graces (graces), politics, or opinions of men. You shall take everything directly from the muse.

For the time of cities and towns is ending, marked (tolled) by funeral bells (funereal chimes). But in nature, the universal hours are counted by the generations (succeeding tribes) of animals and plants, and by the continuous growth of joy upon joy.

God also wills that you give up (abdicate) a complicated (manifold and duplex) life. Be content to let others speak for you in conventional ways.

• Others shall act as your gentlemen, representing courtesy and worldly life for you.
• Others shall perform the great and famous (resounding) actions.
• You shall lie closely hidden with nature. You cannot be spared (afforded) for politics (the Capitol) or business (the Exchange).

The world is full of giving things up (renunciations) and periods of learning (apprenticeships), and this is yours: you must pass for a fool and a rough person (churl) for a long time. This is the protective screen and covering (sheath) in which the nature god Pan protects his beloved flower. You shall be known only to your own kind (thine own), and they shall comfort (console) you with the tenderest love. And you shall not be able to list (rehearse) the names of your friends in your poems, because of an old sense of shame before the holy ideal.

And this is the reward:

• The ideal shall become real for you.
• The impressions of the actual world will fall like summer rain – plentiful (copious) but not bothersome – on your invulnerable inner essence.
• You shall have the whole land for your park and estate (manor), the sea for your bath and travel (navigation), without paying taxes and without causing envy.
• You shall own the woods and the rivers.
• You shall truly possess that reality in which others are only renters (tenants and boarders).

You true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly; wherever day and night meet in twilight; wherever the blue heaven is hung with clouds or scattered (sown) with stars; wherever there are forms with transparent boundaries; wherever there are openings (outlets) into celestial space; wherever there is danger, and awe, and love – there is Beauty. It is abundant (plenteous) as rain, poured out (shed) for you. And though you should walk the entire world over, you shall not be able to find a single condition that is unfit (inopportune) or unworthy (ignoble) for poetry.

Experience

(Original poem retained for context):

The lords of life, the lords of life,— I saw them pass, In their own guise, Like and unlike, Portly and grim, Use and Surprise, Surface and Dream, Succession swift, and spectral Wrong, Temperament without a tongue, And the inventor of the game Omnipresent without name;— Some to see, some to be guessed, They marched from east to west: Little man, least of all, Among the legs of his guardians tall, Walked about with puzzled look:— Him by the hand dear nature took; Dearest nature, strong and kind, Whispered, “Darling, never mind! To-morrow they will wear another face, The founder thou! these are thy race!”

Lost on the Stairs

Where do we find ourselves? We seem to be in the middle of a series that has no known beginning or end. We believe it has no limits (extremes).

We wake up and find ourselves on a staircase. There seem to be stairs below us that we have climbed. There are many stairs above us, going upward and disappearing from view.

According to old beliefs, a spirit (Genius) stands at the door where we enter life. This spirit gives us a drink (the water of Lethe) to make us forget our past lives, so we won’t tell any tales. But this spirit mixed the drink too strongly. Now, even in the middle of our lives (at noonday), we can’t shake off the sleepiness (lethargy). Sleepiness lingers around our eyes our whole lives, just like night seems to hover all day in the branches (boughs) of a fir tree.

Everything seems to swim and glitter around us. Our ability to see clearly (perception) is more threatened than our life itself. We glide through nature like ghosts. If we left our spot, we wouldn’t know how to find it again.

Was our birth a result of a time when nature was poor and saving (indigence and frugality)? Was nature stingy (sparing) with her fire (spirit) and generous (liberal) with her earth (matter)? It seems to us that we lack a strong inner drive (the affirmative principle). We have health and reason, but we don’t have any extra (superfluity of) spirit for new creation. We have enough energy to live and get through the year, but not an ounce extra to share (impart) or invest.

If only our guiding spirit (Genius) were a bit more of a genius! We are like mill owners on the lower part of a stream, after the factories above them have used up all the water. We also imagine that the people upstream must have built higher dams, blocking the flow to us.

Hidden Growth and Passing Days

If only any of us knew what we were really doing, or where we are truly going, especially when we think we know best! Today, we don’t know if we are truly busy or just idle. There have been times when we thought we were lazy (indolent), but later discovered that much was actually accomplished, and much growth had begun inside us.

All our days seem so worthless (unprofitable) while they are passing. It’s amazing where or when we ever managed to gain anything of what we call wisdom, poetry, or virtue. We certainly never got it on any specific calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been slipped in (intercalated) somewhere between the regular ones. It’s like the myth where Hermes won extra days from the Moon in a game of dice, so the god Osiris could be born.

It is said that all martyrdoms looked ordinary or insignificant (mean) while they were happening. Every ship on the horizon looks romantic, except for the one we are sailing on. As soon as we embark, the romance leaves our vessel and hangs on every other sail we see. Our own life looks trivial, and we avoid (shun) recording it.

People seem to have learned from the horizon the art of constantly retreating and pointing elsewhere. “Over there,” says the complaining (querulous) farmer, “those hills (uplands) are rich pasture, and my neighbor has fertile meadow, but my field only holds the world together.” I quote another man’s saying. Unfortunately, that other man does the same thing and quotes me. It’s nature’s trick to make today seem less important (degrade today). There’s a lot of activity (buzz), and somewhere, somehow, a result magically slips in.

Every roof looks pleasant to the eye, until we lift it. Then we find tragedy and weeping (moaning) women, and hard-eyed husbands, and floods (deluges) of forgetfulness (lethe). And people ask, “What’s the news?” as if the old news wasn’t bad enough already.

How many truly individual people can we count in society? How many truly original actions? How many unique opinions? So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much is looking back (retrospect), that the core (pith) of each person’s genius shrinks down to just a very few hours.

The history of literature – if you take the net result from historians like Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel – is just a summary of very few ideas and very few original stories. All the rest is just variations of these. Similarly, in the great society all around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and basic physical sensation (gross sense). There are even few original opinions. The opinions people do have seem deeply ingrained (organic) in them and don’t disturb the fundamental way things are (universal necessity).

The Softness of Disaster

It’s as if opium is mixed (instilled) into every disaster! Disaster looks terrifying (formidable) as we approach it. But when it arrives, there is ultimately no rough, scraping friction (rasping friction). Instead, there are the most slippery, sliding surfaces. We fall softly onto a thought. Even Ate, the goddess of ruin, is gentle:

“Over men’s heads walking aloft, With tender feet treading so soft.”

People give things and complain about their suffering (bemoan themselves), but things are usually not half as bad with them as they say. There are moods when we almost invite (court) suffering. We hope that here, at least, we will find reality – sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be like stage scenery (scene-painting) and fake (counterfeit).

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow grief itself is. Grief, like all the rest, just plays around the surface. It never introduces me to the real core of things. We would even pay the high price of losing sons and lovers to make contact with that reality. Was it the scientist Boscovich who discovered that physical bodies never actually come into contact? Well, souls never truly touch their objects either. An uncrossable (innavigable) sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim for and interact (converse) with.

Grief, too, will make us idealists (people focused on ideas rather than tangible reality). In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful piece of property (estate) – nothing more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I were told that my main debtors had gone bankrupt (bankruptcy), the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience, perhaps for many years. But it would leave me as it found me – neither better nor worse. So it is with this calamity (my son’s death): it does not touch me. Something which I imagined (fancied) was a part of me, which couldn’t be torn away without tearing me, nor grow without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was temporary (caducous).

I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Native American in the legend who was laid under a curse – that the wind couldn’t blow on him, water couldn’t flow to him, nor fire burn him – is a symbol (type) of us all. The events dearest to us are like summer rain, and we are like waterproof coats (Para coats) that shed every drop. Nothing seems left for us now but death. We look toward death with a grim satisfaction, saying, “There, at least, is reality that will not escape (dodge) us.”

Nature’s Slippery Game

I take this vanishing quality (evanescence) and slipperiness (lubricity) of all objects – which lets them slip through our fingers just when we clutch hardest – to be the most unattractive (un-handsome) part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed. She prefers that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the whole universe (sphere) to use as our plaything (cricket-ball), but we cannot grasp even one tiny berry for our philosophy.

Nature never gave us the power to make direct strikes. All our blows glance off; all our hits are accidents. Our relationships with each other are indirect (oblique) and random (casual).

Moods Color Everything

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a sequence (train) of moods, like a string of beads. As we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses. Each lens paints the world in its own color (hue), and each shows only what lies in its particular focus. From the mountain, you see the mountain (your perspective creates your reality). We bring to life (animate) what we are able to focus on, and we see only what we bring to life. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on a person’s mood whether they will appreciate the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius. But only a few hours are calm (serene) enough that we can truly enjoy (relish) nature or criticism.

How much we can appreciate depends more or less on our physical makeup (structure) or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads (our moods) are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a person with a cold and flawed (defective) nature? Who cares what sensitivity (sensibility) or judgment (discrimination) a man has shown at some past time, if now he falls asleep in his chair? Or if he laughs and giggles inappropriately? Or if he apologizes constantly? Or is consumed (affected) with ego (egotism)? Or thinks only of money (his dollar)? Or cannot resist food? Or had a child when he was just a boy?

Of what use is genius, if the mind (organ) is too warped (like a lens that is too convex or too concave) and cannot find a clear focus (focal distance) within the actual horizon of human life? Of what use is genius, if the brain is too cold or too hot, and the person doesn’t care enough about results to push (stimulate) them to experiment, and keep them going? Or if the mind’s fabric (web) is too finely woven, too easily disturbed (irritable) by pleasure and pain, so that life becomes stuck (stagnates) from taking in too much (reception) without enough action (due outlet)? Of what use is it to make heroic promises (vows) to change (amendment), if the same old flawed person (law-breaker) is supposed to keep them?

What comfort (cheer) can religious feeling (sentiment) offer, when we suspect that feeling might secretly depend on the seasons of the year, or the state of our blood? I knew a witty physician who believed theology originated in the liver’s bile duct (biliary duct). He used to declare (affirm) that if there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist (believing in predestination), and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian (believing in free will).

It is very humbling (mortifying) to reluctantly (reluctant) experience how some unfriendly excess or weakness (imbecility) cancels out (neutralizes) the promise of genius. We see young men who seem to owe us a new world, they promise so easily and generously (lavishly). But they never pay (acquit) the debt. They die young and avoid the reckoning (dodge the account). Or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.

The Prison of Temperament

Temperament also fully enters into the system of illusions. It shuts us in a prison of glass that we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth, they are all creatures of a given temperament. This temperament will show up in a given character, whose limits (boundaries) they will never pass. But when we look at them, they seem alive, and we assume there is free will (impulse) in them. In the moment, it seems like impulse. Over a year, or a lifetime, it turns out to be just a certain unchanging tune that the rotating cylinder (revolving barrel) of their internal music box must play.

People resist this conclusion in the morning, but they tend to accept it as the evening wears on: that temperament wins out (prevails) over everything related to time, place, and condition. Temperament cannot be consumed (inconsumable) even in the flames of religion. The moral sense (sentiment) can manage (avails) to impose some modifications. But the individual’s basic inner makeup (texture) keeps its control (dominion). If it doesn’t bias their moral judgments, it at least fixes the level (measure) of their activity and enjoyment.

