Self-Reliance
By Ralph Waldo
Emerson
.
THE ESSAY ON
S E L F-RELI ANCE
By RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Printed by The Roycrofters at their Shop which is in
East Aurora, New York, Nineteen Hundred Eight
Copyright
1908
By Elbert Hubbard
SELF-RELIANCE
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolfs teat:
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
READ the other day some verses
written by an eminent painter which
were original and not conventional.
Always the soul hears an admonition
in such lines, let the subject be what
it may. The sentiment they instill is
of more value than any thought 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 your latent conviction and it shall be the
universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the
outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to
us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the
highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton,
is that they set at naught books and traditions, and
spoke not what men, but what they, thought. A
man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of
light which 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.
9
ftelf- In every work of genius we recognize our own
Reliance rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a
certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have
no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach
us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good
humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry
of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a
stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely
what we have thought and felt all the time, and we
shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion
from another.
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 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 bestowed
on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
The power which resides in him is new in nature,
and none but he knows what that is which he can
do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact
makes much impression on him, and another none.
10
It is not without pre-established harmony, this
sculpture in the memory. The eye was placed where Reliance
one ray should fall, that it might testify of that
particular ray. Bravely let him speak the utmost
syllable of his confession 35 We but half express
ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which
each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as
proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully
imparted, but God will not have his work made
manifest by cowards. It needs a divine man to exhibit
any thing divine. A man is relieved and gay when
he has put his heart into his work and done his best;
but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give
him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not
deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no
muse befriends; no invention, no hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Accept the place the divine Providence has found
for you; the society of your contemporaries, the
connexion of events. Great men have always done
so and confided themselves childlike to the genius
of their age, betraying their perception that the
Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through
11
their hands, predominating in all their being. And
Reliance we are now men, and must accept in the highest
mind the same transcendent destiny; and not pinched
in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution,
but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be
noble clay, plastic under the Almighty effort, let us
advance and advance on Chaos and the Dark.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text 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. Their mind being whole, their eye is as
yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces,
we are disconcerted.
Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so
that one babe commonly makes four or five out of
the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has
armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with
its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable
and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it
will stand by itself.
Do not think the youth has no force because he
12
cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room,
who spoke so clear and emphatic? Good Heaven!
it is he! it is that very lump of bashfulness and
phlegm which for weeks has done nothing but eat
when you were by, that now rolls out these words
like bell -strokes. It seems he knows how to speak to
his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will
know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.
fJThe nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner,
and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say
aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of
human nature. How is a boy the master of society!
independent, irresponsible, looking out from his
corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries
and sentences them on their merits, in the swift
summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting,
silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself
never about consequences, about interests: he gives
an independent, genuine verdict. You must court
him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it
were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As
soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he
is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or
13
the hatred of hundreds whose affections must now
Reliance enter into his account.
There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass
again into his neutral, godlike independence! Who
can thus lose all pledge, and having observed, observe
again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable,
unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable,
must always engage the poet's and the man's regards.
Of such an immortal youth the force would be felt.
He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which
being seen to be not private but necessary, would
sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in
fear s 5$
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but
they grow faint and audible as we enter into the
world. 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 share-
. holder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the
eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.
Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and
creators, but names and customs.
14
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
He who would gather immortal palms must not be Reliance
hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore
if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the
integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself,
and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
I remember an answer which when quite young I
was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was
wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines
of the church. On my saying, What have I to do
with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly
from within? my friend suggested "But these
impulses may be from below, not from above." I
replied, They do not seem to me to be such; but
if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the
devil. 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 what is against it. A
man is to carry himself in the presence of all oppo
sition as if everything were titular and ephemeral
but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we
15
capitulate to badges and names, to large societies
Reliance and dead institutions.
Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and
sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright
and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If
malice and vanity wear the coat of philantrophy,
shall that pass? 35 If an angry bigot assumes this
bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with
his last news of the Barbadoes, why should I not
say to him, "Go love thy infant; love thy wood-
chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that
grace; and never varnish, your hard, uncharitable
ambition with this increditable tenderness for black
folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at
home." Rough and graceless would be such greeting,
but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.
