Self-Reliance
“Ne te quæsiveris extra.”
Do not seek yourself outside yourself.
“Each man is his own star; and the soul that can
Make a man honest and complete
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing comes to him too early or too late.
Our acts are our angels, whether good or ill,
Our fateful shadows that walk beside us still.”
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune.
Cast the infant out on the rocks,
Nurse him at the she-wolf’s teat,
Let him winter with the hawk and fox.
Let power and speed be his hands and feet.
The other day I read some verses by a distinguished painter. They were original rather than conventional. Whatever their subject, the soul always hears a call to action in lines like these. The feeling they inspire is worth more than any idea they may contain.
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men: that is genius. Speak the conviction hidden within you, and it will become what everyone understands. In time, what is most inward becomes most outward, and our first thought comes back to us announced by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
Each of us knows the voice of our own mind well. Yet the highest merit we credit to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they disregarded books and traditions. They said not what other men thought, but what they themselves thought.
A man should learn to notice and watch the flash of light that crosses his mind from within, more than the brilliance of the whole sky of poets and sages. Instead, he dismisses his own thought without a second look, simply because it is his.
In every work of genius we recognize thoughts we ourselves once rejected. They return to us with a certain majesty that now seems to belong to someone else. Great works of art have no more moving lesson for us than this.
They teach us to hold to our spontaneous impressions with good-humored stubbornness, and most of all when every voice around us cries out on the other side. Otherwise, tomorrow a stranger will say, with masterly good sense, exactly what we have thought and felt all along. Then we will be forced, with shame, to accept our own opinion from someone else.
There comes a time in every man’s education when he reaches certain convictions. Envy is ignorance. Imitation is suicide. He must accept himself, for better or worse, as his lot in life. And although the wide universe is full of good things, no kernel of nourishing grain can come to him except through the work he puts into the plot of ground he has been given to farm.
The power within him is something new in nature. No one but he knows what he is able to do, and even he does not know until he has tried.
It is not by chance that one face, one character, or one fact makes a strong impression on him while another makes none. What is carved into his memory follows a harmony established in advance. The eye was placed where one particular ray would fall, so that it could bear witness to that ray.
We express only half of ourselves, and we are ashamed of the divine idea that each of us represents. That idea can be safely trusted to be well proportioned and to lead to good results, as long as it is faithfully communicated. But God will not have his work revealed by cowards.
A man feels relieved and cheerful when he has put his heart into his work and done his best. But anything he has said or done in any other way will give him no peace. It is a release that does not release him. In such an attempt his genius abandons him. No muse helps him; he finds no inventiveness and no hope.
Trust yourself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place that divine providence has found for you, the society of the people of your own time, and the connections among events.
Great men have always done this. They have entrusted themselves, like children, to the spirit of their age. In doing so, they revealed their sense that something absolutely trustworthy was seated in their hearts, working through their hands and governing their whole being.
We are now grown men, and we must accept the same transcendent destiny in the highest frame of mind. We are not to be minors and invalids sheltered in a protected corner, nor cowards running from a revolution. We are to be guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty’s effort and advancing against Chaos and the Dark.
Nature gives us charming oracles on this subject in the faces and behavior of children, babies, and even animals. They do not have our divided and rebellious minds. They do not distrust a feeling just because our calculations have tallied up the strength and resources set against our purpose.
Because their minds are whole, their gaze has not yet been conquered, and when we look into their faces we are unsettled. Infancy conforms to nobody; everyone conforms to it. One baby commonly turns four or five of the adults who babble and play with it into babies themselves.
In the same way, God has equipped youth, adolescence, and manhood with their own sharpness and charm. He has made each stage enviable and gracious, with claims that cannot be brushed aside, as long as it stands on its own.
Do not think a young man has no force just because he cannot speak to you and me. Listen! In the next room his voice is clear and emphatic enough. Apparently he knows how to speak to people his own age. Shy or bold, then, he will know how to make us elders quite unnecessary.
Consider the nonchalance of boys who are sure of their dinner and who would scorn, as much as any lord would, to do or say anything to win someone over. That is the healthy attitude of human nature.
A boy in the parlor is like the audience in the pit of a theater. Independent and answerable to no one, he looks out from his corner at the people and events passing by. He tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys: good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome.
He never burdens himself with consequences or interests. He gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court his favor; he does not court yours.
The grown man, by contrast, is thrown into jail, as it were, by his self-consciousness. Once he has acted or spoken with a public flourish, he is a committed person. Hundreds now watch him with sympathy or hatred, and he must take their feelings into account. There is no Lethe, no river of forgetting, for this. If only he could return to his neutrality!
Whoever can avoid all such pledges, and having observed once can observe again with the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unfrightened innocence, must always be formidable. He would give his opinion on every passing affair. Since people would see that his opinions were not private but necessary, they would sink like darts into men’s ears and make them afraid.
