WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.411 Vellora reading section 1 of seven. 2 00:00:02.411 --> 00:00:03.995 Trust Your Own Thought. 3 00:00:03.995 --> 00:00:04.891 SELF-RELIANCE 4 00:00:04.891 --> 00:00:06.682 "Ne te quaesiveris extra." 5 00:00:06.682 --> 00:00:17.978 "Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls early or too late. 6 00:00:17.978 --> 00:00:23.627 Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still." 7 00:00:23.627 --> 00:00:27.553 Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune. 8 00:00:27.553 --> 00:00:34.441 Cast the bantling on the rocks, Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat, Wintered with the hawk and fox. 9 00:00:34.441 --> 00:00:36.783 Power and speed be hands and feet. 10 00:00:36.783 --> 00:00:37.679 SELF-RELIANCE 11 00:00:37.679 --> 00:00:44.843 I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. 12 00:00:44.843 --> 00:00:50.491 The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. 13 00:00:50.491 --> 00:00:55.795 The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. 14 00:00:55.795 --> 00:01:04.336 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. 15 00:01:04.336 --> 00:01:17.906 Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. 16 00:01:17.906 --> 00:01:31.476 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. 17 00:01:31.476 --> 00:01:42.429 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. 18 00:01:42.429 --> 00:01:46.768 Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. 19 00:01:46.768 --> 00:01:54.896 In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. 20 00:01:54.896 --> 00:01:59.443 Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. 21 00:01:59.443 --> 00:02:09.431 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. 22 00:02:09.431 --> 00:02:22.174 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. 23 00:02:22.174 --> 00:02:47.247 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. 24 00:02:47.247 --> 00:02:56.684 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. 25 00:02:56.684 --> 00:03:03.435 Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. 26 00:03:03.435 --> 00:03:08.050 This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. 27 00:03:08.050 --> 00:03:14.318 The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. 28 00:03:14.318 --> 00:03:20.862 We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. 29 00:03:20.862 --> 00:03:31.057 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. 30 00:03:31.057 --> 00:03:41.251 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. 31 00:03:41.251 --> 00:03:44.213 It is a deliverance which does not deliver. 32 00:03:44.213 --> 00:03:49.724 In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope. 33 00:03:49.724 --> 00:03:53.581 Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. 34 00:03:53.581 --> 00:04:01.778 Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. 35 00:04:01.778 --> 00:04:18.379 Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. 36 00:04:18.379 --> 00:04:37.804 And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark. 37 00:04:37.804 --> 00:04:45.450 What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes! 38 00:04:45.450 --> 00:04:56.196 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. 39 00:04:56.196 --> 00:05:03.704 Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces we are disconcerted. 40 00:05:03.704 --> 00:05:13.141 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. 41 00:05:13.141 --> 00:05:25.678 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. 42 00:05:25.678 --> 00:05:30.844 Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. 43 00:05:30.844 --> 00:05:31.188 Hark! 44 00:05:31.188 --> 00:05:35.459 in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. 45 00:05:35.459 --> 00:05:39.110 It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. 46 00:05:39.110 --> 00:05:44.276 Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary. 47 00:05:44.276 --> 00:05:55.573 The 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. 48 00:05:55.573 --> 00:06:15.273 A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse; 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. 49 00:06:15.273 --> 00:06:22.368 He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. 50 00:06:22.368 --> 00:06:25.261 You must court him; he does not court you. 51 00:06:25.261 --> 00:06:29.739 But the man is as it were clapped into jail by his consciousness. 52 00:06:29.739 --> 00:06:41.862 As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. 53 00:06:41.862 --> 00:06:43.722 There is no Lethe for this. 54 00:06:43.722 --> 00:06:47.097 Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! 55 00:06:47.097 --> 00:06:58.463 Who can thus avoid all pledges and, having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. 56 00:06:58.463 --> 00:07:09.553 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. 57 00:07:09.553 --> 00:07:17.061 These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. 58 00:07:17.061 --> 00:07:22.847 Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. 59 00:07:22.847 --> 00:07:34.557 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. 60 00:07:34.557 --> 00:07:37.381 The virtue in most request is conformity. 61 00:07:37.381 --> 00:07:39.448 Self-reliance is its aversion. 62 00:07:39.448 --> 00:07:43.512 It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. 63 00:07:43.512 --> 00:07:45.900 Vellora reading section 2 of seven. 64 00:07:45.900 --> 00:07:47.811 Nonconformity and Integrity. 65 00:07:47.811 --> 00:07:50.950 Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. 66 00:07:50.950 --> 00:07:58.866 He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. 67 00:07:58.866 --> 00:08:03.029 Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. 68 00:08:03.029 --> 00:08:07.805 Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. 69 00:08:07.805 --> 00:08:18.587 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. 70 00:08:18.587 --> 00:08:41.584 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. 