Your goodness must have some edge to it else
it is none.
The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the
counteraction of the doctrine of love when that
pules and whines. 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
16
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
to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good
situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish
philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime,
the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to
me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class
of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am
bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if
need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities;
the education at college of fools; the building of
meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now
stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief
Societies; 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. There is the man and his
virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as
17
some piece of courage or charity, much as they would
Reliance p a y a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on
parade 3& Their works are done as an apology or
extenuation of their living in the world, as invalids
and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are
penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My
life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and
not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be
of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than
that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it
to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and
bleeding. My life should be unique; it should be an
alms, a conquest, a medicine. I ask primary evidence
that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the
man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes
no difference whether I do or forbear those actions
which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to
pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few
and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and
do not need for my own assurance or the assurance
of my fellows any secondary testimony.
What must I do, is all that concerns me, not what
the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual
' 18
and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole
distinction between greatness and meanness. It is Reliance
the harder, because you will always find those who
think they know what is your duty better than you
know it. \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, j
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. And of course, so much force is withdrawn
from your proper life. But do your thing, and I shall
know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce
yourself. A man must consider what a blind-man's-
buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect,
I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce
19
for his text and topic the expediency of one of the
Reliance institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand
that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous
word? Do I not know that all this ostentation of
examining the grounds of the institution, he will do
no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to
himself not to look but at one side; the permitted
side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is
a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are
the emptiest affectation. 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.
Their two is not the real two, their four not the real
four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and
we know not where to begin to set them right 35
Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the
prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere.
We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and
acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.
fl There is a mortifying experience in particular
20
which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general
history; I mean, "the foolish face of praise," the 3&eliance
forced smile which we put on in company where we
do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which
does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously
moved, but moved by a low usurping wilfulness,
grow tight about the outline of the face and make
the most disagreeable sensation, a sensation of rebuke
and warning which no brave young man will suffer
twice 35 S&
For non-conformity the world whips you with its
displeasure. And therefore a man must know how
to estimate a sour face. The bystanders look askance
on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor.
If this aversation had its origin in contempt and
resistance like his own, he might well go home with
a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multi
tude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause,
disguise no god, but are put on and off as the wind
blows, and a newspaper directs.
Yet is the discontent of the multitude more formid
able than that of the senate and the college. It is
easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to
21
= brook the rage of the cultured classes. Their rage is
Reliance decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being
very vulnerable themselves 35 But when to their
feminine rage the indignation of the people is added,
when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when
the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom
of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the
habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike
as a trifle of no concernment.
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 monstrous corpse of
your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have
stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should
contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule
of wisdon never to rely on your memory alone,
scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but bring the
past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present,
and live ever in a new day. Trust your emotion. In
22
your metaphysics you have denied personality to the
Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, Reliance
yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe
God with shape and color. Leave your theory as
Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.
CJ A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers
and divinesj With consistency a great soul has simply
nothing to do\ He may as well concern himself with
his shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded lips!
Sew them up with packthread, do. Else, if you
would be a man, speak what you think to-day in
words as hard as cannon-balls, and to-morrow speak
what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though
it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ah, then,
exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be
misunderstood. Misunderstood! It is a right fool's
word s& 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
23
sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his
3&eliance being as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh
are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does
it matter how you gauge and try him. A character
is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it
forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same
thing. In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God
allows me, let me record day by day my hone3t
thought without prospect or retrospect, and I cannot
doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean
it not, and see it not. My book should smell of pines
and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow
over my window should interweave that thread or
straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We
pass for what we are. Character teaches above our
wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue
or vice only by overt actions and do not see that
virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
Fear never but you shall be consistent in whatever
variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural
in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be
harmonious, however unlike they seem. These
varieties are lost sight of when seen at a little distance,
24
at a little height of thought. One tendency unites
them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag Reliance
line of a hundred tacks. This is only microscopic
criticism. See the line from a sufficient distance, and
it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your
genuine action will explain itself and will explain
your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains
nothing. Act singly, and what you have already
done singly, will justify you now.