The Escape Hatch: Spirit

I am describing the law as we see it from the viewpoint (platform) of ordinary life. But I must not leave it without mentioning the major (capital) exception. Because temperament is a power that no man willingly hears anyone praise but himself.

From the viewpoint (platform) of physical science (physics), we cannot resist the limiting (contracting) influences of so-called science. From this perspective, temperament defeats (puts to rout) all divinity. I know the mental tendency (proclivity) of physicians. I hear the smug chuckle of the phrenologists (those who judged character by head shape). These theoretical kidnappers and slave-drivers see (esteem) each man as the victim of another person. They think someone can wrap another person around their finger (winds him round his finger) simply by knowing the law of their temperament. They think they can read a person’s fortunes and character by such cheap signs as the color of their beard or the slope of the back of their head (occiput). The most blatant (grossest) ignorance does not disgust as much as this arrogant (impudent) claim to knowledge (knowingness).

The physicians say they are not materialists, but they are. To them, Spirit is just matter reduced to extreme thinness – O so thin! But the definition of spiritual should be: that which provides its own evidence. What shallow (profane) notions do they have about love! What about religion! One wouldn’t willingly say these words in their hearing, giving them the chance to misuse (profane) them. I saw a supposedly gracious gentleman who adjusted (adapts) his conversation based on the head shape of the person he talks with!

I had imagined that the value of life lay in its unknowable (inscrutable) possibilities. It lay in the fact that I never know, when meeting (addressing myself to) a new individual, what might happen to me (befall me). I carry the keys of my castle in my hand, ready to throw them at the feet of my lord (my higher self, or truth), whenever and in whatever disguise he appears. I know he is nearby, hidden among seeming outcasts (vagabonds). Shall I block (preclude) my future by taking a high seat and kindly adjusting my conversation to the shape of heads? When I stoop to that, the doctors can buy me for a penny (Cent)!

“But, sir, medical history! The report to the Institute! The proven facts!” I distrust the facts and the conclusions (inferences) drawn from them when they are based solely on temperament. Temperament is the limiting power (veto) in our inner constitution. It is rightly used to restrain an opposite excess within us. But it is absurdly offered as a barrier (bar) to original goodness and potential (equity). When virtue is present, all lesser (subordinate) powers sleep.

On its own level, or seen from nature’s perspective alone, temperament is final. I do not see any escape for a person caught in this trap of so-called sciences, from the links of the chain of physical necessity. Given a certain embryo, a certain history must follow. From this viewpoint (platform), one lives in a pigsty (sty) of materialism (sensualism) and would soon come to suicide.

BUT it is impossible that the creative power should lock itself out (exclude itself). Into every mind (intelligence) there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The intellect, the seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, the lover of absolute good, steps in (intervenes) to rescue (succor) us. At one whisper from these high powers, we awake from useless (ineffectual) struggles with this nightmare of limitation. We throw (hurl) it into its own hell, and cannot shrink (contract) ourselves back to such a low (base) state again.

The Necessity of Change

The secret of life’s illusion (illusoriness) lies in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would drop anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward movement (trick) of nature is too strong for us: “And yet it moves” (Pero si muove, words attributed to Galileo). When I look at the moon and stars at night, I seem stationary, and they seem to hurry. Our love of the real draws us toward permanence. But health of the body requires circulation, and sanity of the mind requires variety or flexibility (facility) of association.

We need change of objects. Dedication to one single thought quickly becomes hateful (odious). It’s like housing with the insane; we have to humor them, and then real conversation dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne that I thought I wouldn’t need any other book. Before that, it was Shakespeare; then Plutarch; then Plotinus; at one time Bacon; afterwards Goethe; even Bettine. But now I turn the pages of any of them idly (languidly), even while I still cherish their genius.

So it is with pictures. Each painting will command intense attention once, but it cannot hold (retain) that intensity, even though we would gladly (fain) continue to be pleased in that way. How strongly I have felt about pictures: once you have seen one well, you must take your leave of it; you shall never see it the same way again. I have learned good lessons from pictures that I have since seen without emotion or comment (remark).

A discount (deduction) must be made from the opinion that even wise people express about a new book or event. Their opinion gives me news (tidings) of their mood at that moment, and some vague guess at the new fact. But it is in no way (nowise) to be trusted as the lasting relationship between that mind (intellect) and that thing. The child asks, “Mamma, why don’t I like the story as well as when you told it to me yesterday?” Alas, child, it is the same even for the oldest angels (cherubim) of knowledge. But will it answer your question to say, “Because you were born to experience the whole, and this story is just a part (a particular)?”

The reason this discovery causes us pain (and we usually make it late regarding works of art and intellect) is the underlying sadness (plaint of tragedy) it implies about people, friendship, and love.

The Stiffness of People

That lack of movement (immobility) and flexibility (absence of elasticity) we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the artist or person. There seems to be no power of expansion in people. Our friends early on appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never seem to move beyond (pass or exceed). They stand on the edge (brink) of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take the single step that would bring them fully into it.

A person is like a piece of Labrador spar (a type of feldspar). It has no shine (luster) as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptability or universal usefulness (applicability) in most people. Instead, each has their special talent. The mastery of successful people consists in cleverly (adroitly) keeping themselves in situations where that specific talent (turn) will be needed most often.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can. We would gladly (fain) have the praise for having intended the result that happens (ensues). I cannot recall any type (form) of person who isn’t sometimes unnecessary (superfluous). But isn’t this sad (pitiful)? Life is not worth living just to do tricks.

Finding Symmetry in the Whole

Of course, it takes the whole society to provide the balance (symmetry) we seek. The multi-colored (parti-colored) wheel must revolve very fast to appear white. Something is also learned by interacting (conversing) with so much foolishness (folly) and imperfection (defect). In the end (In fine), whoever loses individually, we (as a whole) are always on the gaining side. Divinity is behind our failures and follies too. The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and most serious (solemnest) things: with commerce, government, church, marriage. And so it is with the history of how every person gets their food (bread), and the ways they manage to get it.

Like a bird that never truly lands (alights nowhere), but hops perpetually from branch to branch, so is the divine Power. It does not stay (abides) permanently in any man or woman, but speaks for a moment from this one, and for another moment from that one.

Action Over Thought

But what help do we get from these fancy intellectual ideas (fineries) or focus on tiny details (pedantries)? What help comes from thought alone? Life is not just logical debate (dialectics). We, I think, in these times, have had enough lessons about the uselessness (futility) of criticism. Our young people have thought and written much about labor and reform. But for all their writing, neither the world nor they themselves have gotten ahead one step. Intellectual analysis (tasting) of life will not replace physical activity (muscular activity). If a man were to consider the fine points (nicety) of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.

At Brook Farm (Education-Farm, an experimental community Emerson was associated with), the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest figures of young men and women, but it was quite powerless and melancholy. The theory would not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would not rub down a horse. And it left the men and women pale and hungry.

A political orator wittily compared party promises to western roads. They opened impressively (stately) enough, with planted trees on either side to tempt the traveler. But they soon became narrower and narrower, and ended in a squirrel track, and ran up a tree. So does culture often do with us; it ends in a headache. Life looks unspeakably sad and empty (barren) to those who, just a few months ago, were amazed (dazzled) by the shining (splendor) promise of the times.

“There is now no longer any right course of action, nor any self-devotion left among the Iranis (Persians).” We have certainly had enough objections and criticism. There are objections to every possible way of life and action. Practical wisdom, seeing that objections are everywhere (omnipresence), concludes that maintaining a neutral perspective (indifferency) is logical. The whole structure (frame) of things preaches indifference.

Don’t drive yourself crazy (craze yourself) with overthinking. Just go about your business, wherever you are. Life is not primarily intellectual or critical; it is sturdy and robust. Its main benefit (chief good) is for well-balanced (well-mixed) people who can enjoy what they find without endless questions. Nature hates prying (peeping). Our mothers express nature’s own sense when they say, “Children, eat your food (victuals), and don’t talk about it.”

Happiness is filling the hour—filling it completely, leaving no tiny opening (crevice) for regret or self-approval. We live surrounded by surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. Under the oldest, moldiest customs (conventions), a person with natural strength (native force) prospers just as well as in the newest, most modern world. Success comes from skill in handling situations. Such a person can get a grip (take hold) anywhere.

Life itself is a mixture of power and form. It cannot tolerate (bear) the slightest excess of either one. Wisdom means:

• Finishing the moment.
• Finding the journey’s end in every step of the road.
• Living the greatest number of good hours.

It is not the role of sensible humans, but perhaps of fanatics or mathematicians, to say that because life is short, it doesn’t matter whether we spent that short time struggling in poverty (sprawling in want) or sitting in a high position. Since our duty (office) is with moments, let us manage (husband) them carefully. Five minutes of today are worth as much to me as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be balanced (poised), wise, and true to ourselves (our own), today.

Let us treat men and women well. Treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are. Many people live in their imagination (fancy), like drunkards whose hands are too soft and shaky (tremulous) for successful work. Life is a storm (tempest) of fantasies (fancies). The only anchor (ballast) I know is respect for the present hour.

Without any doubt, amidst this dizzying confusion (vertigo) of appearances (shows) and politics, I settle myself ever more firmly in this belief (creed): we should not postpone, refer to others, or just wish. Instead, we should do broad justice right where we are, with whomever we deal with. We should accept our actual companions and circumstances, no matter how humble or unpleasant (odious), as the mystic messengers (officials) to whom the universe has assigned (delegated) the task of bringing us its pleasure or lessons. If these people or situations are mean and harmful (malignant), finding contentment within them – which is the ultimate victory of justice – resonates more satisfyingly in the heart than the voice of poets or the occasional (casual) sympathy of admirable people.

I think that however much a thoughtful person may suffer from the flaws (defects) and absurdities of their company, they cannot honestly (without affectation) deny that any group of people has an awareness (sensibility) of extraordinary merit when they see it. Even coarse and shallow (frivolous) people have an instinct for superiority (even if they don’t feel sympathy). They honor it sincerely, in their own blind and unpredictable (capricious) way, with genuine respect (homage).

Accepting Life’s Gifts

The sophisticated (fine) young people often despise life. But for me – and others like me who are free from indigestion (dyspepsia) and for whom each day is a sound and solid good – looking down on life (scornful) and crying for company seems like an excessive display of politeness. Sympathy makes me a little eager and sentimental sometimes. But leave me alone, and I would enjoy (relish) every hour and whatever it brought me – the daily luck of the draw (potluck) – as heartily as the oldest regular (gossip) in the bar-room.

I am thankful for small blessings (mercies). I compared notes with a friend who expects everything from the universe and is disappointed when anything is less than the absolute best. I found that I start at the other extreme: expecting nothing. Therefore, I am always full of thanks for moderate, ordinary goods. I accept the loud noise (clangor and jangle) of opposing forces (contrary tendencies). I find value (my account) even in dullards (sots) and bores. They give a sense of reality to the surrounding scene (circumjacent picture), which this fleeting, meteor-like (vanishing meteorous) existence badly needs.