These are the voices we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and then inaudible as we enter the world. Everywhere, society conspires against the manhood of every one of its members.
Society is a joint-stock company, a business owned in shares by its members. To better secure each shareholder’s bread, the members agree to surrender the liberty and cultivation of the one who eats it. The virtue most in demand is conformity. Self-reliance is what society most dislikes. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Whoever would be a man must be a nonconformist. Whoever would gather immortal palms of victory must not be held back by the mere name of goodness, but must investigate whether it really is goodness. In the end, nothing is sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve yourself before yourself, and you will have the vote of the world.
I remember an answer I felt moved to give, when I was quite young, to a valued adviser who used to press the dear old doctrines of the church on me. I said, “What do I have to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?” My friend suggested, “But these impulses may come from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be like that. But if I am the Devil’s child, then I will live from the Devil.”
No law can be sacred to me except the law of my own nature. Good and bad are only names, very easily shifted from this thing to that. The only right is what agrees with my constitution; the only wrong is what goes against it.
In the face of all opposition, a man should carry himself as if everything except himself were a matter of mere titles and passing moments.
I am ashamed to think how easily we surrender to badges and names, to large organizations and dead institutions. Every decent, well-spoken person affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to walk upright and full of life, and speak the blunt truth in every way.
If malice and vanity dress up in the coat of philanthropy, should that go unchallenged? Suppose an angry bigot takes up the generous cause of Abolition and comes to me with his latest news from Barbados. Why shouldn’t I say to him:
‘Go love your infant; love your woodcutter; be good-natured and modest; have that grace. And never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this unbelievable tenderness for Black people a thousand miles away. Your love far away is spite at home.’
Such a greeting would be rough and graceless, but truth is more beautiful than a pretense of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, or it is not goodness at all. The doctrine of hatred must be preached to counteract the doctrine of love, whenever that doctrine whimpers and whines.
I turn away from father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write the word Whim on the lintels of my doorposts. I hope it is something better than whim in the end, but we cannot spend the whole day explaining. Do not expect me to give reasons why I seek out company or why I shut it out.
And do not tell me, as a good man did today, that I am obligated to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell you, you foolish philanthropist, that I begrudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to men who do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.
There is a class of people to whom I am bound, bought and sold, by every spiritual affinity. For them I will go to prison if I must. But then there are your miscellaneous popular charities: the college education of fools, the building of meetinghouses for the useless purpose many of them now serve, handouts to drunkards, and the thousand Relief Societies.
I confess with shame that I sometimes give in and hand over the dollar. But it is a wicked dollar, and before long I will have the manhood to withhold it.
In the popular view, virtues are the exception rather than the rule. There is the man, and then, separately, there are his virtues. Men perform what is called a good deed, some act of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine to make up for missing the daily military parade.
Their good works are done as an apology or excuse for living in the world, the way invalids and the insane pay a high price for their room and board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to atone; I wish to live. My life is for itself, not for a show.
I would much rather my life be pitched in a lower key, as long as it is genuine and steady, than have it glittering and unstable. I want it to be sound and sweet, not in need of special diets and bloodletting.
I ask for direct evidence that you are a man, and I reject this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that, for myself, it makes no difference whether I perform or refrain from the actions people consider excellent. I cannot agree to pay for a privilege that is mine by right.
My gifts may be few and modest, but I actually exist. Neither I nor my fellows need any secondhand testimony to be sure of it.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule is equally hard to follow in practical life and in intellectual life, and it may mark the whole difference between greatness and pettiness. It is all the harder because you will always find people who think they know your duty better than you do.
In the world, it is easy to live by the world’s opinion. In solitude, it is easy to live by our own. But the great man is the one who, in the middle of the crowd, keeps the independence of solitude with perfect sweetness.
The objection to conforming to customs that have become dead to you is that it scatters your energy. It wastes your time and blurs the impression your character makes.
Suppose you keep up a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, or set your table for show as petty housekeepers do. Behind all these screens I have trouble making out precisely what kind of person you are. And of course, that much energy is withdrawn from your own proper life.
But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you will strengthen yourself.
A man must consider what a game of blindman’s buff this conformity is, a game of groping about blindfolded. If I know your sect, I can predict your argument.
I hear a preacher announce that his text and topic will be the usefulness of one of his church’s institutions. Don’t I know beforehand that he cannot possibly say a new and spontaneous word? Don’t I know that, for all his show of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing?
Don’t I know that he has pledged himself to look at only one side, the permitted side, not as a man but as a parish minister? He is a lawyer on retainer, and his airs of judicial impartiality are the emptiest pretense.
Most people have tied one handkerchief or another over their eyes and attached themselves to one of these communities of opinion. This conformity does not make them false in only a few details, the authors of a few lies. It makes them false in every detail.
None of their truths is quite true. Their two is not the real two, and their four is not the real four. So every word they say vexes us, and we don’t know where to begin setting them right.