71 00:08:41.584 --> 00:08:52.025 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. 72 00:08:52.025 --> 00:08:59.668 A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. 73 00:08:59.668 --> 00:09:07.106 I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. 74 00:09:07.106 --> 00:09:12.565 Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. 75 00:09:12.565 --> 00:09:17.342 I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. 76 00:09:17.342 --> 00:09:21.982 If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? 77 00:09:21.982 --> 00:09:45.798 If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from 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 incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. 78 00:09:45.798 --> 00:09:54.601 Thy love afar is spite at home.' Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. 79 00:09:54.601 --> 00:09:58.491 Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none. 80 00:09:58.491 --> 00:10:06.270 The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. 81 00:10:06.270 --> 00:10:11.047 I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. 82 00:10:11.047 --> 00:10:14.595 I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. 83 00:10:14.595 --> 00:10:20.805 I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. 84 00:10:20.805 --> 00:10:25.173 Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. 85 00:10:25.173 --> 00:10:32.679 Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. 86 00:10:32.679 --> 00:10:33.839 Are they my poor? 87 00:10:33.839 --> 00:10:44.485 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. 88 00:10:44.485 --> 00:11:16.762 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 thousand-fold 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. 89 00:11:16.762 --> 00:11:21.744 Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. 90 00:11:21.744 --> 00:11:23.996 There is the man and his virtues. 91 00:11:23.996 --> 00:11:34.300 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. 92 00:11:34.300 --> 00:11:42.762 Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, as invalids and the insane pay a high board. 93 00:11:42.762 --> 00:11:44.604 Their virtues are penances. 94 00:11:44.604 --> 00:11:47.197 I do not wish to expiate, but to live. 95 00:11:47.197 --> 00:11:50.336 My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. 96 00:11:50.336 --> 00:11:58.935 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. 97 00:11:58.935 --> 00:12:03.507 I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. 98 00:12:03.507 --> 00:12:09.921 I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. 99 00:12:09.921 --> 00:12:17.632 I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. 100 00:12:17.632 --> 00:12:22.341 I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. 101 00:12:22.341 --> 00:12:31.895 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. 102 00:12:31.895 --> 00:12:36.398 What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. 103 00:12:36.398 --> 00:12:45.270 This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. 104 00:12:45.270 --> 00:12:53.049 It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. 105 00:12:53.049 --> 00:13:07.857 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. 106 00:13:07.857 --> 00:13:14.545 The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. 107 00:13:14.545 --> 00:13:18.775 It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. 108 00:13:18.775 --> 00:13:40.203 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. 109 00:13:40.203 --> 00:13:42.864 But do your work, and I shall know you. 110 00:13:42.864 --> 00:13:46.071 Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. 111 00:13:46.071 --> 00:13:50.848 A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. 112 00:13:50.848 --> 00:13:54.124 If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. 113 00:13:54.124 --> 00:14:01.357 I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. 114 00:14:01.357 --> 00:14:06.885 Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? 115 00:14:06.885 --> 00:14:14.664 Do I not know that with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? 116 00:14:14.664 --> 00:14:23.672 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? 117 00:14:23.672 --> 00:14:29.404 He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. 118 00:14:29.404 --> 00:14:38.889 Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. 119 00:14:38.889 --> 00:14:46.464 This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. 120 00:14:46.464 --> 00:14:48.921 Their every truth is not quite true. 121 00:14:48.921 --> 00:14:59.157 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. 122 00:14:59.157 --> 00:15:05.571 Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. 123 00:15:05.571 --> 00:15:12.327 We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. 124 00:15:12.327 --> 00:15:31.161 There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. 125 00:15:31.161 --> 00:15:41.738 The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation. 126 00:15:41.738 --> 00:15:45.765 For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. 127 00:15:45.765 --> 00:15:49.722 And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. 128 00:15:49.722 --> 00:15:55.386 The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. 129 00:15:55.386 --> 00:16:13.538 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 multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. 130 00:16:13.538 --> 00:16:20.021 Yet is the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the senate and the college. 131 00:16:20.021 --> 00:16:26.640 It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. 132 00:16:26.640 --> 00:16:32.918 Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. 133 00:16:32.918 --> 00:16:54.005 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. 134 00:16:54.005 --> 00:17:09.768 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. 135 00:17:09.768 --> 00:17:13.385 But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? 