In the morning I awake and find the old world: wife, babies, and mother; Concord and Boston; the dear old spiritual world; and even the dear old devil not far off. If we are willing to take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall receive abundant amounts (heaping measures). The great gifts are not obtained by analysis. Everything good is readily available, right here on the main road (highway).

The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We can climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into the realm of pure physical sensation. Between these extremes lies the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry – a narrow belt.

Moreover, in common experience, everything good is easily accessible (on the highway). A collector searches (peeps) through all the picture shops of Europe for a rare landscape by Poussin or a sketch (crayon-sketch) by Salvator Rosa. But the greatest masterpieces – Raphael’s Transfiguration, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, Domenichino’s Communion of St. Jerome, and works as great (transcendent) as these – are hanging on the walls of the Vatican, the Uffizi Gallery, or the Louvre, where any servant (footman) can see them. This doesn’t even mention nature’s pictures in every street, the sunsets and sunrises happening every day, and the sculpture of the human body, which is never absent.

A collector recently bought Shakespeare’s signature (autograph) at public auction in London for 157 guineas. But for free, any schoolboy can read Hamlet and discover (detect) secrets of the highest importance (concernment) that are still unpublished within the text. I think I will never read any books except the most fundamental and widely available (commonest) ones: the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton.

Then again, we become impatient with such a public life and planet. We run here and there (hither and thither) searching for hidden corners (nooks) and secrets. The imagination delights in the wilderness skills (woodcraft) of Native Americans, trappers, and bee-hunters. We imagine that we are strangers on this planet, not as deeply connected (intimately domesticated) as the wild man, the wild beast, and the wild bird. But the feeling of separation (exclusion) reaches them too. It reaches the climbing, flying, gliding, feathered, and four-footed creatures. The fox and the woodchuck, the hawk and the snipe, the bittern – when seen up close, they have no more deep roots in the world than humans do. They are just superficial renters (tenants) of the globe like us. Then, the new molecular philosophy shows vast empty spaces (astronomical interspaces) between atom and atom. It shows that the world is all outside; it has no inside.

Living in the Middle

The middle world is best. Nature, as we know her, is no saint. She does not favor religious figures like church leaders (lights), ascetics, Hindu sects (Gentoos), or dietary reformers (Grahamites). Nature comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her favorites (darlings) – the great, the strong, the beautiful – are not products (children) of our moral laws. They do not come out of Sunday School. They do not weigh their food or meticulously (punctually) keep the commandments.

If we want to be strong with nature’s strength, we must not harbor such sad (disconsolate) consciences, especially those borrowed from the consciences of other nations or times. We must set up the strong present tense against all the rumors of punishment (wrath), past or future.

So many important things are unsettled. While we wait (pending) for them to be settled, we will continue doing what we do. While the debate about the fairness (equity) of commerce goes on (and won’t be finished for a century or two), New England and Old England can keep doing business (keep shop). The laws of copyright and international copyright need to be discussed. In the meantime (in the interim), we will sell our books for the most we can get. The usefulness (expediency) of literature, the reason for literature, the rightness (lawfulness) of writing down a thought – all are questioned. There is much to say on both sides. And while the fight grows heated (waxes hot), you, dearest scholar, should stick to your seemingly foolish task. Add a line every hour, and between hours, add another line.

The right to hold land, the right of property, is disputed. Committees (conventions) meet. Before the vote is taken, dig away in your garden. Spend your earnings freely, as if they were unexpected gifts (a waif or godsend), for all serene and beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Admit it (Grant it) – and as much more as they want to claim! But you, God’s darling, pay attention (heed) to your private dream. You won’t be missed among the scorners and skeptics; there are enough of them already. Stay there in your private space (closet) and work hard (toil), until the rest have agreed on what to do about it.

They say your sickness and your weak constitution (puny habit) require you to do this or avoid that. But know that your life is a fleeting state, a tent set up for only one night. Whether you are sick or well, finish your assigned task (stint). You are sick, perhaps, but you shall not be worse because of fulfilling your purpose. And the universe, which holds you dear, shall be better for it.

The Balance of Power and Form

Human life is made up of two elements: power and form. The proportion between these must be constantly (invariably) kept if we want life to be sweet and sound. An excess of either element causes as much trouble (mischief) as a lack (defect) of it. Everything tends to run to excess. Every good quality becomes harmful (noxious) if it’s not balanced (unmixed). And, pushing the danger to the edge of ruin, nature causes each person’s unique trait (peculiarity) to become overabundant (superabound).

Here, among the farms, we point to (adduce) scholars as examples of this dangerous imbalance (treachery). They are nature’s victims of expression. You who see the artist, the orator, the poet too closely find their lives no more excellent than those of mechanics or farmers. You find them victims of one-sidedness (partiality), very hollow and worn out (haggard). You declare them failures – not heroes, but fakes (quacks). You conclude very reasonably that these arts are not for humans, but are diseases.

Yet nature will not support (bear you out) this conclusion. Irresistible nature made people like this, and makes legions more like them every day. You love the boy reading a book, gazing at a drawing or a plaster cast (cast). Yet what are these millions who read and look (behold), but potential (incipient) writers and sculptors? Add just a little more of that quality which now reads and sees, and they will seize the pen and chisel. And if one remembers how innocently they began to be an artist, they realize that nature conspired (joined with his enemy) against ordinary balance.

A person is a golden impossibility. The line they must walk is a hair’s breadth wide. The wise person, through too much wisdom, is made a fool.

Life’s Surprises Defy Calculation

How easily, if fate would allow (suffer) it, we might keep forever within these beautiful limits. We could adjust ourselves, once and for all, to the perfect calculation of the kingdom of known cause and effect. In the street and in the newspapers, life appears to be such a plain business. Manly resolution and sticking to (adherence to) the multiplication table through all kinds of weather seem to guarantee success.

But ah! Presently comes a day, or maybe just a half-hour, with its angel-whispering. This sudden insight overturns (discomfits) the conclusions of nations and of years! Tomorrow, everything looks real and solid (angular) again. The usual (habitual) standards are put back (reinstated). Common sense seems as rare as genius – indeed, it is the basis of genius. Experience provides the practical means (hands and feet) for every project (enterprise). And yet, anyone who conducted their business solely on this common-sense understanding would quickly go bankrupt.

Power keeps to a very different road than the highways (turnpikes) of choice and will. Power travels through the hidden (subterranean) and invisible tunnels and channels of life. It is ridiculous that we act like diplomats, doctors, and careful, considerate people. There are no bigger fools (dupes) than these! Life is a series of surprises. It would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

God delights to isolate us every day, hiding the past and the future from us. We try to look around, but with grand politeness, He draws down an impenetrable screen of purest sky before us, and another one behind us. “You will not remember,” He seems to say, “and you will not expect.” All good conversation, manners, and action come from a spontaneity that forgets customs (usages) and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators; her methods are jumpy (saltatory) and impulsive. Humans live by pulses; our bodily (organic) movements are rhythmic. Chemical and energy (ethereal) agents move in waves (undulatory) and alternate. The mind proceeds by engaging with opposites (antagonizing) and never succeeds (prospers) except in bursts (by fits).

We thrive by chance events (casualties). Our most important experiences have been accidental (casual). The most attractive type of people are those who are powerful indirectly (obliquely), not by direct force. These are people of genius, but not yet publicly recognized (accredited). One gets the cheer of their light without paying too high a price (tax). Theirs is the beauty of a bird, or the morning light – natural beauty, not the beauty of art.

In the thought of genius, there is always a surprise. And the moral sense (sentiment) is well called “the newness,” because it is never anything else. It is as new to the oldest wise person (intelligence) as to the young child – “the kingdom that comes without observation.” Similarly, for practical success, there must not be too much planning (design). A person will not be observed while doing the thing they can do best. There is a certain magic about their most natural (properest) action. This magic numbs (stupefies) your powers of observation, so that even though it is done right before you, you are unaware of it (wist not). The art of life has a modesty (pudency) and will not be exposed. Every person is an impossibility until they are born; everything is impossible until we see it succeed.

The passions (ardors) of religious faith (piety) ultimately agree with the coldest skepticism: that nothing comes from us or our works; all is of God. Nature will not spare us even the smallest leaf of praise (laurel). All writing comes by the grace of God, and so does all doing and having. I would gladly be moral and keep proper limits (due metes and bounds), which I dearly love. I would allow the most power to the will of man. But I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter. And I can see nothing, in the end, in success or failure, other than more or less vital force supplied from the Eternal.

The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much that the days never know. The people who make up our company converse, come and go, plan (design) and carry out (execute) many things. Something comes of it all, but it’s an unexpected (unlooked for) result. The individual is always mistaken. They planned many things and drew in other people as helpers (coadjutors). They quarreled with some or all of them, made many mistakes (blundered much), and something gets done. All are a little advanced, but the individual’s original plan is always wrong. It turns out to be something new, and very unlike what they promised themself.

Beyond Chance to the Ideal

The ancients were struck by this inability to reduce the elements of human life to calculation (irreducibleness). They elevated (exalted) Chance into a divinity. But that is like staying too long looking at the spark, which truly glitters at one point. The whole universe, however, is warm with the hidden potential (latency) of the same fire. The miracle of life, which cannot be explained (will not be expounded) but will remain a miracle, introduces a new element.

In the growth of the embryo, Sir Everard Home (a surgeon) noticed, I think, that development (evolution) did not start from one central point, but happened simultaneously (co-active) from three or more points. Life has no memory of its deepest origins. Things that happen in sequence might be remembered. But things that exist together (coexistent), or that burst forth (ejaculated) from a deeper cause (which is still far from being conscious), do not know their own direction (tendency).

So it is with us. Now we are skeptical, or feel divided (without unity), because we are lost (immersed) in forms and effects that all seem equally valuable yet hostile. And now we are religious, while receiving spiritual law. Bear with these distractions, with this simultaneous (coetaneous) growth of the parts. One day they will become unified parts (members) and obey one will. On that one will, on that secret cause, they focus (nail) our attention and hope. Life is thereby melted into an expectation or a religion.

Underneath the clashing (inharmonious) and trivial details, there is a musical perfection. The Ideal is always journeying with us – the heaven without rips (rent) or seams (seam). Just observe the way we receive insight (illumination). When I talk (converse) with a profound mind, or if at any time I am alone and have good thoughts, I do not immediately reach satisfaction – like drinking water when thirsty, or going to the fire when cold. No! Instead, I am first made aware (apprised) of my closeness (vicinity) to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting in reading or thinking, this region gives further signs of itself. It comes in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its deep beauty and peace (repose). It’s as if the clouds covering it parted at intervals, showing the approaching traveler inland mountains with tranquil, eternal meadows spread at their base. Flocks graze on these meadows, and shepherds play pipes (pipe) and dance.

