"Self-Reliance" (first published in Essays, 1841)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)
Our age is retrospective. It builds sepulchers to the fathers.
It writes
biographies, histories, and criticism.
The foregoing
generations beheld God face to face; we, through
their eyes.
Why should we not enjoy an original relation to the
universe?
Why should
we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight
and not of tradition, and a religion of revelation
to us, and not
a history of
theirs? . . . why should we grope among the dry
bones of the past, or put the living generation
into masquerade
out of its
faded wardrobe? The sun shines today
also. There
is more wool
and flax in the fields. There are new
lands, new
men, new
thoughts. Let us demand our own works
and laws
and
worship. --from the
"Introduction" to Nature,
1836
To believe in your own thoughts, to believe that what is
true for you in your private heart, is true for all men--that is genius.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light
that flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament
of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses
without notice his thought, because it is his.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at
the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must
take for himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide
universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but
through his toil on that plot of ground which is given him to till.
We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that
divine idea which each of us represents.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. . .
Great men have always done so.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this in the face and
behavior of children, babes, and even brutes.
That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our
arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these
have
not. . . . The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner,
and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught conciliate one, is the
healthy attitude of human nature.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of
every one of its members. Society is a
joint-stock company in which the members agree for the better securing of his
bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue is most request is
conformity. Self-reliance is its
aversion. It loves not realities and
creators, but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own
mind. . . . No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily
transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution,
the only wrong is what is against it. A
man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing
were titular and ephemeral but he. I am
ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large
societies and dead institutions.
I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius
calls me. I would write on the lintels
of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is
somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in
explanation. Expect me not to show cause
why I seek or why I exclude company.
Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my
obligation to put all poor men in good institutions. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist,
that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give such men as do not belong
to me to whom I do not belong . . . . though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb
and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the
manhood to withhold.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception
than the rule . . . Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of
courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily
non-appearance on parade. Their works
are done as an apology . . . I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.
What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what people
think. . . . It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is
easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the
midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead
to you, is that it scatters your force.
It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character . . . If
you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-Society, vote with a
great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like
base housekeepers--under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the
precise man you are. . . . But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce
yourself. A man must consider what a
blind-man’s-bluff is this game of conformity.
If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.
Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another
handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of
opinion. This conformity makes them not
false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all
particulars. Their every truth is not quite true.
For nonconformity, the world whips you with its displeasure.
The other terror that scares us
from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word
because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our
past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them
But why should you keep your head
over your shoulder? Why drag about this
corpse of your memory.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply
nothing to do.
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 hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity
and consistency.
Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires
infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design.
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his
feet. Let him not peep or steal, or
skulk up and down with an air of a charity-boy, a bastard, an interloper in the
world which exists for him. But the man
in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which
built a tower or sculpted a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book
have an alien and forbidding air . . .
Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history our imagination plays us
false. Kingdom and lordship, power and
estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John or Edward in a small house
and common day's work; but the things of life are the same to both . . .
What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star,
without parallax, without calculable elements, which shots a ray of beauty even
into the trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence
appear? This inquiry leads us to that
source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call
Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this
primary wisdom as Intuitions, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind
which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin.
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure,
that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.
It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing,
but all things; should fill the world with his voice . . .
If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and
carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another
country, in another world, believe him not. . . . Whence then this worship of
the past? The centuries are conspirators
against the sanity and authority of the soul.
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he
dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or
sage. He is ashamed before the blade of
grass or the blowing rose. These roses
under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are for
what they are; they exist with God to-day.
But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the
present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches
that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy an strong until he too
lives in nature in the present, above time.
Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet to hear God
himself unless he speaks the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah,
or Paul. We shall not always set so
great a price on a few texts, on a few lives.
We are like children who repeat by rote sentences of granddames and
tutors.
Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose.
This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the
past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the
saint with a rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.
But now we are a mob.
Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay
at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes
abroad to beg a cup of water, of the urn of other men. We must go alone.
I like the silent church before the service begins, better
than any preaching.
At times the whole world seems to be in a conspiracy to
importune you with emphatic trifles.
Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once
at they closet door and say—“Come out unto us.”
But keep thy state; come not into their confusion.
[L]et us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into
the state of war . . . This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the
truth. Check this lying hospitality and
lying affection. Live no longer to the
expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse.
Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupation, our
marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us.
It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a
revolution in all offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their
education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in
their property; in their speculative views.
Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to
come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural
and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity,
anything less than all good is vicious . . . . But prayer as a means to effect
a private end, is meanness and theft. It
supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he
will not beg.
As men's prayers area disease of the will, so are creeds a
disease of the intellect . . . . Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my
brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of
his brother’s, or his brother’s brother’s God.
It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of
Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for
all educated Americans.
Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the
indifference of places. At home I dream
that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my
sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my
friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me
is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
As to our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so
does our spirit of society. All men
plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.
Society never advances.
It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other . . . Society
acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of
his feet. He is supported on crutches,
but lacks so much support of muscle. He
has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the
sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he
has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the
street does not know a star in the sky.
The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows a little; and the
whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his
libraries overload his wit; the insurance company increases the number of
accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber;
whether we have lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in
establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on
governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at
things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, the learned, and
civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these,
because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other, by
what each has, and not what each is.
He who knows that Power is inborn, that he is weak because
he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws
himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the
erect position, commands his limbs [and] works miracles . . .
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph
of principles.