136 00:17:13.385 --> 00:17:21.369 Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? 137 00:17:21.369 --> 00:17:24.781 Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? 138 00:17:24.781 --> 00:17:38.429 It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. 139 00:17:38.429 --> 00:17:51.326 In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. 140 00:17:51.326 --> 00:17:56.376 Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. 141 00:17:56.376 --> 00:17:58.774 Vellora reading section 3 of seven. 142 00:17:58.774 --> 00:18:01.856 Consistency, Misunderstanding, and Character. 143 00:18:01.856 --> 00:18:09.528 A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. 144 00:18:09.528 --> 00:18:13.296 With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. 145 00:18:13.296 --> 00:18:17.337 He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. 146 00:18:17.337 --> 00:18:33.777 Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day., 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.', Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? 147 00:18:33.777 --> 00:18:44.737 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. 148 00:18:44.737 --> 00:18:47.135 To be great is to be misunderstood. 149 00:18:47.135 --> 00:18:49.875 I suppose no man can violate his nature. 150 00:18:49.875 --> 00:19:00.492 All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. 151 00:19:00.492 --> 00:19:03.575 Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. 152 00:19:03.575 --> 00:19:12.138 A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;, read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. 153 00:19:12.138 --> 00:19:27.139 In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. 154 00:19:27.139 --> 00:19:31.660 My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. 155 00:19:31.660 --> 00:19:38.921 The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. 156 00:19:38.921 --> 00:19:40.565 We pass for what we are. 157 00:19:40.565 --> 00:19:42.894 Character teaches above our wills. 158 00:19:42.894 --> 00:19:52.484 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. 159 00:19:52.484 --> 00:19:59.882 There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. 160 00:19:59.882 --> 00:20:04.951 For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. 161 00:20:04.951 --> 00:20:10.842 These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. 162 00:20:10.842 --> 00:20:12.829 One tendency unites them all. 163 00:20:12.829 --> 00:20:17.213 The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. 164 00:20:17.213 --> 00:20:23.446 See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. 165 00:20:23.446 --> 00:20:29.201 Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. 166 00:20:29.201 --> 00:20:31.461 Your conformity explains nothing. 167 00:20:31.461 --> 00:20:36.325 Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. 168 00:20:36.325 --> 00:20:38.517 Greatness appeals to the future. 169 00:20:38.517 --> 00:20:46.531 If I can be firm enough to-day to do right and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. 170 00:20:46.531 --> 00:20:48.723 Be it how it will, do right now. 171 00:20:48.723 --> 00:20:51.737 Always scorn appearances and you always may. 172 00:20:51.737 --> 00:20:54.272 The force of character is cumulative. 173 00:20:54.272 --> 00:20:58.382 All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. 174 00:20:58.382 --> 00:21:05.026 What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? 175 00:21:05.026 --> 00:21:09.410 The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. 176 00:21:09.410 --> 00:21:12.767 They shed an united light on the advancing actor. 177 00:21:12.767 --> 00:21:16.055 He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. 178 00:21:16.055 --> 00:21:24.206 That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. 179 00:21:24.206 --> 00:21:27.700 Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. 180 00:21:27.700 --> 00:21:29.618 It is always ancient virtue. 181 00:21:29.618 --> 00:21:32.974 We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. 182 00:21:32.974 --> 00:21:46.195 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. 183 00:21:46.195 --> 00:21:51.264 I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. 184 00:21:51.264 --> 00:21:54.963 Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. 185 00:21:54.963 --> 00:22:00.169 Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. 186 00:22:00.169 --> 00:22:02.635 Let us never bow and apologize more. 187 00:22:02.635 --> 00:22:05.444 A great man is coming to eat at my house. 188 00:22:05.444 --> 00:22:10.170 I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me. 189 00:22:10.170 --> 00:22:16.061 I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. 190 00:22:16.061 --> 00:22:39.899 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 working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. 191 00:22:39.899 --> 00:22:41.886 Where he is, there is nature. 192 00:22:41.886 --> 00:22:44.831 He measures you and all men and all events. 193 00:22:44.831 --> 00:22:50.791 Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. 194 00:22:50.791 --> 00:22:56.682 Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. 195 00:22:56.682 --> 00:23:01.614 The man must be so much that he must make all circumstances indifferent. 196 00:23:01.614 --> 00:23:14.629 Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;, and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. 197 00:23:14.629 --> 00:23:19.013 A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. 198 00:23:19.013 --> 00:23:27.850 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. 199 00:23:27.850 --> 00:23:40.248 An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. 200 00:23:40.248 --> 00:23:49.975 Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome"; and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. 201 00:23:49.975 --> 00:23:54.222 Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. 