But every insight from this realm of thought feels like a beginning (initial) and promises something more to follow (a sequel). I do not make it; I arrive there and see (behold) what was already there. Me, make it? Oh no! I clap my hands in childlike (infantine) joy and amazement before the first opening to me of this awesome (august) magnificence. It is old with the love and respect (homage) of countless (innumerable) ages, yet young with the very essence of life (life of life). It is the shining destination (sunbright Mecca) in the desert. And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of ordinary nature and be born again into this new yet unreachable (unapproachable) America I have found within (in the West).

“Since neither now nor yesterday began These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can A man be found who their first entrance knew.”

The Unchanging Core

If I have described life as a flow (flux) of moods, I must now add that there is that in us which changes not. This unchanging part ranks all sensations and states of mind. The consciousness in each person is like a sliding scale. It identifies them sometimes with the First Cause (God, the Source), and sometimes with the flesh of their body. There is life above life, in infinite degrees.

The inner feeling (sentiment) from which an action springs determines its worth (dignity). The question is always: not what you have done or avoided (forborne), but at whose command did you do or avoid it? (Was it your higher self, or a lower impulse?)

The Unnamable

Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost – these are quaint names, too narrow to cover this limitless (unbounded) substance. The confused (baffled) intellect must still kneel before this Cause, which refuses to be named – the ineffable Cause. Every great genius has attempted (essayed) to represent it by some strong (emphatic) symbol:

• Thales used water.
• Anaximenes used air.
• Anaxagoras used thought (Nous).
• Zoroaster used fire.
• Jesus and modern thinkers use love. And the chosen metaphor of each has become a national religion.

The Chinese philosopher Mencius was quite successful in his generalization. “I fully understand language,” he said, “and I nourish well my vast-flowing vigor.” “I beg to ask what you call vast-flowing vigor?” asked his companion. “The explanation,” replied Mencius, “is difficult. This vigor is supremely great, and in the highest degree unbending. Nourish it correctly, and do it no injury, and it will fill up the empty space (vacancy) between heaven and earth. This vigor works with (accords with) and assists justice and reason, and leaves no hunger.”

In our more precise modern writing, we give this generalization the name of Being. By doing so, we admit that we have arrived as far as we can go with names. Let it be enough for the joy of the universe that we have not arrived at a wall, but at endless (interminable) oceans.

Our life seems not to be happening in the present moment, so much as it seems directed toward the future (prospective). Life isn’t really about the affairs we waste it on. Instead, it serves as a hint of that “vast-flowing vigor” mentioned earlier. Most of life seems to be just an advertisement of our potential (faculty). We are given information to understand that we shouldn’t sell ourselves cheap – that we are actually very great.

So, in specific instances (particulars), our greatness always shows up as a tendency or a direction, not as a completed action. We should believe in the general rule (our potential), not focus on the exceptions (our limited achievements). This is how noble people are known from the ignoble.

Similarly, when accepting the guidance of inner feelings (sentiments), what matters is not what we believe about specific topics like the soul’s immortality. The important thing (material circumstance) is the universal impulse to believe. This impulse itself is the main fact in the history of the globe.

Shall we describe this underlying cause (the spirit) as something that works directly? Yes. The spirit is not helpless. It doesn’t need intermediate tools (mediate organs). It has abundant (plentiful) powers and achieves direct effects. I am explained without needing to explain myself. I am felt without needing to act physically, even in places where I am not physically present.

Therefore, all just people are satisfied with their own self-approval (praise). They refuse to explain themselves. They are content to let their new actions serve that purpose (do them that office). They believe that we communicate without speech, and on a level above speech. They believe that no right action of ours goes completely unnoticed (unaffecting) by our friends, no matter how far away they are. The influence of action is not measured by miles.

Why should I worry (fret myself) because something happened (a circumstance has occurred) that prevents me from being physically present where I was expected? If I am not at the meeting, my presence where I am should be just as useful to the community (commonwealth) of friendship and wisdom as my presence in that specific place would be. I exert the same quality of power in all places.

In this way, the mighty Ideal journeys before us; it has never been known to fall behind. No person ever reached an experience that was completely satisfying (satiating). Instead, any good we experience is just news (tidings) of something better to come. Onward and onward!

In moments of clarity (liberated moments), we know that a new picture of life and duty is already possible. The necessary elements for a doctrine of life that will go beyond (transcend) any written record we currently have already exist in many minds around you. The new statement of truth will include (comprise) society’s doubts (skepticisms) as well as its faiths. A new belief system (creed) shall be formed even out of unbeliefs. Because skepticisms are not random (gratuitous) or lawless. They are simply the limitations of any positive (affirmative) statement. The new philosophy must take these limitations into account and make affirmations that go beyond them, just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs.

The Discovery of Subjectivity (The Fall)

It is very unfortunate – but too late now to be helped – the discovery we have made: that we exist as separate, subjective selves. That discovery is traditionally called the Fall of Man. Ever since then, we suspect our own ways of perceiving (instruments). We have learned that we do not see reality directly, but indirectly (mediately). We see through colored and distorting lenses – which are ourselves. We have no way of correcting these lenses or calculating (computing) the amount of their errors.

Perhaps these subjective lenses even have creative power. Perhaps there are no independently existing objects outside of our perception. Once, perhaps, we lived completely in what we saw. Now, the greedy nature (rapaciousness) of this new self-awareness, which threatens to absorb all things into itself, occupies (engages) us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions – all these objects tumble one after another into our subjective viewpoint. Even God becomes just one of its ideas.

Nature and literature become subjective phenomena. Every evil thing and every good thing is just a shadow that we ourselves cast. The street is full of humiliations for the proud person. There’s an analogy: a fancy man (fop) managed (contrived) to dress his debt collectors (bailiffs) in his own servants’ uniform (livery) and make them wait on his guests at table. Similarly, the inner annoyances (chagrins) that a bad heart gives off like bubbles immediately take form as ladies and gentlemen in the street, or shopkeepers, or bartenders (barkeepers) in hotels. These projected forms then threaten or insult whatever part of us is vulnerable (threatenable and insultable).

It’s the same with our worship of idols (idolatries). People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon. It is the shaping power of the mind’s eye (rounding mind’s eye) which makes this or that person seem like a symbol (type) or representative of humanity, giving them the name of hero or saint. Jesus, called the “providential man,” is a good man upon whom many people agree that these “optical laws” of perception shall take effect. Through love on one side, and restraint (forbearance) from pressing objections on the other side, it is settled for a time that we will look at him as the center of the horizon. We will assign (ascribe) to him the properties that will naturally seem to belong (attach) to any person seen in that central position.

But the longest love or hatred (aversion) has a quick end (speedy term). The great and growing (crescive) self, rooted in absolute nature, eventually replaces (supplants) all relative, temporary existences. It ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love. Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible because of the inherent inequality between every subject (the self) and every object (the other). The subject is the receiver of Godhead. At every comparison, the subject must feel their own being expanded (enhanced) by that hidden (cryptic) might. Though perhaps not actively showing its energy, the presence of this storehouse (magazine) of substance cannot help but be felt. No force of intellect can assign (attribute) to the object the true divinity which sleeps or wakes forever within every subject.

Love can never make our inner awareness (consciousness) and our outward valuation (ascription) equal in force. There will always be the same gap (gulf) between every “me” and “thee” as there is between an original painting and its picture. The universe is the bride of the soul. All private sympathy is partial and limited. Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only at a single point. While they remain in contact at that point, all other points of each sphere are inactive (inert). Their turn for contact must also come. The longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of desire (appetency) the parts not currently in union acquire.

The Hidden God Within

Life can be represented in images (imaged), but it cannot be divided or doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos. The soul is not born as a twin; it is the unique child (the only begotten). Though it reveals itself as a child in time, a child in appearance, it possesses a fatal and universal power that admits no rival (co-life).

Every day, every act reveals (betrays) the poorly hidden (ill-concealed) deity within us. We believe in ourselves in a way we do not believe in others. We permit ourselves to do all things. That which we call sin in others is just an experiment for us.

It is an example of our faith in ourselves that people never speak of crime as lightly as they think about it. Or, put another way, every man thinks a certain amount of leeway (latitude) is safe for himself, which is completely unacceptable (nowise to be indulged) for another person. The act looks very different from the inside versus the outside; in its inner quality versus its outward consequences. Murder, in the murderer’s own mind, is not such a ruinous thought as poets and novelists (romancers) make it out to be. It doesn’t destabilize (unsettle) him or frighten (fright) him from his ordinary notice of small details (trifles). It is an act quite easy for him to contemplate. But in its results (sequel), it turns out to be a horrible clashing (jangle) and confusing (confounding) of all relationships. Especially the crimes that spring from love often seem right and fair from the actors’ point of view. But when acted out, they are found to be destructive of society.

Ultimately, no man believes that he can truly be lost, nor that the crime within him is as black as the crime in the convicted criminal (felon). This is because the intellect modifies (qualifies) the moral judgments in our own case. For there is no crime to the intellect. The intellect is beyond law (antinomian or hypernomian). It judges the law itself, as well as the fact. “It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder,” said Napoleon, speaking the language of the intellect. To the intellect, the world is a problem in mathematics or the science of quantity. It leaves out praise and blame and all weak emotions. All stealing is relative. If you come down to absolutes, pray tell, who does not steal? Saints are sad because they view sin (even when they think about it abstractly - speculate) from the point of view of the conscience, and not from the point of view of the intellect – this is a confusion of thought. Sin seen from the perspective of thought is a lessening (diminution) or less-than-ideal state. Seen from the conscience or will, it is wickedness (pravity) or badness. The intellect names it shadow, absence of light, and says it has no real substance (essence). The conscience must feel it as essence, as essential evil. But it is not essential evil: it has an objective existence (it causes effects in the world), but no subjective reality (it has no core being in itself).

The Subject Creates the View

Thus, inevitably, the universe wears our color. Every object eventually falls into the subject itself. The subject exists; the subject enlarges. All things sooner or later fall into place relative to the subject. As I am, so I see. Whatever language we use, we can never say anything but what we are. Great historical figures – Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Bonaparte – are servants (ministers) of our mind, helping us understand ourselves.

Instead of feeling poor when we encounter a great person, let us treat the newcomer like a traveling geologist. The geologist passes through our property (estate) and shows us good slate, limestone, or coal (anthracite) in our overgrown pasture (brush pasture) – resources we already possessed but didn’t recognize. The focused action (partial action) of each strong mind in one direction acts like a telescope for the objects it is pointed at. But every other part of knowledge needs to be pushed to the same extreme (extravagance) before the soul achieves its proper wholeness (due sphericity).

Do you see that kitten chasing her own tail so charmingly (prettily)? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded by hundreds of figures performing complex dramas with tragic and comic results (issues), long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate. And meanwhile, it is only the cat (puss) and her tail. How long before our own noisy show (masquerade) of tambourines, laughter, and shouting will end, and we find out it was really just a solitary performance by the self? A subject and an object – it takes these two to make the connection (galvanic circuit) complete. But size (magnitude) adds nothing essential. What difference does it make (What imports it) whether the pair is Kepler and the solar system (sphere), Columbus and America, a reader and his book, or the cat with her tail?