Meanwhile nature is quick to fit us out in the prison uniform of the party we belong to. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and we gradually acquire the gentlest donkey-like expression.
One humiliating experience in particular shows itself in general life as well. I mean “the foolish face of praise”: the forced smile we put on in company where we feel ill at ease, in answer to conversation that doesn’t interest us.
The muscles are not moved spontaneously. They are moved by a low, usurping willfulness, and they tighten around the outline of the face with a most disagreeable sensation.
For nonconformity, the world whips you with its displeasure. A man must therefore know how to judge the worth of a sour face. Bystanders look at him sideways in the public street or in a friend’s parlor.
If their dislike came from contempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home sad. But the sour faces of the crowd, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause. They are put on and taken off as the wind blows and as a newspaper directs.
Even so, the discontent of the crowd is more formidable than that of the senate and the college. A firm man who knows the world can easily endure the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, because they are timid, being very vulnerable themselves.
But sometimes the people’s indignation is added to that feminine rage. The ignorant and the poor are aroused, and the unthinking brute force at the bottom of society is made to growl and grimace. Then it takes a habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it as a god would, as a trifle of no concern.
The other terror that frightens us away from self-trust is our consistency. This is a reverence for our past acts and words. Other people have no data for calculating our orbit except our past acts, and we are reluctant to disappoint them.
But why should you keep looking back over your shoulder? Why drag around this corpse of your memory, for fear of contradicting something you once said in this or that public place? Suppose you did contradict yourself: what then?
It seems a rule of wisdom never to rely on memory alone, hardly even in acts of pure memory. Instead, bring the past to be judged in the thousand-eyed present, and always live in a new day.
In your metaphysics you have denied that God has personality. Yet when the soul’s devout impulses come, yield to them with heart and life, even if they clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory as Joseph left his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and clergymen. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He might as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.
Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, even if it contradicts everything you said today.
“Ah, then you are sure to be misunderstood.”
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the outbursts of his will are contained within the law of his being, just as the unevenness of the Andes and the Himalayas is insignificant in the curve of the globe.
Nor does it matter how you measure and test him. A character is like an acrostic or an Alexandrian stanza: read it forward, backward, or across, and it still spells the same thing.
In this pleasant, contrite life in the woods that God allows me, let me record my honest thought day by day, without looking ahead or behind. I cannot doubt that it will turn out to be symmetrical, though I neither intend it nor see it.
My book should smell of pines and hum with the sound of insects. The swallow over my window should weave the thread or straw he carries in his beak into my web as well.
We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. People imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by open actions. They do not see that virtue and vice give off a breath every moment.
However varied our actions are, there will be agreement among them, as long as each is honest and natural in its hour. Actions that come from one will are harmonious, however unlike they seem. Their differences disappear from view at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all.
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks, as it changes course back and forth against the wind. See the line from far enough away, and it straightens out into its average direction.
Your genuine action will explain itself, and it will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, by your own lights, and what you have already done in that way will justify you now.
Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough today to do right and scorn people’s eyes, I must have done enough right before to defend me now. However that may be, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may.
The force of character is cumulative. All the past days of virtue work their health into this one.
What gives the heroes of the senate and the battlefield the majesty that so fills the imagination? It is the consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind them. These shed a united light on the person advancing. He is attended as if by a visible escort of angels.
That is what throws thunder into Chatham’s voice, dignity into Washington’s bearing, and America into Adams’s eye.
Honor is venerable to us because it is not short-lived. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it today because it is not of today.
We love it and pay it homage because it is not a trap set for our love and homage. It is self-dependent and self-derived, and therefore it has an old, spotless pedigree, even when it appears in a young person.
I hope that in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. From now on, let those words be publicly posted as ridiculous. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize again.
A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true.
Let us confront and rebuke the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times. Let us hurl in the face of custom, trade, and office the fact that is the upshot of all history: that a great responsible Thinker and Actor is at work wherever a man works.
A true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all men and all events.
Ordinarily, everyone in society reminds us of something else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes the place of the whole creation. The man must be so much that he makes all circumstances indifferent.
Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age. He requires infinite spaces, numbers, and time to fully accomplish his design, and later generations seem to follow in his steps like a train of clients.
A man named Caesar is born, and for ages afterward we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow toward and cling to his genius that he is confused with virtue and with what is possible for man.
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man. Monasticism is the shadow of the hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Milton called Scipio “the height of Rome.” All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.
Let a man, then, know his worth and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down like a charity boy, a bastard, or an intruder in the world that exists for him.
But the man in the street finds no worth in himself that corresponds to the force that built a tower or sculpted a marble god. So he feels poor when he looks at these things.
To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book has a foreign and forbidding air, much like a showy carriage. Like the carriage, they seem to say, “Who are you, sir?”