202 00:23:54.222 --> 00:24:03.881 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. 203 00:24:03.881 --> 00:24:15.389 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. 204 00:24:15.389 --> 00:24:33.884 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. 205 00:24:33.884 --> 00:24:40.666 The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. 206 00:24:40.666 --> 00:25:11.559 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 reason and finds himself a true prince. 207 00:25:11.559 --> 00:25:14.368 Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. 208 00:25:14.368 --> 00:25:17.245 In history our imagination plays us false. 209 00:25:17.245 --> 00:25:31.836 Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary 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. 210 00:25:31.836 --> 00:25:36.014 Why all this deference to Alfred and Scanderbeg and Gustavus? 211 00:25:36.014 --> 00:25:39.645 Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? 212 00:25:39.645 --> 00:25:46.289 As great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. 213 00:25:46.289 --> 00:25:54.989 When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen. 214 00:25:54.989 --> 00:26:00.948 The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the eyes of nations. 215 00:26:00.948 --> 00:26:07.250 It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. 216 00:26:07.250 --> 00:26:35.952 The joyful loyalty with which men have everywhere 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 the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man. 217 00:26:35.952 --> 00:26:38.346 Vellora reading section 4 of seven. 218 00:26:38.346 --> 00:26:39.577 The Source Within. 219 00:26:39.577 --> 00:26:46.484 The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. 220 00:26:46.484 --> 00:26:47.784 Who is the Trustee? 221 00:26:47.784 --> 00:26:52.913 What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? 222 00:26:52.913 --> 00:27:07.617 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? 223 00:27:07.617 --> 00:27:16.508 The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. 224 00:27:16.508 --> 00:27:22.253 We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. 225 00:27:22.253 --> 00:27:29.297 In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. 226 00:27:29.297 --> 00:27:46.805 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 proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. 227 00:27:46.805 --> 00:27:56.243 We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause. 228 00:27:56.243 --> 00:27:59.389 Here is the fountain of action and of thought. 229 00:27:59.389 --> 00:28:07.459 Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. 230 00:28:07.459 --> 00:28:14.846 We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. 231 00:28:14.846 --> 00:28:22.300 When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. 232 00:28:22.300 --> 00:28:29.208 If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. 233 00:28:29.208 --> 00:28:32.559 Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. 234 00:28:32.559 --> 00:28:43.844 Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. 235 00:28:43.844 --> 00:28:51.777 He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. 236 00:28:51.777 --> 00:29:00.941 My wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving;, the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command my curiosity and respect. 237 00:29:00.941 --> 00:29:12.773 Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily; for they do not distinguish between perception and notion. 238 00:29:12.773 --> 00:29:16.261 They fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. 239 00:29:16.261 --> 00:29:19.202 But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. 240 00:29:19.202 --> 00:29:29.050 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. 241 00:29:29.050 --> 00:29:32.675 For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun. 242 00:29:32.675 --> 00:29:39.856 The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. 243 00:29:39.856 --> 00:29:57.159 It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole. 244 00:29:57.159 --> 00:30:09.469 Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. 245 00:30:09.469 --> 00:30:14.188 All things are made sacred by relation to it, one as much as another. 246 00:30:14.188 --> 00:30:22.806 All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and in the universal miracle petty and particular miracles disappear. 247 00:30:22.806 --> 00:30:34.979 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. 248 00:30:34.979 --> 00:30:39.698 Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? 249 00:30:39.698 --> 00:30:44.896 Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? 250 00:30:44.896 --> 00:30:47.427 Whence then this worship of the past? 251 00:30:47.427 --> 00:30:52.624 The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. 252 00:30:52.624 --> 00:31:10.611 Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, 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 any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming. 253 00:31:10.611 --> 00:31:18.818 Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. 254 00:31:18.818 --> 00:31:22.922 He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. 255 00:31:22.922 --> 00:31:32.223 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. 256 00:31:32.223 --> 00:31:33.933 There is no time to them. 257 00:31:33.933 --> 00:31:38.925 There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. 258 00:31:38.925 --> 00:31:47.884 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. 259 00:31:47.884 --> 00:31:52.603 Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. 260 00:31:52.603 --> 00:32:05.598 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. 261 00:32:05.598 --> 00:32:11.616 He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. 262 00:32:11.616 --> 00:32:13.531 This should be plain enough. 263 00:32:13.531 --> 00:32:23.106 Yet 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. 