Hold Fast to Self-Trust

It is true that all the muses, and love, and religion hate these kinds of intellectual analysis. They will find a way to punish the chemist who reveals the secrets of the laboratory in the living room (parlor). And we cannot say too little about our fundamental (constitutional) necessity of seeing things from our private perspective (under private aspects), colored (saturated) by our own moods (humors).

And yet, God is native even to these bleak, subjective rocks. That necessity (of subjective experience) creates, in morals, the most important (capital) virtue: self-trust. We must hold hard to this subjective limitation (poverty), however scandalous it may seem. And through more vigorous efforts at self-recovery (self-recoveries) after periods of action (sallies), we must possess our own center (axis) more firmly.

The life of truth is cold, and therefore sad (mournful) in a way. But it is not the slave of tears, regrets (contritions), and emotional disturbances (perturbations). It does not attempt another person’s work, nor adopt another person’s facts. A main lesson of wisdom is to know your own from another’s. I have learned that I cannot manage (dispose of) other people’s facts. But I possess such a key to my own facts that it persuades me, against all their denials, that they also have a key to theirs.

A sympathetic person is placed in the difficult situation (dilemma) of a swimmer among drowning men, who all clutch at him. If he gives them so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him too. They wish to be saved from the harmful consequences (mischiefs) of their vices, but not from their vices themselves. Charity would be wasted on this poor effort of waiting on symptoms. A wise and tough (hardy) physician will say, “Come out of that situation,” as the first condition of giving advice.

Focus Inward Amidst the Noise

In this talkative America of ours, we are ruined by our good nature and by listening too much on all sides. This tendency to comply (compliance) takes away the power of being greatly useful. A person should not be able to look other than directly and straightforwardly (forthright).

A preoccupied attention – an attention focused on one’s own aim – is the only answer to the annoying triviality (importunate frivolity) of other people. This focused attention makes their demands seem frivolous. This is a divine answer. It leaves no room for argument (appeal) and no hard feelings.

In Flaxman’s drawing of Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Orestes pleads with (supplicates) Apollo, while the Furies (goddesses of vengeance) sleep on the doorway (threshold). The god’s face expresses a hint (shade) of regret and compassion, but remains calm with the conviction that the two spheres (divine and earthly) are incompatible (irreconcilableness). Apollo is born into other politics – into the eternal and beautiful. The man at his feet (Orestes) asks for his involvement (interest) in the turmoils of the earth, into which Apollo’s nature cannot enter. And the sleeping Eumenides visually express (express pictorially) this gap (disparity). The god is fully occupied (surcharged) with his own divine destiny.

The Lords of Life

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness – these are the threads on the loom of time. These are the lords of life. I dare not presume (assume) to give their order, but I name them as I encounter them on my way. I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one law or another that makes itself clear (throws itself into relief and form). But I am too young yet by some ages to put together (compile) a complete code or system. I chat (gossip) for my hour about these eternal matters (politics). I have seen many beautiful pictures (fair pictures), and the experience was not wasted (not in vain). I have lived in a wonderful time. I am not the beginner (novice) I was fourteen, or even seven years ago. Let whoever wants to ask, where is the result (fruit)? I find a private fruit that is sufficient for me.

This is a fruit: that I should not ask for a hasty (rash) effect from meditations, advice (counsels), and the gathering (hiving) of truths. I should feel it is pitiful to demand a result in this specific town and county, an obvious (overt) effect in the current month and year. The effect is as deep and long-term (secular) as the cause. It works on time periods in which a mortal lifetime is lost.

All I know is reception. I am and I have. But I do not get. And when I have imagined (fancied) I had gotten something, I discovered I had not. I worship the great Fortune (fate, destiny) with wonder. My reception of life’s gifts has been so large that I am not annoyed by receiving too much (superabundantly) of this or that. I say to my guiding spirit (Genius), if he will forgive the proverb, “In for a penny, in for a pound” (In for a mill, in for a million). When I receive a new gift, I do not torture (macerate) my body to make the account balance (square). Because even if I should die, I could not make the account balance. The benefit exceeded (overran) the merit on the very first day, and has exceeded the merit ever since. The merit itself, so-called, I consider (reckon) part of the receiving.

Knowing is Enough

Also, that longing (hankering after) for an obvious (overt) or practical effect seems to me like a betrayal (apostasy) of a deeper truth. In all seriousness (In good earnest), I am willing to skip (spare) this mostly unnecessary amount (deal) of doing. Life wears a visionary face to me. The hardest, roughest action is visionary also. It is merely a choice between soft dreams and turbulent dreams. People look down on (disparage) knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am very content with knowing, if only I could truly know. That is a noble (august) entertainment and would satisfy (suffice) me for a great while. To know even a little would be worth the cost (expense) of living in this world. I always hear the law of Adrastia (Necessity): “that every soul which had acquired any truth, should be safe from harm until another cycle (period).”

Patience and the Present Moment

I know that the world I interact (converse) with in the city and on the farms is not the world I think. I observe that difference (discrepance), and I shall continue to observe it. One day, I shall know the value and law of this gap. But I have not found that much was gained by hands-on (manipular) attempts to realize the world of thought in the physical world. Many eager people successively try this experiment, and they make themselves ridiculous. They adopt democratic manners, they foam at the mouth, they hate and deny. Worse, I observe that in the history of mankind, there is never a single (solitary) example of success – judging by their own tests of success. I say this argumentatively (polemically), in reply to the question, “Why not realize your world?” But far be it from me to fall into the despair which prejudges the underlying law based on limited, superficial experience (paltry empiricism) – because there never was a right effort (endeavor) that did not ultimately succeed. Patience and patience, we shall win at the last.

We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars. But it takes very little time to receive (entertain) a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life. We tend our garden, eat our dinners, discuss household matters with our wives, and these things make no lasting impression; they are forgotten next week. But in the solitude to which every person is always returning, they find a sanity and receive revelations, which they will carry with them in their passage into new worlds.

Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat. Up again, old heart!—it seems to say—there is victory yet for all justice. And the true romance which the world exists to realize will be the transformation of genius into practical power.

The Divinity School Address

(Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838)

Nature’s Beauty and Generosity

In this shining (refulgent) summer, it has been a true luxury just to breathe the air. The grass grows, the buds burst open. The meadow is dotted (spotted) with the fire and gold colors (tint) of flowers. The air is full of birdsong. It smells sweet with the scent of pine trees, the balm-of-Gilead plant, and newly cut hay.

Night arrives with its welcome shade, bringing no sadness (gloom) to the heart. Through the clear (transparent) darkness, the stars pour down their almost spiritual rays. Under the stars, a person seems like a young child, and this huge globe feels like just a toy. The cool night washes (bathes) the world as if with a river, preparing our eyes again for the red (crimson) dawn.

The mystery of nature has never been shown (displayed) more happily. Food and drink (corn and the wine) have been freely given (dealt) to all creatures. And the never-broken silence with which this ancient generosity (bounty) continues has not yet offered a single word of explanation. One feels forced (constrained) to respect the perfection of this world, the world our senses interact (converse) with.

How wide it is! How rich! What an invitation it gives from every feature (property) to every ability (faculty) of humankind! Consider its fruitful soils, its sailable (navigable) seas, its mountains full of metal and stone, its forests of all kinds of wood, its animals, its chemical elements (ingredients), and the powers and paths of light, heat, gravity (attraction), and life. This world is truly worth the effort (pith) and passion (heart) of great people to understand (subdue) and enjoy it. History loves to honor the planters, the builders (mechanics), the inventors, the astronomers, the founders of cities, and the leaders (captains).

The Mind Reveals Deeper Laws

But the moment the mind opens up and reveals the laws that run through (traverse) the universe and make things what they are, then the great physical world immediately shrinks. It becomes just an illustration or a story (fable) representing this inner mind.

“What am I?” and “What is reality?” the human spirit asks. This curiosity is newly sparked (new-kindled) but can never be put out (quenched). Look at these far-reaching laws! Our imperfect understanding (apprehension) can see them tending this way and that, but we cannot see them come full circle. Behind these infinite relationships – so similar, yet so different; so many, yet all one – lies a unity. I want to study it, I want to know it, I want to admire it forever. Exploring these works of thought has been the entertainment of the human spirit in all ages.

The Beauty of Virtue

A more secret, sweet, and overwhelming (overpowering) beauty appears to a person when their heart and mind open to the feeling (sentiment) of virtue. Instantly, that person is taught (instructed) about what is higher than themself. They learn that their own being has no boundaries (is without bound). They learn that they are born for the good and the perfect, no matter how low they now lie in evil and weakness.

That which a person deeply respects (venerates) is still their own potential, even if they haven’t achieved (realized) it yet. They feel they ought to achieve it. They understand the meaning (sense) of that grand word “ought,” even if their logical analysis completely fails to explain (render account of) it.

When a person, either through innocence or through intellectual understanding (perception), reaches the point of saying: “I love the Right. Truth is beautiful both inside and outside, forevermore. Virtue, I belong to you! Save me! Use me! I will serve you, day and night, in big ways and small ways, so that I may become not just virtuous, but virtue itself.” — then the purpose (end) of creation is fulfilled (answered), and God is well pleased.

Reading the Moral Law

The feeling (sentiment) of virtue is a reverence and delight felt in the presence of certain divine laws. This feeling recognizes that this simple (homely) game of life we play covers up astonishing principles under what seem like foolish details.

A child playing among his simple toys (baubles) is actually learning about light, motion, gravity, and muscular force. And in the game of human life, love, fear, justice, desire (appetite), humanity, and God all interact.

These fundamental laws refuse to be stated adequately. They will not be written down on paper or spoken by the tongue, either by us or for us. They slip away from (elude) and avoid (evade) our persistent (persevering) thought. And yet, we read these laws hourly in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, and in our own feelings of remorse. The moral traits that are gathered (globed) into every virtuous act and thought – when we try to speak of them, we must separate (sever) them and describe or suggest them through a difficult listing (painful enumeration) of many specific examples (particulars).

Yet, since this feeling of virtue is the essence of all religion, let me guide your eyes to the specific things (objects) this feeling focuses on, by listing (enumeration) some types of facts where this element is clearly visible (conspicuous).

The Self-Executing Laws of the Soul

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight into the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They exist outside of time, outside of space, and are not dependent on circumstances.

For example:

• In the human soul, there is a justice whose rewards and punishments (retributions) are instant and complete (entire).
• Whoever does a good deed is instantly made noble (ennobled) themself.
• Whoever does a mean deed is, by the action itself, shrunk or diminished (contracted).
• Whoever puts off impurity thereby puts on purity.
• If a person is truly just at heart, then to that extent (in so far) they are God. The safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God enter into that person along with justice.
• If a person pretends (dissemble) or deceives, they deceive themself and lose connection (acquaintance) with their own being.
• A person looking at absolute goodness worships (adores) with total humility. Every step taken downward in humility is actually a step upward. The person who gives up their selfish self (renounces himself) actually finds their true self by doing so.