Yet they all belong to him. They are suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties, asking them to come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict. It is not there to command me; I am the one to settle its claim to praise.
There is a popular fable about a drunkard who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed, dressed, and laid in the duke’s bed. When he woke, he was treated with all the fawning ceremony due to the duke and assured that he had been insane.
The fable owes its popularity to how well it symbolizes the state of man. In the world he is a kind of drunkard, but now and then he wakes up, uses his reason, and finds himself a true prince.
Our reading is beggarly and fawning. In history, our imagination plays us false.
Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, make a showier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house doing a common day’s work. But the things of life are the same for both. The sum total of both is the same.
Why all this deference to Alfred and Scanderbeg and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear virtue out? As great a stake depends on your private act today as followed their public and renowned steps.
When private people act with original views, the glory will pass from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.
The world has been instructed by its kings, who have held the eyes of nations as if by magnetism. Through this colossal symbol, it has been taught the mutual reverence that each person owes another.
Everywhere, people have joyfully and loyally allowed the king, the noble, or the great landowner to walk among them by a law of his own. He could make his own scale of men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but with honor, and represent the law in his own person.
That joyful loyalty was the hieroglyphic by which people dimly expressed their awareness of their own right and dignity: the right of every man.
The magnetic pull of all original action becomes clear once we ask what grounds self-trust in the first place. Who is the one being trusted? What is the original, aboriginal Self on which a universal reliance can rest?
What is the nature and power of that star which baffles science? Astronomers measure a star’s distance by its parallax, but this star has no parallax and no elements that can be calculated. Yet if the least mark of independence appears, it sends a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions.
This inquiry leads us to a single source, which is at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life. We call it Spontaneity or Instinct. We name this primary wisdom Intuition, while everything we are taught later is mere tuition.
That deep force is the last fact, the point beyond which analysis cannot go. In it, all things find their common origin.
In calm hours, a sense of being rises in the soul, and we do not know how. That sense is not separate from things, from space, from light, from time, or from other people. It is one with them, and it plainly comes from the same source as their life and being.
We first share the life by which things exist. Only afterward do we see them as appearances in nature, and then we forget that we once shared their cause.
Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs that breathe the inspiration which gives us wisdom. To deny that inspiration is impiety and atheism.
We lie in the lap of an immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and instruments of its activity. When we perceive justice or truth, we do nothing by ourselves. We simply let its beams pass through us.
If we ask where this comes from, or try to pry into the soul that causes it, all philosophy fails. All we can say is whether it is present or absent.
Everyone distinguishes between the voluntary acts of the mind and its involuntary perceptions. Everyone also knows that involuntary perceptions deserve perfect faith. We may express them badly, but we know they are true, like day and night, beyond dispute.
My deliberate actions and acquisitions merely wander. Yet the idlest daydream and the faintest native emotion command my curiosity and respect.
Thoughtless people contradict a statement of perception as readily as a statement of opinion. In fact, they contradict it much more readily, because they do not distinguish between a perception and a mere notion. They imagine that I choose to see this or that thing.
But perception is not a matter of whim. It is fixed, like fate. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in time all mankind will see it, even if no one happened to see it before me. My perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.
The soul’s relation to the divine spirit is so pure that it is profane to try to insert aids between them. When God speaks, he must communicate not one thing but all things. He must fill the world with his voice and scatter light, nature, time, and souls from the center of the present thought. He must give the whole a new date and create it anew.
Whenever a mind is simple and receives divine wisdom, old things pass away. Means, teachers, texts, and temples fall. That mind lives now, and it absorbs the past and the future into the present hour.
All things are made sacred by their relation to it, one as much as another. All things are dissolved back to their center by their cause. In the universal miracle, the petty and particular miracles disappear.
So if someone claims to know and speak about God, and takes you back to the language of some old, decayed nation in another country or another world, do not believe him.
Is the acorn better than the oak, which is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has poured his ripened being? Why, then, this worship of the past?
The centuries conspire against the soundness and authority of the soul. Time and space are only like the colors the eye itself produces. The soul, however, is light. Where it is, there is day; where it was, there is night.
History is an impertinence and an injury if it is anything more than a cheerful fable, a parable of my own being and becoming.
Man is timid and apologetic. He no longer stands upright. He does not dare to say “I think” or “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage instead. He is put to shame by a blade of grass or a rose in bloom.
These roses under my window make no reference to earlier roses or to better ones. They are what they are, and they exist with God today. For them there is no time. There is simply the rose, and it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
Before a leaf-bud has burst, the rose’s whole life is already at work. In the full-blown flower there is no more of it, and in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, equally at every moment.
But man postpones or remembers. He does not live in the present. With his eyes turned backward, he mourns the past. Or he ignores the riches around him and stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
This should be plain enough. Yet look at how strong intellects still do not dare to hear God himself unless he speaks in the language of David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We will not always place such a high value on a few texts and a few lives.