264 00:32:23.106 --> 00:32:28.030 We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. 265 00:32:28.030 --> 00:32:57.096 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 understand them and are willing to let the words go; for at any time they can use words as good when occasion comes. 266 00:32:57.096 --> 00:32:59.627 If we live truly, we shall see truly. 267 00:32:59.627 --> 00:33:05.098 It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. 268 00:33:05.098 --> 00:33:12.348 When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. 269 00:33:12.348 --> 00:33:19.802 When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn. 270 00:33:19.802 --> 00:33:30.403 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. 271 00:33:30.403 --> 00:33:34.985 That thought by what I can now nearest approach to say it, is this. 272 00:33:34.985 --> 00:33:53.861 When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the footprints 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. 273 00:33:53.861 --> 00:33:56.597 It shall exclude example and experience. 274 00:33:56.597 --> 00:33:59.195 You take the way from man, not to man. 275 00:33:59.195 --> 00:34:03.162 All persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. 276 00:34:03.162 --> 00:34:05.556 Fear and hope are alike beneath it. 277 00:34:05.556 --> 00:34:07.950 There is somewhat low even in hope. 278 00:34:07.950 --> 00:34:13.831 In the hour of vision there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. 279 00:34:13.831 --> 00:34:25.595 The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. 280 00:34:25.595 --> 00:34:33.665 Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; long intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account. 281 00:34:33.665 --> 00:34:44.949 This which I think and feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is called life, and what is called death. 282 00:34:44.949 --> 00:34:47.616 Life only avails, not the having lived. 283 00:34:47.616 --> 00:34:58.559 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. 284 00:34:58.559 --> 00:35:13.605 This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that for ever 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. 285 00:35:13.605 --> 00:35:16.204 Why then do we prate of self-reliance? 286 00:35:16.204 --> 00:35:21.402 Inasmuch as the soul is present there will be power not confident but agent. 287 00:35:21.402 --> 00:35:25.163 To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. 288 00:35:25.163 --> 00:35:29.130 Speak rather of that which relies because it works and is. 289 00:35:29.130 --> 00:35:34.601 Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. 290 00:35:34.601 --> 00:35:38.363 Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. 291 00:35:38.363 --> 00:35:41.987 We fancy it rhetoric when we speak of eminent virtue. 292 00:35:41.987 --> 00:35:56.760 We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a 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. 293 00:35:56.760 --> 00:35:59.166 Vellora reading section 5 of seven. 294 00:35:59.166 --> 00:36:00.609 Self-Trust in Nature. 295 00:36:00.609 --> 00:36:09.407 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. 296 00:36:09.407 --> 00:36:19.510 Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. 297 00:36:19.510 --> 00:36:23.428 All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain. 298 00:36:23.428 --> 00:36:34.013 Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of its presence and impure action. 299 00:36:34.013 --> 00:36:38.480 I see the same law working in nature for conservation and growth. 300 00:36:38.480 --> 00:36:42.054 Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. 301 00:36:42.054 --> 00:36:47.140 Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. 302 00:36:47.140 --> 00:37:03.705 The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul. 303 00:37:03.705 --> 00:37:08.791 Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. 304 00:37:08.791 --> 00:37:17.314 Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. 305 00:37:17.314 --> 00:37:22.537 Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. 306 00:37:22.537 --> 00:37:31.747 Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches. 307 00:37:31.747 --> 00:37:33.191 But now we are a mob. 308 00:37:33.191 --> 00:37:47.075 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 urns of other men. 309 00:37:47.075 --> 00:37:48.243 We must go alone. 310 00:37:48.243 --> 00:37:53.604 I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. 311 00:37:53.604 --> 00:38:00.271 How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! 312 00:38:00.271 --> 00:38:01.714 So let us always sit. 313 00:38:01.714 --> 00:38:11.887 Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? 314 00:38:11.887 --> 00:38:14.842 All men have my blood and I have all men's. 315 00:38:14.842 --> 00:38:21.303 Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. 316 00:38:21.303 --> 00:38:27.145 But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. 317 00:38:27.145 --> 00:38:33.331 At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. 318 00:38:33.331 --> 00:38:45.015 Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say, 'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. 319 00:38:45.015 --> 00:38:49.552 The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. 320 00:38:49.552 --> 00:38:52.507 No man can come near me but through my act. 321 00:38:52.507 --> 00:38:57.731 "What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love." 322 00:38:57.731 --> 00:39:12.302 If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. 323 00:39:12.302 --> 00:39:16.495 This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. 324 00:39:16.495 --> 00:39:19.863 Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. 325 00:39:19.863 --> 00:39:26.392 Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. 326 00:39:26.392 --> 00:39:34.090 Say to them, 'O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. 