The Power of Moral Energy

See how this rapid, internal (intrinsic) energy works everywhere! It rights wrongs, corrects appearances, and brings facts into harmony with thoughts. Its operation in everyday life, though it seems slow to our senses, is ultimately as sure as its operation within the soul.

Through this energy, a person becomes their own guide and judge (Providence to himself). They dispense good to their own goodness, and evil to their own sin. Character is always known, eventually.

• Thefts never truly enrich.
• Giving charity (alms) never truly impoverishes.
• Murder will eventually reveal itself, even speaking metaphorically “out of stone walls.”

The smallest mixture (admixture) of a lie – for example, the smallest amount of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression or favorable appearance – will instantly spoil (vitiate) the effect of an action. But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected assistance (furtherance). Speak the truth, and all things, alive or inanimate (brute), support you (are vouchers). The very roots of the grass underground seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to our feelings (affections) and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we associate. The good seek out the good, drawn by similarity (affinity). The wicked (vile) seek out the wicked, by affinity. Thus, by their own choice (volition), souls proceed into heaven or into hell.

One Will Governs All

These facts have always suggested to humans the sublime belief (creed): that the world is not the product of many (manifold) powers, but of one will, of one mind. And that one mind is everywhere active – in each ray of starlight, in each small wave (wavelet) on a pond. Whatever opposes that will is everywhere blocked (baulked) and defeated (baffled), because things are simply made that way, and not otherwise.

Good is positive. Evil is merely negative (privative), not absolute. It is like cold, which is just the absence (privation) of heat. All evil is essentially death or non-existence (nonentity). Benevolence (goodwill, kindness) is absolute and real. However much benevolence a person has, that is how much life they have.

Because all things come from (proceed out of) this same spirit. This spirit is given different names – love, justice, temperance – in its different applications. It’s just like the ocean receives different names on the various shores it washes. All things come from the same spirit, and all things work together (conspire) with it. While a person seeks good ends, they are made strong by the whole strength of nature. To the extent (In so far as) they wander (roves) from these good ends, they deprive (bereaves) themself of power and help (auxiliaries). Their being shrinks out of all the wider channels (remote channels). They become less and less, a tiny speck (mote), a point, until absolute badness becomes absolute death.

The Happiness of the Religious Sentiment

The perception of this law of laws always awakens in the mind a feeling (sentiment) which we call the religious sentiment. This feeling brings us our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command!

• It is like mountain air.
• It is the preserver (embalmer) of the world.
• It is like fragrant resins and spices (myrrh and storax, chlorine and rosemary).
• It makes the sky and the hills sublime.
• The silent song of the stars is this sentiment.

By this sentiment, the universe is made safe and livable (habitable), not by science or by power. Thought alone may work coldly and disconnectedly (intransitive) in the world, finding no ultimate end or unity. But the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart gives – and is – the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures. And the worlds, time, space, eternity, all seem to break out into joy.

Virtue Makes Us Divine

This sentiment is divine, and it makes one divine (deifying). It is the highest state of human bliss (beatitude). It makes a person limitless (illimitable). Through it, the soul first knows itself.

It corrects the major (capital) mistake of the spiritually immature person (infant man), who seeks to be great by following great people, and hopes to gain advantages (derive advantages) from another person. Instead, this sentiment shows that the source (fountain) of all good is within oneself. It shows that each person, equally with every other person, is a doorway into the depths of Reason.

When a person says, “I ought;” when love warms them; when they choose the good and great deed, warned from on high; then, deep melodies wander through their soul from Supreme Wisdom. Then they can worship, and be enlarged by their worship. For they can never go behind this fundamental sentiment. In the highest (sublimest) flights of the soul, right action (rectitude) is never surpassed (surmounted), and love is never outgrown.

The Foundation of Worship

This sentiment lies at the foundation of society. It successively creates all forms of worship. The principle of reverence (veneration) never dies out. Even a person who has fallen into superstition or focus on physical pleasure (sensuality) is never wholly without glimpses (visions) of the moral sentiment.

In the same way, all expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity. The expressions of this sentiment affect us more deeply, more greatly (greatlier), than all other writings (compositions). The sentences from the oldest times which cry out (ejaculate) this deep faith (piety) are still fresh and fragrant today.

This thought always dwelled deepest in the minds of people in the devout and thoughtful (contemplative) East – not only in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but also in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed its divine impulses to Eastern genius. What these holy poets (bards) said, all sane people found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind – whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this world – is proof of the subtle power (virtue) of this spiritual infusion.

The Condition: Intuition

Meanwhile, while the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every person, and the oracles of this truth never cease, it is guarded by one strict (stern) condition. This condition is: It is an intuition. It cannot be received secondhand.

Truly speaking, what I can receive from another soul is not instruction, but provocation – a stimulus to find the truth in myself. What someone else announces, I must find true within me, or wholly reject it. I can accept nothing merely on their word, or as their follower (second), no matter who they may be.

On the contrary, the absence of this primary, firsthand faith is the presence of degradation. As the tide floods, so it ebbs (ebb). Let this faith depart, and the very words it spoke (spake), and the things it created, become false and hurtful. Then falls the church, the state, art, letters, life itself.

When the doctrine of the divine nature within all is forgotten, a sickness infects and shrinks (dwarfs) the human constitution. Once, man was considered all-important; now he seems like a mere attachment (appendage), a nuisance. And because the indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be gotten rid of, the doctrine suffers this distortion (perversion): the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons and denied to all the rest – and denied with fury. The doctrine of inspiration is lost. The base doctrine of the majority of voices (democracy) takes over (usurps) the place of the doctrine of the soul. Miracles, prophecy, poetry, the ideal life, the holy life – these exist now merely as ancient history. They are not in the belief, nor in the aspiration, of society. When suggested today, they seem ridiculous. Life becomes comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade from sight, and people become short-sighted (near-sighted), able only to pay attention to what appeals to (addresses) the senses.

Applying This to Christianity

These general views, which nobody will argue with (contest) as long as they remain general, find plenty (abundant) of illustration in the history of religion, and especially in the history of the Christian church. In that church, all of us have had our upbringing (birth and nurture). The truth contained in Christianity, you, my young friends (seminary graduates), are now setting forth to teach. As the established worship (Cultus) of the civilized world, it has great historical interest for us. I don’t need to speak about its blessed words, which have been the comfort (consolation) of humanity.

I shall try to fulfill (discharge) my duty to you on this occasion by pointing out two errors in its administration. These errors appear more glaring (gross) every day from the point of view we have just taken (emphasizing intuition and the indwelling divine).

Jesus and His Message

Jesus Christ belonged to the true family (race) of prophets. He saw with open eyes the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its stern (severe) harmony, captivated (ravished) by its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he truly understood (estimated) the greatness of man. One man was true to the potential that is in you and me. He saw that God becomes human (incarnates himself in man), and continually (evermore) goes forth anew to take possession of his world.

He said, in this joyful celebration (jubilee) of sublime emotion, ‘I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, God speaks. Would you see God? See me; or, see yourself, when you also think as I now think.’ But what a distortion his doctrine and memory suffered in the same age, in the next age, and in the following ages! There is no doctrine of the higher Reason that can bear to be taught by the lower Understanding. The Understanding caught this high song (chant) from the poet’s lips and said, in the next age, ‘This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you if you say he was just a man.’

The specific ways he used language (idioms) and his figures of speech (rhetoric) have taken over (usurped) the place of his actual truth. Churches today are not built on his principles, but on his figures of speech (tropes). Christianity became a mythology (Mythus), just like the poetic teaching of Greece and Egypt before it. He spoke of miracles because he felt that human life was a miracle, and all that humans do (doth) is miraculous. He knew that this daily miracle shines more brightly as the person becomes more divine (diviner). But the very word “Miracle,” as spoken (pronounced) by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it suggests a Monster. It suggests something unnatural, not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

Jesus and Tradition

He felt respect for Moses and the prophets. But he felt no inappropriate (unfit) hesitation (tenderness) about prioritizing (postponing) their earlier (initial) revelations in favor of the hour and the person that is now. He prioritized the eternal revelation in the heart. In this way, he was a true man. Having seen that the law within us is commanding, he would not allow it to be commanded by any external authority. Boldly, with his hand, heart, and life, he declared that this inner law was God. In this way, he was a true man. And thus, he is, as I think, the only soul in history who has truly appreciated the worth of a human being.

Error 1: Focusing on the Person of Jesus

1. In thinking about (contemplating) Jesus this way, we become very aware (sensible) of the first major flaw (defect) of historical Christianity. Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us now, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the historical (positive), and the ritualistic. It has focused, and still focuses, with harmful (noxious) exaggeration on the person of Jesus.

The soul knows no persons. It invites every person to expand to the full circle of the universe. It wants no preferences except those of spontaneous love. But through this “eastern monarchy” style of Christianity, which laziness and fear have built, the friend of man has been made the injurer of man. The way Jesus’ name is surrounded with expressions – which were once spontaneous outbursts (sallies) of admiration and love, but are now hardened (petrified) into official titles – kills all generous sympathy and liking.

All who hear me feel that the language used to describe Christ in Europe and America is not the style of friendship and enthusiasm toward a good and noble heart. Instead, it is stiff (appropriated) and formal. It paints a demigod, just as the ancient Egyptians (Orientals) or Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. If you accept the harmful assumptions (injurious impositions) of our early religious education (catachetical instruction), then even honesty and self-denial were just “splendid sins” if they didn’t carry the Christian name. One would rather be

‘A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,’ (Wordsworth)

than to be cheated (defrauded) of his manly right to come into nature and find not just names and places, not just land and professions, but even virtue and truth already claimed and controlled (foreclosed and monopolized) by a system. You shall not even be a full human being. You shall not own the world; you shall not dare to live according to the infinite Law that is in you, and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms. Instead, you must make your nature secondary (subordinate) to Christ’s nature; you must accept our interpretations; and you must take his portrait as the common people (vulgar) draw it.

Finding God Within

That is always best which gives me to myself. The feeling of the sublime is excited in me by the great Stoic doctrine: Obey thyself. That which shows God in me strengthens (fortifies) me. That which shows God out of me makes me like a wart or an ugly lump (wen) – pointless. There is no longer a necessary reason for my existence. Already the long shadows of premature (untimely) oblivion creep over me, and I feel I shall cease to exist (decease) forever.

Jesus as Inspiration, Not Authority

The divine poets (bards) are friends of my virtue, my intellect, my strength. They advise (admonish) me that the gleams of insight which flash across my mind are not mine, but God’s. They tell me that they had similar visions, and were not disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I love them. Noble challenges (provocations) come from them, inviting me also to:

• Free (emancipate) myself.
• Resist evil.
• Master (subdue) the world.
• And simply Be.

And thus, by his holy thoughts, Jesus serves us, and thus only. To aim to convert a person by miracles is a violation (profanation) of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is made now, as always, by the reception of beautiful sentiments.

