Essays
contributor: Eric Lease Morgan (Infomotions, Inc.)
creator: Emerson, Ralph Waldo
extent: 422975
format: text/plain
language: en
publisher: Eris Etext Project
rights: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/
source: 5
subject: man
subject: nature
subject: soul
subject: life
subject: maketh
subject: cometh
subject: emerson
subject: ralph
subject: waldo
subject: essays
subject: american
subject: literature
type: text
local mirror: emerson-essays-231.txt
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plain html: emerson-essays-231.htm
sort title: Essays
full text: ESSAYS _First Series_ by Ralph Waldo Emerson HISTORY ----- There is no great and no small To the Soul that maketh all: And where it cometh, all things are; And it cometh everywhere. I am owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain. ESSAY I _History_ There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world. This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as t…