Greatness always appeals to the future. If I can be
great enough to do right now and scorn eyes, I must
have done so much right before, as to defend me
now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn
appearances, and you always may. The force of
character is cumulative. All the foregone days of
virtue work their health into this. What makes the
majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field,
which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of
a train of great days and victories behind. There
they all stand and shed an united light on the
advancing actor 35 He is attended as by a visible
escort of angels to every man's eye. That is it which
throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity
25
into Washington's port, and America into Adam's
lUitaiue eye 5$ Honor is venerable to us because it is no
ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship
it to-day, because it is not of to-day. We love it
and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our
love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived,
and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even
if shown in a young person.
I hope in these days we have heard the last of con
formity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted
and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for
dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife.
Let us bow and apologize never more.
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
affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and
squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the
face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which
is the upshot of all history, that there is a great
responsible Thinker and Actor moving wherever
moves a man; that a true man belongs to no other
26
time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he
is, there is nature. He measures you, and all men,
and all events. You are constrained to accept his
standard.
Ordinarily everybody in society reminds us of some
what else or of some other person. Character, reality,
reminds you of nothing else. It takes place of the
whole creation. The man must be so much that he
must make all circumstances indifferent, put all
means into the shade. This all great men are and do.
fl Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age ;
requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully
to accomplish his thought; and posterity seem to
follow his steps as a procession. A man Caesar is
born and for ages after, we have a Roman Empire.
Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and
cleave to His genius, that He is confounded with
virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the
lengthened shadow of one man; as the Reformation,
of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of
Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson 35 Scipio, Milton
called "the height of Rome;" and all history resolves
itself very easily into the biography of a stout and
27
earnest persons. t| Let a man then know his worth,
Jfcritance and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or
steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-
boy, a bastard, or 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 sculptured 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, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like
that, 'Who are you, sir?' Yet they all are his, suitors
for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they
will come out and take possession. The picture waits
for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am
to settle its claims to praise.
That popular fable of the sot who was picked up
dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house,
washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and
on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony
like the duke, and assured that he had been insane,
-owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes
so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort
of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his
28
reason, and finds himself a true prince. J Our reading
is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagi- Reliance
nation makes fools of us, plays us false. Kingdom
and lordship, power and estate are a gaudier vocabu
lary than private John and Edward in a small house
and common day's work: but the things of life are
the same to 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 out virtue? As great a stake depends on your
private act to-day, as followed their public and
renowned steps. When private men shall act with
vast views, the lustre will be transferred from the
actions of kings to those of gentlemen.
The world has indeed been instructed by its kings,
who have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has
been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual
reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful
loyalty with which men have every where suffered
the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk
among them by a law of his own, make his own
scale of- men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for
benefits not with money but with honor, and represent
29
the Law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which
Reliance they obscurely signified their consciousness of their
own right and comeliness, the right of every man.
tjfThe magnetism which all original action exerts is
explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust.
Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self on
which a universal reliance may be grounded? What
is the nature and power of that science-baffling star,
without parallax, without calculable elements, which
shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure
actions, if the least mark of independence appear?
The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the
essence of genius, the essence of virtue, the essence
of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We
denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all
later teachings are tuitions.
In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis
cannot go, all things find their common origin. For
the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we
know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things,
from space, from light, from time, from man, but
one with them, and proceedeth obviously from the
same source whence their life and being also
30
proceedeth. We first share the life by which things
exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in JUliance
nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.
<JHere is the fountain of action and the fountain of
thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which
giveth man wisdom, of that inspiration of man which
cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We
lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes
us organs of its activity and receivers of its truth.
When we discern justice, we discern truth, we do
nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.
If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into
the soul that causes, all metaphysics, all philosophy
is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can
affirm 33 33
Every man discerns between the voluntary acts of
his mind, and his involuntary perceptions. And to
his involuntary perceptions, he knows a perfect
respect is due. He may err in the expression of them,
but he knows that these things are so, like day and
night, not to be disputed. All my wilful actions and
acquisitions are but roving; the most trivial reverie,
the faintest native emotion are domestic and divine.