It is true that a great and rich soul, like Jesus’, falling among simple people, does dominate (preponderate) so much that, as happened with him, they name the world after him. The world seems to them to exist for him. They have not yet understood (drunk so deeply of) his meaning enough to see that only by coming back to themselves, or to God in themselves, can they grow forevermore.

It is a low benefit to give me something. It is a high benefit to enable me to do something (somewhat) of myself. The time is coming when all people will see that the gift of God to the soul is not a boastful (vaunting), overpowering, excluding holiness (sanctity), but a sweet, natural goodness. It is a goodness like yours and mine, and it invites your goodness and my goodness to be and to grow.

Error 2: Preaching that Harms Jesus

The injustice of the common (vulgar) tone of preaching is just as harmful (flagrant) to Jesus as it is to the souls which it desecrates (profanes). The preachers do not see that they make his gospel seem not like “glad tidings.” They strip (shear) him of his beautiful qualities (locks of beauty) and the attributes of heaven.

When I see a majestic figure like Epaminondas or Washington; when I see among my contemporaries a true orator, an upright judge, a dear friend; when I resonate (vibrate) to the melody and imagination (fancy) of a poem – I see beauty that is desirable. And just as lovely – and with even more complete agreement (consent) of my human being – sounds in my ear the serious (severe) music of the poets (bards) who have sung of the true God in all ages. Now, do not degrade the life and dialogues of Christ out of this circle of charm by isolating him and making him seem peculiar (insulation and peculiarity).

Let them lie as they naturally occurred (befel) – alive and warm, part of human life, the landscape, and the cheerful day.

Error 2: Neglecting the Soul’s Law Within

2. The second flaw (defect) of the traditional and limited way of using the mind of Christ follows from the first error. It is this: the Moral Nature – that Law of laws, whose revelations introduce greatness, indeed (yea), God himself, into the open soul – is not explored as the foundation of the established teaching in society.

People have come to speak of revelation as something given and finished long ago, as if God were dead. This injury to faith stifles (throttles) the preacher. And the finest (goodliest) of institutions becomes an uncertain and unclear (inarticulate) voice.

The Need to Express Inner Truth

It is very certain that connecting (conversation) with the beauty of the soul creates (beget) a desire and need to share (impart) the same knowledge and love with others. If expression (utterance) is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the person. Always, the seer (one who sees truth) is also a sayer (one who speaks truth). Somehow, their dream gets told. Somehow, they publish it with solemn joy.

• Sometimes with pencil on canvas.
• Sometimes with chisel on stone.
• Sometimes built (builded) in towers and aisles of granite, expressing their soul’s worship.
• Sometimes in anthems of boundless (indefinite) music.
• But the clearest and most permanent expression is in words.

The True Teacher Speaks from the Spirit

The person who falls in love (enamored) with this excellence becomes its priest or poet. This role (office) is as old as the world (coeval). But notice the condition, the spiritual limitation of the role: Only the spirit can teach.

• Not any worldly (profane) person.
• Not any person focused only on senses (sensual).
• Not any liar.
• Not any slave (to convention or fear). Only the person who has the truth can give it. Only the person who is the truth can create. The person upon whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks – that person alone can teach. Courage, deep faith (piety), love, wisdom – these can teach. And every person can open their doors to these angels, and they shall bring the gift of inspired speech (tongues). But the person who aims to speak just as books instruct, as church councils (synods) dictate, as fashion guides, or as self-interest (interest) commands – that person just babbles. Let them be silent (hush).

A Time of Decaying Faith

You (seminary graduates) propose to devote yourselves to this holy office. I wish you may feel your calling in powerful urges (throbs) of desire and hope. This office is the first and most important in the world. It deals with such reality that it cannot tolerate (suffer) the subtraction (deduction) of any falsehood.

And it is my duty to say to you that the need for new revelation was never greater than it is now. From the views I have already expressed, you will guess (infer) the sad conviction which I share (I believe with many people - numbers) about the universal decay and now almost death of faith in society. The soul is not preached. The Church seems to wobble (totter) towards its fall, almost all its life gone (extinct). On this occasion, any polite pretence (complaisance) would be criminal. It would be wrong to tell you – whose hope and mission (commission) it is to preach the faith of Christ – that the faith of Christ is currently being preached (when it is not).

The Hunger for Real Preaching

It is time that this poorly suppressed (ill-suppressed) complaint (murmur) from all thoughtful people against the spiritual starvation (famine) in our churches should be heard. It is time that this moaning of the heart – because it is deprived (bereaved) of the comfort (consolation), the hope, the grandeur that come only from cultivating (culture) the moral nature – should be heard through the sleep of laziness (indolence) and over the noise (din) of routine.

This great and ongoing (perpetual) office of the preacher is not being fulfilled (discharged). Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment applied to the duties of life. Tell me, in how many churches, by how many prophets, is a person made truly aware (sensible) that:

• They are an infinite Soul?
• That the earth and heavens are passing into their mind?
• That they are constantly drinking (drinking forever) the soul of God?

Where now do we hear the kind of persuasion whose very melody fills my heart with paradise (imparadises) and thus proves (affirms) its own origin in heaven? Where shall I hear words like those that, in older ages, drew people to leave everything and follow – father and mother, house and land, wife and child? Where shall I hear these majestic (august) laws of moral being spoken (pronounced) in such a way that they fill my ear, and I feel ennobled by the chance to offer my absolute utmost action and passion?

The test of true faith should certainly be its power to charm and command the soul, just as the laws of nature control the activity of the hands – commanding in such a way that we find pleasure and honor in obeying. The faith should blend naturally with the light of rising and setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird, and the breath of flowers. But now the priests’ Sabbath has lost the splendor of nature; it is unlovely. We are glad when it is done. We can make – and we do make, even while sitting in our pews – a far better, holier, sweeter Sabbath for ourselves.

Empty Formalism in the Pulpit

Whenever the pulpit is taken over (usurped) by a formalist (one who cares more for rules and forms than spirit), then the worshipper is cheated (defrauded) and left disheartened (disconsolate). We shrink back as soon as the prayers begin – prayers which do not uplift us, but instead strike (smite) and offend us. We feel like (are fain to) wrapping our cloaks about us and finding (secure), as best we can, a solitude where we don’t have to hear the words.

I once heard a preacher who severely (sorely) tempted me to say I would never go to church again. People go, I thought, where they are accustomed (wont) to go; otherwise, not a single soul would have entered the church (temple) that afternoon. A snowstorm was falling around us. The snowstorm was real; the preacher seemed unreal, like a ghost (spectral). The eye felt the sad contrast when looking at him, and then out the window behind him into the beautiful, swirling snow (meteor).

He had lived in vain. He had no single word suggesting (intimating) that he had ever laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been praised (commended), or cheated, or deeply annoyed (chagrined). If he had ever truly lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The main (capital) secret of his profession – namely, to convert life into truth – he had not learned. He had not imported (imported) a single fact from all his experience into his teaching (doctrine). This man had ploughed and planted, talked and bought and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head ached; his heart beat (throbs); he smiled and suffered. Yet there was not a hint (surmise) in the entire sermon (discourse) that he had ever lived at all. He did not draw a single line from real history.

The true preacher can always be known by this: he deals out to the people his life – life that has been passed through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, you could not tell from his sermon what era (age) of the world he lived in (fell in); whether he had a father or a child; whether he owned property (freeholder) or was poor (pauper); whether he was a city person (citizen) or a country person (countryman); or any other fact of his life story (biography).

Hope Endures Despite Poor Preaching

It seemed strange that the people should come to church at all. It seemed as if their own houses must be very boring (unentertaining), that they should prefer this thoughtless noise (clamor). It shows that there is a commanding attraction in the moral sentiment itself, that can lend a faint touch (tint) of light even to dullness and ignorance, when they come wrapped in religion’s name and place. The good listener is sure they have been touched sometimes; they are sure there is something worthwhile to be reached, and some word that can reach it. When listening to these empty (vain) words, the listener comforts themself by relating the words to their memory of better hours. And so the meaningless words rattle (clatter) and echo unchallenged.

Finding Truth Even in Dead Forms

I am not unaware (ignorant) that when we preach poorly (unworthily), it is not always completely in vain. There is a good ear in some people that draws nourishment (supplies) for virtue out of very poor material (indifferent nutriment). There is poetic truth concealed in all the clichés (commonplaces) of prayer and sermons. Though they may be foolishly spoken, they may be wisely heard. For each cliché is some special (select) expression that broke out in a moment of deep faith (piety) from some suffering (stricken) or joyful (jubilant) soul, and its excellence caused it to be remembered.

The prayers and even the doctrines (dogmas) of our church today are like the zodiac ceiling of Denderah in Egypt, or the ancient astronomical monuments of the Hindus. They are completely disconnected (insulated) from anything currently existing (extant) in the actual life and business of the people. They simply mark the height to which the waters of faith once rose.

But this passive acceptance (docility) of dead forms only limits the harm (mischief) among the good and devout people. In a large part of the community, the religious service gives rise to quite different thoughts and emotions. We need not scold (chide) the neglectful (negligent) servant (the ineffective preacher). We are struck with pity, rather, at the swift punishment (retribution) his laziness (sloth) brings. Alas for the unhappy man who is called to stand in the pulpit and not give the bread of life! Everything that happens (befals) accuses him.

• Would he ask for contributions for missions, foreign or domestic? Instantly his face flushes (suffused) with shame. How can he propose to his congregation (parish) that they should send money hundreds or thousands of miles away to provide the same poor spiritual food (fare) they receive at home – food they would do well to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to escape?
• Would he urge people to live a godly way? How can he ask a fellow human (creature) to come to Sabbath meetings, when he and they all know what poor results (uttermost) they can realistically hope for there?
• Will he privately invite them to the Lord’s Supper? He dares not. If no heart warms this ritual (rite), the hollow, dry, creaking formality is too obvious (plain). He cannot face a person of intelligence (wit) and energy and extend the invitation without terror.
• In the street, what can he say to the bold village skeptic or non-believer (blasphemer)? The blasphemer sees fear in the minister’s face, posture (form), and way of walking (gait).

Hope in Individual Virtue and the Need for Self-Reliance

Let me not spoil (taint) the sincerity of this plea by any failure (oversight) to recognize the claims of good men. I know and honor the purity and strict conscience of many members of the clergy. Whatever life public worship still retains, it owes to the scattered group (company) of pious men who serve (minister) here and there in the churches. These men sometimes accept the beliefs (tenet) of the elders with too much gentle respect (tenderness), but they have received the genuine impulses of virtue not from others, but from their own hearts. And so they still command our love and awe for the holiness (sanctity) of their character.

Moreover, the exceptions (to the general decay) are not so much found in a few famous (eminent) preachers, as in the better hours and truer inspirations of all preachers – indeed (nay), in the sincere moments of every person. But regardless of (with whatever) exceptions, it is still true that tradition characterizes the preaching of this country. Preaching comes out of memory, not out of the soul. It aims at what is usual, not at what is necessary and eternal. Thus, historical Christianity destroys the power of preaching by withdrawing it from the exploration of the moral nature of man – the place where the sublime is, where the resources of astonishment and power reside.

