When Is A Conspiracy Not a Conspiracy?

The Before-His-Time Ideas
of Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the under appreciated American philosophers is the “transcendentalist” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the Harvard-educated teacher and pastor who, to the surprise of almost everyone, had the courage to resign a pastorate for reasons of conscience—people desperately wanted pastorates in those days, regardless of their religious convictions—and spent his life traveling, lecturing, and writing. One of the many famous people Emerson talked with in his travels was Abraham Lincoln, who even in 1862 at the height of the Civil War, wanted to discuss ideas with the famous thinker and recalled something he’d heard Emerson say at a lecture nearly twenty years earlier. Emerson, “the sage of Concord,” made an impression with his words.

And these words are what we’d like to share with you—though we ask you to recall that in the 1800s, the term “man” meant a true human being (and note that we’ve modernized some of the punctuation). So here are some of the thoughts of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which, though over a century old, still have the philosophical and literary power to inspire:

From “An Address”

What in these desponding days can be done by us? The remedy is already declared in the ground of our complaint of the Church. We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In the soul then let the redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. When man comes, all books are legible, all things transparent, all religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the wonderworker. He is seen amid miracles. ... All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret: they love to be blind in public. They think society wiser than their soul and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.

From “Nature”

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.

From “The American Scholar”

The one thing in the world of value is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him although in almost all men obstructed and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth or creates. In this action it is genius: not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man.

Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconcious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know as I have lived. Instantly, we know whose words are loaded with life and whose not. ... I learn immediatley from any speaker how much he has already lived through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. ... Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.

Fear always springs from ignorance. ... The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance—by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

From “Intellect”

We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in art. I knew in an academic club a person who always deferred to me, who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied my experiences somewhat superior, while I saw that his experiences were as good as mine. ... Perhaps if we should meet Shakespeare, we should not be conscious of any steep inferiority; no, but of a great equality—only that he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying his facts which we lacked. For notwithstanding our utter incapacity to produce anything like Hamlet or Othello, see the perfect reception this wit and immense knowledge of life and liquid eloquence find in us all.

From “Politics”

Hence the less government we have, the better—the fewer laws and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual ... the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government is, it must be owned, a shabby imitation.

From “Experience”

In reply to the inquiry, Why not realize your world? [I say that] there never was a right endeavor but it succeeded. 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 and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight, which becomes the light of our life. ... In the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. 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.