We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of their grandmothers and tutors. As they grow older, they repeat the words of whatever talented people of strong character they happen to meet, struggling to recall the exact words.
Later, when they reach the point of view of the people who said those things, they understand them and are willing to let the words go. Whenever the occasion arises, they can use words just as good.
If we live truly, we will see truly. It is as easy for the strong person to be strong as it is for the weak person to be weak. When we have a new perception, we will gladly clear our memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish.
When a person lives with God, his voice will be as sweet as the murmur of a brook and the rustle of the corn.
And now, at last, the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid. It probably cannot be said, because everything we say is only a distant remembering of the intuition. As nearly as I can now put that thought into words, it is this.
When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it does not come by any known or familiar path. You will not see anyone else’s footprints. You will not see a human face or hear any name. The way, the thought, and the good will be wholly strange and new.
It will exclude example and experience. You take the way away from other people, not toward them. Everyone who has ever lived was its servant, though forgotten. Fear and hope are both beneath it, and there is something low even in hope.
In the hour of vision there is nothing that can be called gratitude, or even, properly speaking, joy. The soul, raised above passion, sees identity and eternal causation. It perceives that Truth and Right exist in themselves, and it is calmed by knowing that all things go well.
Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean and the South Seas, count for nothing. So do long stretches of time, years and centuries. What I now think and feel lay beneath every earlier state of life and circumstance. It lies beneath my present one, and beneath what is called life and what is called death.
Only living matters, not having lived. Power stops in the instant of rest. It lives in the moment of passing from an old state to a new one, in the leap across the gulf, in the dart toward a goal.
The world hates this one fact: that the soul becomes. Becoming forever degrades the past. It turns all riches into poverty and all reputation into shame. It confuses the saint with the rogue, and it pushes Jesus and Judas aside equally.
Why, then, do we chatter about self-reliance? Wherever the soul is present, there will be power that does not merely trust but acts. Talking about reliance is a poor, external way of speaking. Speak instead of that which relies because it works and exists.
Whoever is more obedient to that inner law than I am becomes my master, even if he never lifts a finger. I must revolve around him by a kind of spiritual gravitation.
We think it is mere rhetoric when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height. A person, or a group of people, who is moldable and open to principles must, by the law of nature, overpower and override all cities, nations, kings, rich men, and poets who are not.
On this subject, as on every other, we quickly reach the ultimate fact: everything resolves into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause. It sets the measure of good by the degree to which it enters into all lower forms.
All real things are real in proportion to the virtue they contain. Commerce, farming, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, and personal weight all count for something. They earn my respect as examples of its presence, though its action in them is impure.
I see the same law working in nature for preservation and growth. In nature, power is the essential measure of right. Nature allows nothing to remain in her kingdoms that cannot help itself.
The birth and maturing of a planet, its balance and orbit, the bent tree that rights itself after a strong wind, and the vital resources of every animal and plant all demonstrate the self-sufficient, and therefore self-relying, soul.
So everything comes to a single center. Let us not wander. Let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding crowd of people, books, and institutions with a simple declaration of the divine fact.
Tell the invaders to take off their shoes, as on holy ground, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them. Let our willingness to follow our own law show how poor nature and fortune are beside our native riches.
But as things stand, we are a mob. People do not stand in awe of one another. A person’s genius is not warned to stay at home and keep in touch with the ocean within. Instead it goes out to beg a cup of water from other people’s jars.
We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching. How distant, how cool, how pure the people look, each surrounded by a boundary, a sanctuary of his own! That is how we should always sit.
Why should we take on the faults of a friend, a wife, a father, or a child just because they sit around our hearth, or are said to share our blood? All people have my blood, and I have theirs. That is no reason for me to adopt their irritability or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it.
But your isolation must not be mechanical. It must be spiritual, which means it must be an elevation.
At times the whole world seems to conspire to pester you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, need, and charity all knock at once on the door of your private room and say, “Come out to us.”
But keep your dignity. Do not step into their confusion. Whatever power people have to annoy me, I give them through a weak curiosity. No one can come near me except through my own act. “What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love.”
If we cannot rise at once to the holiness of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations. Let us enter a state of war and wake Thor and Woden, the old gods of courage and constancy, in our Saxon hearts.
In our smooth times, this is done by speaking the truth. Put a stop to this lying hospitality and lying affection. Stop living up to the expectations of the deceived and deceiving people we talk with. Say to them:
“O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, until now I have lived with you according to appearances. From now on I belong to the truth. Know that from now on I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no agreements except the bonds of real closeness.
“I will try to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the faithful husband of one wife. But I must fill these relationships in a new and unprecedented way. I appeal against your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or for you.
“If you can love me for what I am, we will be happier. If you cannot, I will still try to deserve your love. I will not hide what I like or what I dislike. I trust so fully that what is deep is holy that I will do openly, before the sun and moon, whatever brings me inward joy and whatever my heart directs.