31
^[Thoughtless people contradict as readily the state-
Reliance ment of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much
more readily; for, they do not distinguish between
perception and notion. They fancy that I choose to
see this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical,
but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after
me, and in course of time, all mankind, although
it may chance that no one has seen it before me.
For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.
fJThe 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 com
municate not one thing, but all things; should fill
the world with His voice; should scatter forth light,
nature, time, souls, from the center of the present
thought; and new date and new create the whole.
Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine
wisdom, then old things pass away, means, teachers,
texts, temples fall; it lives now and absorbs past and
future into the present hour. All things are made
sacred by relation to it, one thing as much as
another. All things are dissolved to their center by
their cause, and in the universal miracle petty
32
and particular miracles disappear. ^|This is and must Sbttt-
be. If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak of Jtelianee
God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of
some old mouldered nation in another country, in
another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better
than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is
the parent better than the child into whom he has
cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship
of the past?
The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and
majesty of the soul. Time and space are but physio
logical colors which the eye maketh, but the soul is
light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and
history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be
anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable
of my being and becoming.
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 to
better ones; they are for what they are; they exist
with God to-day. There is no time to them. There
33
is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of
J&eliance its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole
life acts; in the full-blown flower, there is no more;
in the leafless root, there is no less 3& Its nature is
satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike.
There is no time to it.
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 forsee the future. He cannot be
happy and strong until he, too, lives with nature in
the present, above time.
This should be plain enough. You see what strong
intellects dare not yet hear God Himself, unless He
speak 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 the sentences of
grandames and tutors, and as they grow older, of
the men of talents and character they chance to see,
painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke;
afterwards, when they come into the point of view
which those had who uttered these sayings, they
34
understand them, and are willing to let the words
go; for, at any time, they can use words as good, Reliance
when occasion comes. So was it with us, so will it
be, if we proceed. If we live truly, we shall see truly.
{} It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it
is for the weak to be weak. When we have new
perception, we shall gladly disburthen the memory
of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man
lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the
murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.
fj And now at last the highest truth on this subject
remains unsaid; probably, cannot be said; for all that
we say is the far off remembering of the intuition.
That thought, by what I can now nearest approach
to say it, is this. When good is near you, when you
have life in yourself, it is not by any known or
appointed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints
of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you
shall not hear any name; the way, the thought, the
good shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude
all other being. You take the way from man not to
man. All persons that ever existed are its fugitive
ministers. There shall be no fear in it. Fear and hope
35
are alike beneath it. It asks nothing. If There is
Reliance somewhat low even in hope. We are then in vision.
There is nothing that can be called gratitude nor
properly joy. The soul is raised over passion. It seeth
identity and eternal causation. It is a perceiving that
Truth and Right are. Hence it becomes a Tran
quillity out of the knowing that all things go well.
Vast spaces of nature; the Atlantic Ocean, the
South Sea; vast intervals of time, years, centuries,
are of no account.
This which I think and feel, underlay that former
state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie
my present, and will always all circumstance, and
what is called life, and what is called death.
Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases
in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of
transition from a past to a new state; in the shooting
of the gulf; in the darting to an aim. 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
the rogue; shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.
Why then do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch
36
as the soul is present, there will be power not confident
but agent. Reliance
To talk of reliance, is a poor external way of speaking.
Speak rather of that which relies, because it works
and is. Who has more soul than I, masters me, though
he should not raise his finger. Round him I must
evolve by the gravitation of spirits; who has less, I
rule with like facility. We fancy it rhetoric when
we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that
virtue is Height, and that a man or company of men
plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of
nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations,
kings, rich men, poets, who are not.
This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach
on this as on every topic, the resolution of all into
the ever blessed One. Virtue is the governor, the
creator, the reality. All things real are so by so much
of virtue as they contain. Hardship, husbandry,
hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, personal weight,
are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples
of the soul's presence and impure action.