327 00:39:34.090 --> 00:39:36.152 Henceforward I am the truth's. 328 00:39:36.152 --> 00:39:41.582 Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. 329 00:39:41.582 --> 00:39:44.400 I will have no covenants but proximities. 330 00:39:44.400 --> 00:39:55.878 I shall endeavour 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. 331 00:39:55.878 --> 00:39:57.734 I appeal from your customs. 332 00:39:57.734 --> 00:39:58.902 I must be myself. 333 00:39:58.902 --> 00:40:02.270 I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. 334 00:40:02.270 --> 00:40:06.256 If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. 335 00:40:06.256 --> 00:40:10.380 If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. 336 00:40:10.380 --> 00:40:13.061 I will not hide my tastes or aversions. 337 00:40:13.061 --> 00:40:22.683 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. 338 00:40:22.683 --> 00:40:30.175 If you are noble, I will love you: if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. 339 00:40:30.175 --> 00:40:36.911 If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. 340 00:40:36.911 --> 00:40:40.004 I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly. 341 00:40:40.004 --> 00:40:47.221 It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. 342 00:40:47.221 --> 00:40:49.214 Does this sound harsh to-day? 343 00:40:49.214 --> 00:41:00.967 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 may you give these friends pain. 344 00:41:00.967 --> 00:41:06.053 Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. 345 00:41:06.053 --> 00:41:16.569 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. 346 00:41:16.569 --> 00:41:29.697 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. 347 00:41:29.697 --> 00:41:32.171 But the law of consciousness abides. 348 00:41:32.171 --> 00:41:37.464 There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. 349 00:41:37.464 --> 00:41:43.856 You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. 350 00:41:43.856 --> 00:41:53.822 Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid you. 351 00:41:53.822 --> 00:41:58.564 But I may also neglect this reflex standard and absolve me to myself. 352 00:41:58.564 --> 00:42:01.726 I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. 353 00:42:01.726 --> 00:42:06.262 It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. 354 00:42:06.262 --> 00:42:11.830 But if I can discharge its debts it enables me to dispense with the popular code. 355 00:42:11.830 --> 00:42:17.259 If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day. 356 00:42:17.259 --> 00:42:27.225 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 taskmaster. 357 00:42:27.225 --> 00:42:40.903 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! 358 00:42:40.903 --> 00:42:49.082 If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics. 359 00:42:49.082 --> 00:42:55.887 The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. 360 00:42:55.887 --> 00:43:01.660 We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death and afraid of each other. 361 00:43:01.660 --> 00:43:04.684 Our age yields no great and perfect persons. 362 00:43:04.684 --> 00:43:22.142 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 do lean and beg day and night continually. 363 00:43:22.142 --> 00:43:31.490 Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. 364 00:43:31.490 --> 00:43:33.071 We are parlor soldiers. 365 00:43:33.071 --> 00:43:37.057 We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born. 366 00:43:37.057 --> 00:43:42.074 If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart. 367 00:43:42.074 --> 00:43:45.511 If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. 368 00:43:45.511 --> 00:44:04.687 If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges and is not 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 complaining the rest of his life. 369 00:44:04.687 --> 00:44:26.063 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 newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. 370 00:44:26.063 --> 00:44:35.342 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. 371 00:44:35.342 --> 00:44:38.434 He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. 372 00:44:38.434 --> 00:45:16.512 Let a Stoic open 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 teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor and make his name dear to all history. 373 00:45:16.512 --> 00:45:34.176 It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the 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. 374 00:45:34.176 --> 00:45:36.579 Vellora reading section 6 of seven. 375 00:45:36.579 --> 00:45:38.640 Prayer, Travel, and Imitation. 376 00:45:38.640 --> 00:45:38.777 1. 377 00:45:38.777 --> 00:45:41.524 In what prayers do men allow themselves! 378 00:45:41.524 --> 00:45:46.262 That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. 379 00:45:46.262 --> 00:45:59.034 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. 380 00:45:59.034 --> 00:46:04.803 Prayer that craves a particular commodity, any thing less than all good, is vicious. 381 00:46:04.803 --> 00:46:10.296 Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. 382 00:46:10.296 --> 00:46:13.936 It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. 383 00:46:13.936 --> 00:46:17.438 It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. 384 00:46:17.438 --> 00:46:22.108 But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. 385 00:46:22.108 --> 00:46:26.365 It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. 386 00:46:26.365 --> 00:46:30.142 As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. 387 00:46:30.142 --> 00:46:32.751 He will then see prayer in all action. 388 00:46:32.751 --> 00:46:45.387 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. 389 00:46:45.387 --> 00:46:57.129 Caratach, in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies, "His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors; Our valors are our best gods." 390 00:46:57.129 --> 00:47:00.288 Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. 