“If you are noble, I will love you. If you are not, I will not harm both you and me with hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth as I am, stay close to your companions; I will seek my own.
“I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly. However long we have lived in lies, it is in your interest, in mine, and in everyone’s to live in truth. Does this sound harsh today? You will soon love what your nature dictates, as well as what mine does. If we follow the truth, it will bring us out safely in the end.”
But in doing this you may give these friends pain. Yes. But I cannot sell my liberty and my power to spare their feelings. Besides, everyone has moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth. Then they will justify me, and do the same thing themselves.
The crowd assumes that rejecting popular standards means rejecting every standard, as if you were simply an antinomian, someone who believes himself above moral law. The bold pleasure-seeker, for his part, will borrow the name of philosophy to dress up his crimes. But the law of conscience still stands.
There are two confessionals, and we must be absolved in one or the other. You can fulfill your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct way or in the reflected way. The reflected way means asking whether you have met your obligations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog, and whether any of them can reproach you.
But I may also set aside this reflected standard and absolve myself before myself. I have my own strict demands and my own complete circle of obligation. That circle refuses to call many tasks duties that are commonly called duties. Yet if I can pay its debts, it allows me to do without the popular code. If anyone imagines this law is lax, let him try keeping its commandment for one day.
It truly demands something godlike in a person who has thrown off the ordinary motives of humanity and dared to trust himself as his own taskmaster. May his heart be high, his will faithful, and his sight clear, so that he can truly be doctrine, society, and law to himself. May a simple purpose be as strong to him as iron necessity is to others!
Anyone who looks at the present state of what is specially called “society” will see the need for these ethics. The muscle and heart of humanity seem to have been drawn out of us, and we have become timid, despairing whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.
Our age produces no great and complete persons. We need men and women who will renew life and our social condition. But we see that most people are bankrupt in character. They cannot meet their own needs. Their ambition is far out of proportion to their practical strength, and they lean on others and beg, day and night, without end.
Our households live like beggars. Our arts, our occupations, our marriages, and our religion were not chosen by us; society chose them for us. We are parlor soldiers. We avoid the rough battle with fate, which is where strength is born.
If our young men fail in their first ventures, they lose all heart. If a young merchant fails, people say he is ruined. Suppose the finest talent studies at one of our colleges and is not settled in a position within a year, in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York. His friends, and he himself, feel he is right to be discouraged and to complain for the rest of his life.
Compare him with a sturdy young man from New Hampshire or Vermont. In successive years he tries every line of work. He drives a team, farms, peddles goods, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so on. Like a cat, he always lands on his feet. He is worth a hundred of these city dolls.
He keeps pace with his days and feels no shame at not “studying a profession,” because he does not put off his life. He is already living it. He has not one chance but a hundred.
Let a Stoic reveal the resources of human nature. Let him tell people that they are not leaning willows, bending for support, but that they can and must stand free. Let him tell them that when they exercise self-trust, new powers will appear. Let him tell them that a man is the word made flesh, born to bring healing to the nations, and that he should be ashamed of our pity.
Let him tell them that the moment a man acts from himself, throwing the laws, the books, the idolatries, and the customs out the window, we stop pitying him and instead thank and revere him. That teacher will restore human life to its splendor and make his name dear to all of history.
It is easy to see that greater self-reliance must bring about a revolution in all of people’s roles and relationships. It must change their religion, their education, their pursuits, their ways of living, their associations, their property, and their speculative views.
- What prayers people allow themselves! What they call a holy act is not even brave and manly. Prayer looks outward and asks for some addition from outside, to arrive through some outside power. It loses itself in endless mazes of the natural and the supernatural, of mediators and miracles. Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is a vice.
Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a soul that beholds and rejoices. It is the spirit of God declaring his works good. But prayer used as a means to a private end is meanness and theft. It assumes a dualism, a split, rather than unity in nature and in consciousness.
As soon as a person is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The farmer kneeling in his field to weed it and the rower kneeling with each stroke of his oar are offering true prayers, heard throughout nature, even though their ends are humble.
In Fletcher’s play Bonduca, the character Caratach is urged to ask the will of the god Audate. He replies:
“His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
Our valors are our best gods.”
Our regrets are another kind of false prayer. Discontent is a lack of self-reliance; it is a weakness of the will. Regret a calamity if doing so helps the person who suffers. If it does not, attend to your own work, and the evil already begins to be repaired.
Our sympathy is just as base. We go to people who are weeping foolishly, and we sit down and cry with them for company. Instead, we should give them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them back in touch with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our own hands.
The self-helping man is always welcome to gods and to people. For him every door is flung open. Every tongue greets him, every honor crowns him, and every eye follows him with desire. Our love goes out and embraces him precisely because he did not need it.