I see the same law working in nature for conversation
and growth. The poise of a planet, the bended tree
37
recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital
JXeltance resources of every vegetable and animal, are also
demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore
self-relying soul. All history from its highest to its
trivial passages is the various record of this power.
Thus all concentrates; let us not rove; let us sit at
home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the
intruding rabble of men and books and institutions by
a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid them
take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here
within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility
to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature
and fortune beside our native riches.
But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe
of man, nor is the soul 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 urns of men. We must go alone. Isolation must
precede true society.
I like the silent church before the service begins,
better than any preaching. How far off, how cool,
how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a
precinct or sanctuary. So let us always sit. Why
38
should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife,
or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, Reliance
or are said to have the same blood? All men have
my blood, and I have all men's. Not for that will I
adopt their petulance and folly, even to the extent
of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must
not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be
elevation.
At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy
to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client,
child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once
at thy closet door and say, "Come out unto us."
Do not spill thy soul; do not all descend; keep thy
state; stay at home in thine own heaven; come not
for a moment into their facts, into their hubbub of
conflicting appearances, but let in the light of thy
law on their confusion. The power men possess to
annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man
can come near me but through my act. "What we
love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves
of the love."
If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedi
ence and faith, let us at least resist our temptations,
39
let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor
Reliance and Woden, courage and constancy in our Saxon
breasts. 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. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife,
brother, O friend, I have lived with you after
appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's.
fJBe it known unto you that henceforward I obey
no law less than the external law. I will have no
covenants but proximities. 1 shall endeavor to nourish
my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste
husband of one wife, but these relations I must fill
after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from
your customs. I must be myself.
1 cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If
you can love me for what I am, we shall be happier.
If you cannot, I will still to deserve that you should.
I must be myself. I will not hide my tastes or aversions.
I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will
do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly
rejoices me, and the heart appoints.
40
If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I
will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical atten- Reliance
tions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with
me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own.
I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is
alike your interest and mine and all men's, however
long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does
this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what
is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if
we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last.
But so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but
I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their
sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments
of reason when they look out into the region of
absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the
same thing.
The populace think that your rejection of popular
standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere
antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the
name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law
of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals,
in one or the other of which we must be shriven.
You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing
41
yourself in the direct, or, in the reflex way. Consider
Reliance whether you have satisfied your relations to father,
mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat and dog; whether
any of these can upbraid you.
But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and
absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims
and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to
many offices that are called duties. But if I can
discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with
the popular code. If any one imagines that this law
is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.
And truly it demands something godlike in him who
has cast off the common motives of humanity, and
has ventured to trust himself for a task-master. High
be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he
may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law to
himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as
strong as iron necessity is to others.
If any may consider the present aspects of what is
called by distinction society, he will see the need of
these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to
be drawn out, and we are becoming timorous des
ponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid
42
of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.
Our age yields no great and perfect persons. Reliance
We want men and women who shall renovate life
and our social state, but we see that most natures are
insolvent; cannot satisfy their own wants, have an
ambition out of all proportion to their practical force,
and so do lean and beg day and night continually.
Our housekeeper is mendicant, our arts, our occu
pations, our marriages, our religion we have not
chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor
soldiers. The rugged battle of fate, where strength is
born, we shun.
If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises,
they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men
say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of
our colleges, and is installed in an office within one
year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or
New York, it seems to his friends and to himself
that he is right in being disheartened and in com
plaining the rest of his life.
A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont,
who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it,
farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a
43
newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and
Reliance so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat,
falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city
dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no
shame in not "studying a profession," for he does not
postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one
chance, but a hundred chances.
Let a stoic arise who shall reveal the resources of
man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but
can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise
of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is
the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the
nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion,
and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing
the laws, the books, idolatries and customs out of
the window, we pity him no more but thank and
revere him, and that the teacher shall restore the
life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to
all History.