391 00:47:00.288 --> 00:47:04.752 Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. 392 00:47:04.752 --> 00:47:13.541 Regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work and already the evil begins to be repaired. 393 00:47:13.541 --> 00:47:15.533 Our sympathy is just as base. 394 00:47:15.533 --> 00:47:29.473 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 their own reason. 395 00:47:29.473 --> 00:47:32.357 The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. 396 00:47:32.357 --> 00:47:36.271 Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. 397 00:47:36.271 --> 00:47:43.344 For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. 398 00:47:43.344 --> 00:47:48.082 Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it. 399 00:47:48.082 --> 00:47:56.185 We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. 400 00:47:56.185 --> 00:47:58.932 The gods love him because men hated him. 401 00:47:58.932 --> 00:48:04.357 "To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the blessed Immortals are swift." 402 00:48:04.357 --> 00:48:10.606 As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. 403 00:48:10.606 --> 00:48:15.962 They say with those foolish Israelites, 'Let not God speak to us, lest we die. 404 00:48:15.962 --> 00:48:31.413 Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.' 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. 405 00:48:31.413 --> 00:48:34.091 Every new mind is a new classification. 406 00:48:34.091 --> 00:48:44.803 If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! 407 00:48:44.803 --> 00:48:45.696 a new system. 408 00:48:45.696 --> 00:48:55.791 In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. 409 00:48:55.791 --> 00:49:08.220 But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. 410 00:49:08.220 --> 00:49:11.241 Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. 411 00:49:11.241 --> 00:49:22.847 The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new terminology as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. 412 00:49:22.847 --> 00:49:30.950 It will happen for a time that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. 413 00:49:30.950 --> 00:49:51.551 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. 414 00:49:51.551 --> 00:50:07.894 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. 415 00:50:07.894 --> 00:50:10.915 Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. 416 00:50:10.915 --> 00:50:29.250 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. 417 00:50:29.250 --> 00:50:29.388 2. 418 00:50:29.388 --> 00:50:40.237 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. 419 00:50:40.237 --> 00:50:49.577 They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. 420 00:50:49.577 --> 00:50:52.735 In manly hours we feel that duty is our place. 421 00:50:52.735 --> 00:51:18.349 The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still 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. 422 00:51:18.349 --> 00:51:34.487 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. 423 00:51:34.487 --> 00:51:44.444 He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. 424 00:51:44.444 --> 00:51:50.006 In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. 425 00:51:50.006 --> 00:51:51.791 He carries ruins to ruins. 426 00:51:51.791 --> 00:51:53.989 Travelling is a fool's paradise. 427 00:51:53.989 --> 00:51:58.178 Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. 428 00:51:58.178 --> 00:52:04.633 At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. 429 00:52:04.633 --> 00:52:16.993 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. 430 00:52:16.993 --> 00:52:19.397 I seek the Vatican and the palaces. 431 00:52:19.397 --> 00:52:24.959 I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. 432 00:52:24.959 --> 00:52:27.431 My giant goes with me wherever I go. 433 00:52:27.431 --> 00:52:27.568 3. 434 00:52:27.568 --> 00:52:34.710 But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. 435 00:52:34.710 --> 00:52:39.929 The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. 436 00:52:39.929 --> 00:52:44.049 Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. 437 00:52:44.049 --> 00:52:48.513 We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? 438 00:52:48.513 --> 00:53:00.461 Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. 439 00:53:00.461 --> 00:53:04.307 The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. 440 00:53:04.307 --> 00:53:08.152 It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. 441 00:53:08.152 --> 00:53:14.951 It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. 442 00:53:14.951 --> 00:53:18.453 And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? 443 00:53:18.453 --> 00:53:47.637 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 sentiment will be satisfied also. 444 00:53:47.637 --> 00:53:49.972 Insist on yourself; never imitate. 445 00:53:49.972 --> 00:54:02.676 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. 446 00:54:02.676 --> 00:54:06.934 That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. 447 00:54:06.934 --> 00:54:11.878 No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. 448 00:54:11.878 --> 00:54:15.517 Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? 449 00:54:15.517 --> 00:54:21.766 Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? 450 00:54:21.766 --> 00:54:23.689 Every great man is a unique. 451 00:54:23.689 --> 00:54:28.359 The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. 452 00:54:28.359 --> 00:54:32.273 Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. 453 00:54:32.273 --> 00:54:37.560 Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. 454 00:54:37.560 --> 00:54:50.676 There is at this moment for you an utterance brave 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. 455 00:54:50.676 --> 00:55:08.874 Not possibly will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. 456 00:55:08.874 --> 00:55:16.496 Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again. 457 00:55:16.496 --> 00:55:16.633 4. 