We anxiously and apologetically flatter and celebrate him because he kept to his path and scorned our disapproval. The gods love him because men hated him. “To the persevering mortal,” said Zoroaster, “the blessed Immortals are swift.”
Men’s prayers are a disease of the will, and in the same way their creeds are a disease of the intellect. They say, like those foolish Israelites, “Let not God speak to us, lest we die. You speak to us, let any man speak with us, and we will obey.”
Everywhere I am kept from meeting God in my brother, because he has shut the doors of his own temple. He merely recites fables about his brother’s God, or his brother’s brother’s God.
Every new mind is a new classification, a new way of ordering things. Suppose it proves to be a mind of unusual activity and power: a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier. Then it imposes its classification on other people, and suddenly there is a new system.
The pupil’s satisfaction grows with the depth of the thought, and so with the number of things it touches and brings within his reach. This is most visible in creeds and churches. They too are classifications made by some powerful mind working on the basic thought of duty and of humanity’s relation to the Highest. Calvinism, Quakerism, and Swedenborgism are examples.
The pupil delights in fitting everything under the new terminology, just as a girl who has just learned botany sees a new earth and new seasons through it. For a while, the pupil will find that his intellectual power has grown by studying his master’s mind.
But in all unbalanced minds, the classification becomes an idol. It is taken for the goal rather than for a means that is quickly used up. In their eyes, the walls of the system blend with the walls of the universe on the distant horizon. The lights of heaven seem to hang from the arch their master built.
They cannot imagine how you outsiders have any right to see, or how you can see at all. “Somehow you must have stolen the light from us,” they think. They do not yet see that light, unsystematic and unconquerable, will break into any cabin, even theirs.
Let them chirp for a while and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, their neat new pinfold, the pen where they keep their flock, will soon be too narrow and too low. It will crack, lean, rot, and vanish. Then the immortal light, young and joyful, million-orbed and million-colored, will shine over the universe as on the first morning.
- It is from a lack of self-cultivation that the superstition of Travel, whose idols are Italy, England, and Egypt, keeps its hold on all educated Americans. Those who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in our imagination did it by staying firmly where they were, like the axis of the earth. In our strongest hours we feel that duty is our place.
The soul is no traveler. The wise man stays at home. When his needs or duties call him out of his house or into foreign countries, he is still at home. His expression will make people sense that he goes as a missionary of wisdom and virtue, visiting cities and people like a sovereign, not like an intruder or a servant.
I have no grudging objection to sailing around the globe for the sake of art, study, or charity. My condition is that the man first be at home in himself, or that he not go abroad hoping to find something greater than what he already knows.
Someone who travels to be amused, or to get something he does not carry with him, travels away from himself. He grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes and in Palmyra, his will and mind become as old and crumbling as the ruins around him. He carries ruins to ruins.
Travel is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys show us that one place is as good as another. At home I dream that in Naples or Rome I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, set out to sea, and finally wake up in Naples.
And there beside me is the stern fact: the sad self, unrelenting and unchanged, that I fled from. I seek out the Vatican and the palaces. I pretend to be intoxicated with the sights and what they suggest, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
- But the craze for travel is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness that affects the whole working of the intellect. The intellect is a vagabond, and our system of education encourages restlessness. Our minds travel even when our bodies are forced to stay home. We imitate, and what is imitation but the mind traveling?
Our houses are built in foreign styles. Our shelves are decorated with foreign ornaments. Our opinions, our tastes, and our faculties lean on the Past and the Distant and follow them. Yet the soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. The artist looked for his model in his own mind. He applied his own thought to the task at hand and to the conditions he had to respect.
So why should we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and striking expression are as near to us as to anyone. The American artist should study, with hope and love, exactly what he has to do.
He must consider the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the needs of the people, and the habits and form of the government. Then he will create a house in which all these find themselves suited, and in which taste and feeling are satisfied as well.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer at every moment with the accumulated force of a whole life’s cultivation. Of someone else’s borrowed talent, you have only a makeshift, half possession. What each person can do best, no one but his Maker can teach him.
No one yet knows what that is, or can know, until that person has shown 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 man is unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely the part he could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by studying Shakespeare.
Do what is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. At this moment there is an utterance meant for you, as brave and grand as the colossal chisel of Phidias, the trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all of them.
The soul, all-rich and all-eloquent, speaking with a thousand tongues, will never stoop to repeat itself. But if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can answer them in the same pitch of voice, for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Stay in the simple and noble regions of your life, obey your heart, and you will reproduce the Foreworld again.
- Just as our religion, our education, and our art look abroad, so does our social spirit. Everyone prides himself on the improvement of society, and no one improves.
Society never advances. It loses ground on one side as fast as it gains on the other. It goes through constant changes. It is barbarous, then civilized, then Christianized, then rich, then scientific. But change is not improvement. For everything society is given, something is taken away. It acquires new skills and loses old instincts.