It is easier to see that a greater self-reliance, a new
respect for the divinity in man, must work a revo
lution in all the offices and relations of men; in their
religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their
44
modes of living; their association; in their property;
in their speculative views. JReliance
1 . In what prayers do men allow themselves! That
which they call a holy office, is not so much as brave
and manly. 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 any thing less
than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation
of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It
is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It
is the spirit of God pronouncing His works good.
tjfBut prayer as a means to effect a private end, is
theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity
in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is
at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see
prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling
in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling
with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard
throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach,
in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to inquire
the mind of the god Audate, replies,
45
His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors,
Reliance ^ ur va ^ ors are our kest gds.
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Dis
content is the want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of
will. Regret calamities, if you can therefore help
the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already
the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just
as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and
sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting
to them truth and health in rough electric shocks,
putting them once more in communication with the
soul. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands.
Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-
helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him
all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow
with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces
him, because he did not need it. We solicitously
and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because
he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation.
The gods love him because men hated him. "To the
persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the blessed
Immortals are swift."
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are
46
their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with
those foolish Israelites, "Let not God speak to us, Reliance
lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and
we will obey." Everywhere I am bereaved 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.
Every new mind is a new classification. If it prove
a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke,
a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Spurzheim, it
imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a
new system. In proportion always to the depth of
the thought, and so to the numbers of the objects
it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is
his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in
creeds and churches, which are also classifications of
some powerful mind acting on the great elemental
thought of Duty, and man's relation to the Highest.
Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgianism.
fJThe pupil takes the same delight in subordinating
everything to the new terminology that a girl does
who has just learned botany, in seeing a new earth
and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time,
47
that the pupil will feel a real debt to the teacher,
Reliance will find his intellectual power has grown by the
study of his writings. This will continue until he has
exhausted his master's mind.
But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is
idolized, passes for the end, and not for a speedily
exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system
blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the
walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem
to them hung on the arch their master built. They
cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to
see, how you can see; "It must be somehow that
you stole the light from us."
They do not yet perceive, that, light unsystematic,
indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into
theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own.
If they are honest and do well, presently their neat
new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack,
will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light,
all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored,
will beam over the universe as on the first morning.
fl2. It is for want of self -culture that the idol of
Traveling, the idol of Italy, of England, of Egypt,
48
remains for all educated Americans. They who
made England, Italy or Greece venerable in the ^Reliance
imagination, did so not by rambling round creation
as a moth round a lamp, but by sticking fast where
they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours,
feel that duty is our place, and that the merrymen
of circumstance should follow as they may. The soul
is no traveler: the wise man stays at home with the
soul, and when his necessities, his duties, on any
occasion call him from his house, or into foreign
lands, he is at home still, and is not gadding abroad
from himself, and shall make men sensible by the
expression of his countenance, that he goes the
missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities
and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper
or a valet.
I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation
of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and
benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated,
or does not go abroad with the hope of finding
somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to
be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not
carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even
49
in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra,
Reliance his will and mind have become old and dilapidated
as they. He carries ruins to ruins.
Traveling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first
journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home
I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxi
cated 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. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces.
I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions,
but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me
wherever I go.
3. But the rage of traveling is itself only a symptom
of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intel
lectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and the
universal system of education fosters restlessness.
Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to
stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but
the traveling of the mind? Our houses are built with
foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign
ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our whole minds
50
lean, and follow the Past and the Distant, as the
eyes of a maid follow her mistress. Reliance
The soul created the arts wherever they have flour
ished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought
his model. It was an application of his own thought
to the thing to be done and the conditions to be
observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the
Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of
thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as
to any, and if the American artist will study with
hope and love the precise thing to be done by him,
considering the climate, the soil, the length of the
day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of
the government, he will create a house in which all
these will find themselves fitted, and taste and senti
ment will be satisfied also.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you
can present every moment with the cumulative force
of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted
talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous,
half possession. That which each can do best, none but
his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what
it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it.
51
Where is the master who could have taught Shakes-
JXeltance peare? Where is the master who could have instructed
Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton?
Every great man is an unique. The Scipionism of
Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow.
JIf anybody will tell me whom the great man
imitates in the original crisis when he performs a
great act, I will tell him who else than himself can
teach him. Shakespeare will never be made the study
of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned thee, and
thou canst not hope too much or dare too much.