458 00:55:16.633 --> 00:55:22.333 As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. 459 00:55:22.333 --> 00:55:27.552 All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves. 460 00:55:27.552 --> 00:55:29.973 Vellora reading section 7 of seven. 461 00:55:29.973 --> 00:55:31.980 Society, Property, and Peace. 462 00:55:31.980 --> 00:55:33.571 Society never advances. 463 00:55:33.571 --> 00:55:37.445 It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. 464 00:55:37.445 --> 00:55:48.030 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. 465 00:55:48.030 --> 00:55:51.419 For every thing that is given something is taken. 466 00:55:51.419 --> 00:55:54.878 Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. 467 00:55:54.878 --> 00:56:12.796 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! 468 00:56:12.796 --> 00:56:20.268 But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. 469 00:56:20.268 --> 00:56:35.003 If the traveller 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 same blow shall send the white to his grave. 470 00:56:35.003 --> 00:56:39.846 The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. 471 00:56:39.846 --> 00:56:44.343 He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. 472 00:56:44.343 --> 00:56:50.016 He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. 473 00:56:50.016 --> 00:57:00.116 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. 474 00:57:00.116 --> 00:57:09.663 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. 475 00:57:09.663 --> 00:57:31.732 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. 476 00:57:31.732 --> 00:57:36.644 For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian? 477 00:57:36.644 --> 00:57:42.732 There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. 478 00:57:42.732 --> 00:57:45.360 No greater men are now than ever were. 479 00:57:45.360 --> 00:58:03.763 A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. 480 00:58:03.763 --> 00:58:06.253 Not in time is the race progressive. 481 00:58:06.253 --> 00:58:11.788 Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. 482 00:58:11.788 --> 00:58:20.712 He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and in his turn the founder of a sect. 483 00:58:20.712 --> 00:58:26.661 The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume and do not invigorate men. 484 00:58:26.661 --> 00:58:30.743 The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. 485 00:58:30.743 --> 00:58:41.605 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. 486 00:58:41.605 --> 00:58:48.938 Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. 487 00:58:48.938 --> 00:58:52.328 Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. 488 00:58:52.328 --> 00:59:02.981 It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. 489 00:59:02.981 --> 00:59:05.887 The great genius returns to essential man. 490 00:59:05.887 --> 00:59:20.346 We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among 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. 491 00:59:20.346 --> 00:59:39.924 The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Cases, "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." 492 00:59:39.924 --> 00:59:41.169 Society is a wave. 493 00:59:41.169 --> 00:59:46.012 The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. 494 00:59:46.012 --> 00:59:50.232 The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. 495 00:59:50.232 --> 00:59:52.238 Its unity is only phenomenal. 496 00:59:52.238 --> 00:59:58.257 The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them. 497 00:59:58.257 --> 01:00:06.420 And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. 498 01:00:06.420 --> 01:00:23.439 Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. 499 01:00:23.439 --> 01:00:29.112 They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. 500 01:00:29.112 --> 01:00:35.200 But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. 501 01:00:35.200 --> 01:00:53.602 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. 502 01:00:53.602 --> 01:01:11.727 But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is 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 breathes. 503 01:01:11.727 --> 01:01:25.702 "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. 504 01:01:25.702 --> 01:01:35.802 The political parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! 505 01:01:35.802 --> 01:01:38.085 The Democrats from New Hampshire! 506 01:01:38.085 --> 01:01:39.400 The Whigs of Maine! 507 01:01:39.400 --> 01:01:45.487 the young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. 508 01:01:45.487 --> 01:01:51.160 In like manner the reformers summon conventions and vote and resolve in multitude. 509 01:01:51.160 --> 01:01:52.406 Not so, O friends! 510 01:01:52.406 --> 01:01:58.148 will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse. 511 01:01:58.148 --> 01:02:05.688 It is only as a man puts off all foreign support and stands alone that I see him to be strong and to prevail. 512 01:02:05.688 --> 01:02:08.732 He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. 513 01:02:08.732 --> 01:02:10.946 Is not a man better than a town? 514 01:02:10.946 --> 01:02:20.216 Ask nothing of men, and, in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. 515 01:02:20.216 --> 01:02:44.291 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, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head. 516 01:02:44.291 --> 01:02:46.643 So use all that is called Fortune. 517 01:02:46.643 --> 01:02:51.694 Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. 518 01:02:51.694 --> 01:02:58.681 But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. 519 01:02:58.681 --> 01:03:07.536 In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. 520 01:03:07.536 --> 01:03:21.234 A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. 521 01:03:21.234 --> 01:03:22.479 Do not believe it. 522 01:03:22.479 --> 01:03:25.316 Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. 523 01:03:25.316 --> 01:03:29.328 Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.