What a cruel injustice it is to that Law – the joy of the whole earth, which alone can make thought precious (dear) and rich! That Law whose inescapable (fatal) sureness even the astronomical orbits poorly copy (emulate)! It is cruel that this Law is mocked (travestied) and devalued (depreciated), that it is hooted and howled at (behooted and behowled), and not a single feature (trait), not a single word of it is clearly expressed (articulated). The pulpit, in losing sight of this Law, loses all its inspiration and gropes blindly after it knows not what. And for lack of this inner cultivation (culture), the soul of the community is sick and faithless.

It wants nothing so much as a stern, high, stoical, Christian discipline to make it know itself and the divinity that speaks through it. As it is now, man is ashamed of himself. He hides (skulks) and sneaks through the world, hoping only to be tolerated, to be pitied. Scarcely once in a thousand years does any person dare to be wise and good, and so draw after him the tears and blessings of humankind (his kind).

Fading Creeds and Churches

Certainly, there have been periods when, because the intellect was inactive concerning certain truths, a greater faith was possible in names and persons. The Puritans in England and America found, in the Christ of the Catholic Church and in the doctrines (dogmas) inherited from Rome, enough room (scope) for their severe (austere) piety and their desires (longings) for civil freedom. But their creed is passing away, and no new creed is arising in its place (room).

I think no person can go, with their thoughts actively engaged (about him), into one of our churches without feeling that whatever hold public worship once had on people is gone or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection of the good and the fear of the bad. In the country, neighborhoods and half-congregations (half parishes) are “signing off” – to use the local term for withdrawing support. It is already beginning to be seen as a sign of character and true religion to withdraw from religious meetings. I have heard a devout person, who valued (prized) the Sabbath, say in bitterness of heart, “On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church.” And the motive that holds the best people there now is only a hope and a waiting. What was once just a minor detail (mere circumstance) – that the best and the worst people in the parish, the poor and the rich, the learned and the ignorant, young and old, should meet one day as equals (fellows) in one house, as a sign of an equal right in the soul – has now become the main (paramount) motive for going there (thither).

The Calamity and the Remedy

My friends, in these two errors – (1) exaggerating the personal and historical, and (2) neglecting the universal moral nature and intuition – I think I find the causes of the calamity we face: a decaying church and a spreading (wasting) unbelief. These are casting harmful (malignant) influences around us and making the hearts of good people sad. And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship? Then all things go to decay. Genius leaves the temple to linger (haunt) in the senate or the marketplace. Literature becomes trivial (frivolous). Science becomes cold. The eye of youth is not lit by the hope of other worlds, and old age is without honor. Society lives for trivial matters (trifles), and when people die, we do not mention them in any meaningful way.

And now, my brothers, you will ask: What can be done by us in these discouraging (desponding) days? The remedy is already declared in the foundation (ground) of our complaint against the Church. We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. Therefore, let redemption be sought in the Soul. In one soul, in your soul, there are resources for the world.

Wherever a true man comes, there comes revolution. The old ways are for slaves. When a true man arrives, all books become readable, all things become transparent, all religions are seen as mere forms. He is religious. Man is the wonder-worker. He is seen surrounded by miracles. All other men bless and curse; he only says yes and nay.

The stagnation (stationariness) of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man – these clearly indicate (indicate with sufficient clearness) the falsehood of our current theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity – a faith like Christ’s in the infinite potential (infinitude) of man – is lost. Nobody believes in the soul of man, but only in some particular man or person, old and long dead (departed).

Ah me (Alas)! No person walks alone on their spiritual path. All people go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who sees in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their own soul. They do not know that one soul – their soul – is wiser than the whole world. See how nations and races flicker (flit) by on the sea of time and leave no ripple to tell where they floated or sunk. And yet, one good soul shall make the name of Moses, or of Zeno, or of Zoroaster honored (reverend) forever.

Nobody attempts (assayeth) the stern ambition to be the Self of the nation and of nature. Instead, each person would prefer to be an easy follower (secondary) of some Christian system (scheme), or sectarian group (connexion), or some famous (eminent) man. Once you leave your own knowledge of God, your own inner sentiment, and take secondary knowledge – like St. Paul’s, or George Fox’s, or Swedenborg’s – you get further (wide) from God with every year this secondary form lasts. And if it lasts for centuries, as it has now, the gap (chasm) opens (yawns) to such a breadth that people can scarcely be convinced there is anything divine within them.

Go Alone, Be Yourself

Let me advise (admonish) you, first of all, to go alone. Refuse the good models, even those considered most sacred in human imagination. Dare to love God without a mediator or veil. You shall find plenty of friends who will hold up for your imitation (emulation) figures like the Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, ‘I also am a man.’ Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did something because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural. The imitator denies (bereaves) himself of his own beauty only to come short of another man’s.

Yourself a newborn poet (bard) of the Holy Ghost – cast behind you all conformity. Acquaint people firsthand with Deity. Be to them a man. Look to it first and only, that you are such a person. Ensure that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money are nothing to you – that they are not blindfolds (bandages) over your eyes preventing you from seeing. Live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind.

Don’t be too anxious to visit periodically all families and each family in your parish connection. But when you do meet one of these men or women, be to them a divine man. Be to them thought and virtue. Let their timid hopes (aspirations) find in you a friend. Let their suppressed (trampled) instincts be gently encouraged (genially tempted) out in your presence (atmosphere). Let their doubts know that you too have doubted, and let their wonder feel that you too have wondered.

By trusting your own soul, you shall gain a greater confidence in other people. For despite all our petty calculations (penny-wisdom), despite all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all people have sublime thoughts. All people do value the few real hours of life. They love to be heard. They love to be lifted (caught up) into the vision of principles. We mark brightly (mark with light) in our memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and sin, with souls that made our souls wiser – souls that spoke what we thought, that told us what we already knew, that gave us permission (leave) to be who we inwardly (inly) were. Fulfill (Discharge) the priestly office to people in this way. Present or absent, you shall be followed with their love as by an angel.

Aim for Absolute Merit

And, toward this goal (end), let us not aim at common levels (degrees) of merit. Can we not leave, to those who love it, the virtue that glitters only to gain society’s praise (commendation)? Can we not ourselves pierce the deep solitudes of absolute ability and worth?

We easily meet (come up to) the standard of goodness in society. Society’s praise can be cheaply secured, and almost all people are content with those easy merits. But the instant effect of communing (conversing) with God will be to put those easy merits away.

There are sublime merits. There are persons who are not actors, not speakers, but influences. There are persons too great for fame, too great for display, who disdain eloquence. To them, all that we call art and artist seems too closely connected (allied) to showing off (show) and ulterior motives (by-ends), to the exaggeration of the limited (finite) and selfish, and the loss of the universal.

The orators, the poets, the commanders impress (encroach on) us only as beautiful women do: by our permission (allowance) and respect (homage). Ignore (Slight) them by being preoccupied with your own mind. Ignore them, as you can well afford to do, by focusing on high and universal aims. They will instantly feel that you have right on your side, and that it is in lower places that they must shine. They also feel your right; for they, along with you, are open to the inflow (influx) of the all-knowing Spirit. This Spirit destroys (annihilates) before its bright noon the little distinctions (shades and gradations) of intelligence found in the creations (compositions) we call wiser and wisest. In such high connection (communion), let us study the great examples (strokes) of right action (rectitude):

• Bold kindness (benevolence).
• Independence even from the unjust wishes of friends. We should resist even the freest flow of kindness if it goes against truth, appealing instead to higher sympathies far beyond the present moment.
• And the highest form: a certain solid goodness (solidity of merit). This has nothing to do with public opinion. It is so essentially and obviously (manifestly) virtue that everyone takes it for granted. People assume the right, brave, generous step will be taken, and nobody thinks of praising (commending) it. You might compliment a show-off (coxcomb) for doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel. The silence that accepts true merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

Such souls, when they appear, are the Imperial Guard of Virtue. They are the perpetual reserve force, the dictators of fortune. One does not need to praise their courage – they are the heart and soul of nature.

O my friends, there are resources within us that we have not yet used (drawn upon). There are people who rise up refreshed when they hear a threat. There are people for whom a crisis – one that frightens (intimidates) and paralyzes the majority – comes gracefully and welcomed (beloved) like a bride. Such crises demand not the usual skills (faculties) of caution (prudence) and saving (thrift), but comprehension, stability (immovableness), and the readiness for sacrifice.

Napoleon said of his general Massena that he wasn’t truly himself until the battle started going against him. Then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, Massena’s powers of strategy (combination) awoke, and he put on terror and victory like clothing (a robe).

So it is in tough (rugged) crises, in tireless (unweariable) endurance, and in pursuing aims so high they put personal sympathy out of the question, that the angel within a person is shown. But these are heights that we can scarcely remember and look up to without regret (contrition) and shame. Let us thank God that such potential exists.

Rekindling Faith Through the Soul

And now, let us do what we can to rekindle the dying (smouldering, nigh quenched) fire on the altar of faith. The evils of the church as it currently exists (that now is) are clear (manifest). The question returns: What shall we do?

I confess, all attempts to design (project) and establish a new system of worship (Cultus) with new rituals (rites) and forms seem useless (vain) to me. Faith makes us, not we it. And faith creates its own forms naturally. All attempts to invent (contrive) a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French Revolutionaries to the goddess of Reason – today it’s flimsy decorations (pasteboard and fillagree), and tomorrow it ends in madness and murder.

Rather, let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms that already exist. For if you yourselves are once spiritually alive, you shall find that the old forms become flexible (plastic) and new. The remedy for their current lifelessness (deformity) is, first, soul, and second, soul, and forevermore, soul. A whole vast system (popedom) of forms can be lifted up and made alive (vivify) by a single pulse (pulsation) of virtue.

Christianity has given us two priceless (inestimable) advantages:

1. First, the Sabbath: the weekly celebration (jubilee) of the whole world. Its light dawns welcome alike into the philosopher’s private study (closet), into the worker’s attic room (garret), and into prison cells. Everywhere, it suggests, even to the most wicked (vile), a thought of the dignity of spiritual being. Let the Sabbath stand forevermore, a temple which new love, new faith, new sight shall restore to mankind in more than its original splendor.
2. And secondly, the institution of preaching: the speech of one human to others. This is essentially the most flexible of all tools (organs), of all forms. What prevents (hinders) you now, everywhere – in pulpits, in lecture rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of people or your own occasions lead you – from speaking the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it? What stops you from cheering the waiting, fainting hearts of people with new hope and new revelation?

Awaiting the New Teacher

I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty – which captivated (ravished) the souls of those Eastern people, especially the Hebrews, and through their lips spoke timeless truths (oracles) – shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences that have been the bread of life to millions. But they lack overall narrative coherence (epical integrity); they are fragmented. Their truths are not shown in logical order to the intellect.

I look for the new Teacher. This teacher will follow those shining laws of the soul so far that they shall see them come full circle. They shall see the laws’ rounding, complete grace. They shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul. They shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart. And they shall show that the feeling of Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.