There is at this moment, there is for me an utterance
bare and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias,
or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or
Dante, but different from all these.
Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with
thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but
if I can hear what these patriarchs say, surely I can
reply to them in the same pitch of voice: for the ear
and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Dwell
up there in the simple and noble regions of thy life,
obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Fore-
world again.
52
4. As 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. Its progress is only
apparent, like the workers of a treadmill. It undergoes
continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it
is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this
change is not amelioration.
For every thing that is given, something is taken.
Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.
What a contrast between the well-clad, reading,
writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil
and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked
New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear,
a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep
under. But compare the health of the two men, and
you shall see that his aboriginal strength the white
man has lost. If the traveler tell us truly, strike the
savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the
flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow
into soft pitch, and the blow shall send the white to
53
his grave. fJThe civilized man has built a coach,
Reliance b u t has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on
crutches, but loses so much support of muscle. He
has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the
skill to tell the hour by the sun 55 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 as 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 office increases the
number of accidents; and it may be a question
whether machinery does not encumber; whether we
have not lost by refinement some energy, by a
Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms,
some vigor of wild virtue. For every stoic was a
stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
tj There is no more deviation in the moral standard
than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater
men are now then ever were. A singular equality
may be observed between the great men of the first
54
and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art,
religion and philosophy of the Nineteenth Century ^Reliance
avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes,
three or four centuries ago. Not in time is the race
progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diog
enes, are great men, but they leave no class. He
who is really of their class will not be called by
their name, but be wholly his own man, and in turn
the founder of a sect.
The arts and inventions of each period are only its
costume, and do not invigorate men. The harm of
the improved machinery may compensate its good.
Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in their
fishing-boats, as to astonish Parry and Franklin,
whose equipment exhausted the resources of science
and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a
more splendid series of facts than any one since.
Columbus found the New World in an undecked
boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and
perishing of means and machinery which were intro
duced with loud laudation, a few years or centuries
before.
The great genius returns to essential man 58 We
55
reckoned the improvements of the art of war among
Reliance the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered
Europe by the Bivouac, which consisted of falling
back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all
aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a
perfect army, says Las Casas, "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 onward, but
the water of which it is composed does not. The
same particle does not rise from the valley to the
ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons
who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and
their experience with them.
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 what they call the soul's progress,
namely, the religious, learned, the civil institutions,
as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults
56
on these, because they feel them to be assaults on
property. They measure their esteem of each other,
by what each has, and not by what each is. But a
cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property,
ashamed of what he has, out of new respect for his
being 5S 35
Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is
accidental, came to him by inheritance, or gift, or
crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does
not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely
lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes
it away. But that which a man is, does always by
necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is
permanent and living property, which does not wait
the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire,
or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews
itself wherever the man is put.
'Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali,
"is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from
seeking after it." Our dependence on these foreign
goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers.
The political parties meet in numerous conventions;
the greater the concourse, and with each new uproar
57
of announcement, The delegation from Essex! The
Reliance Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of
Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger than
before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like
manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote
and resolve in multitude. But not so, O friends!
will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by
a method precisely the reverse.
It is only as a man puts off from himself all external
support and stands alone, that I see him to be strong
and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his
banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing
of men, and in the endless mutation, thou only firm
column must presently appear the upholder of all
that surrounds thee.
He who knows that power is in the soul, that he is
weak only because he has looked for good out of
him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws him
self unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights
himself, stands in the erect position, commands his
limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his
feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.
So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble
58
with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel
rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, Reliance
and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of
God. In the Will, work and acquire, and thou hast
chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt always
drag her after thee.
A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of
your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or
some other quite external event, raises your spirits,
and you think good days are preparing for you 35
Do not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing
can bring you peace but yourself 35 Nothing can
bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
59
Here endeth the Essay on Self-Reliance, written
by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and done into a Book
by The Roycrofters, at their shop which is in East
Aurora, Erie County, New York, MCMVIII.
X
*q