Consider the contrast between two men. One is the well-dressed American who reads, writes, and thinks, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket. The other is the naked New Zealander, whose whole property is a club, a spear, a mat, and a one-twentieth share of a shed to sleep under.
Now compare the health of the two men, and you will see that the white man has lost his original strength. If travelers’ reports are true, you can strike the New Zealander with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh will close and heal, as if you had struck soft pitch. The same blow would send the white man to his grave.
The civilized man has built a coach, but he has lost the use of his feet. He leans on crutches, and lacks the support his own muscles once gave him. He owns a fine Geneva watch, but he no longer knows how to tell the time by the sun.
He has a Greenwich nautical almanac. Because he can look up the positions of the stars whenever he needs them, the ordinary man in the street cannot recognize a single star in the sky. He does not notice the solstice, and he knows just as little about the equinox. The whole bright calendar of the year has no dial in his mind to mark it.
His notebooks weaken his memory. His libraries overload his intelligence. The insurance office increases the number of accidents. We may fairly ask whether machinery is a burden. Perhaps refinement has cost us some energy. Perhaps a Christianity entrenched in institutions and forms has cost us some of the vigor of wild virtue. Every Stoic was truly a Stoic, but in Christendom, where is the Christian?
The moral standard varies no more than the standard of human height or size. There are no greater men now than there ever were. A remarkable equality appears between the great men of the earliest ages and those of the latest. All the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century cannot produce greater men than Plutarch’s heroes, who lived twenty-three or twenty-four centuries ago.
The human race does not progress over time. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, and Diogenes are great men, but they leave behind no class of followers who share their greatness. Someone who truly belongs in their company will not be called by their names. He will be his own man, and in his turn will found a school of his own.
The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume. They do not make people stronger. The harm done by improved machinery may cancel out its good. Hudson and Bering accomplished so much in their fishing boats that they astonished Parry and Franklin, whose equipment used every resource that science and art could supply.
Galileo, with an opera glass, discovered a more splendid series of things in the heavens than anyone has discovered since. Columbus found the New World in an open boat without a deck. It is curious to watch how tools and machinery, introduced with loud praise a few years or centuries earlier, periodically fall out of use and disappear. The great genius returns to what is essential in man.
We counted the improvements in the art of war among the triumphs of science. Yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, camping in the open. This meant falling back on bare courage and stripping away everything that had been added to help it.
According to Las Cases, the Emperor believed it impossible to build a perfect army “without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself.”
Society is a wave. The wave moves forward, but the water that makes it up does not. The same drop of water does not travel from the trough to the crest. The wave’s unity is only an appearance. The people who make up a nation today will die next year, and their experience dies with them.
In the same way, reliance on property, including reliance on the governments that protect it, is a lack of self-reliance. People have looked away from themselves and toward things for so long that they now value religious, educational, and civil institutions mainly as guards of property. They object to attacks on these institutions because they feel them as attacks on property.
They measure their respect for one another by what each person has, not by what each person is. But a cultivated man grows ashamed of his property, out of a new respect for his own nature. He especially dislikes what he owns if he sees that it came to him by accident, through inheritance, a gift, or a crime.
Then he feels that this is not really having anything. It does not belong to him. It has no root in him. It simply lies there because no revolution or robber has yet taken it away.
But what a man is always acquires something, by necessity. What he acquires in this way is living property. It does not wait on the signal of rulers, mobs, or revolutions, and it does not fear fire, storm, or bankruptcy. It constantly renews itself wherever the man lives and breathes. As the Caliph Ali said, “Thy lot or portion of life is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.”
Our dependence on these outside goods leads to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in crowded conventions. The larger the gathering, and the louder each new announcement—“The delegation from Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine!”—the stronger the young patriot feels, as if he had gained a thousand new eyes and arms.
The reformers do the same. They call conventions and vote and pass resolutions in large numbers. Not this way, my friends, will God consent to enter and live in you. It happens by exactly the opposite method. Only when a man puts aside all outside support and stands alone do I see him become strong and prevail. Every recruit who joins his banner makes him weaker.
Is not one man worth more than a town? Ask nothing of other people. Then, amid endless change, you alone will stand as the firm column, and you will soon be seen as the support of everything around you.
A man may come to know that power is inborn. He may see that he has been weak because he looked for good outside himself, somewhere else. Once he sees this, he throws himself without hesitation on his own thought. He instantly rights himself, stands upright, commands his limbs, and works miracles, just as a man standing on his feet is stronger than a man standing on his head.
Use everything called Fortune in the same way. Most people gamble with her. They win everything and lose everything as her wheel turns. But you should leave those winnings alone, as if they were unlawful. Deal instead with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God.
Work and acquire through your own will, and you will have chained the wheel of Chance. From then on you can sit free from fear of its turning.
A political victory, a rise in rents, the recovery of someone who was sick, the return of an absent friend, or some other happy event lifts your spirits, and you think good days are coming. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.