Caricature of the "transparent eyeball"
by Christopher Cranch |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1836).
Introduction
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies,
histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face;
we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition,
and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for
a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite
us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope
among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of
its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields.
There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
[...] (pp. 5-6)
Chapter 1: "Nature"
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.
I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone,
let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between
him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design,
to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets
of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,
how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the
city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and
light the universe with their admonishing smile.
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible;
but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.
Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and
lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise
spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour,
as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.
When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind.
We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this
which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet.
The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty
or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond.
But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man
has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best
part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least
they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines
into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward
senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even
into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily
food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real
sorrows. Nature says, -- he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall
be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its
tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different
state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that
fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of
incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded
sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed
a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off
his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child.
In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity
reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them
in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that
nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which
nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air,
and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent
eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through
me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and
accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a trifle
and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness,
I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape,
and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful
as his own nature. [...] (pp. 9-12)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, daguerreotype, 1857
Chapter 4: "Language"
Language is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the vehble, and threefold degree.
1. Words are signs of natural facts.
2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural
history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of
the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact,
if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means
straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing
of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion,
the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things,
and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation
is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same
tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and savages use only nouns or names
of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.
2. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import, -- so conspicuous a fact
in the history of language, -- is our least debt to nature. It is not words only that are
emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some
spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that
state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.
An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man
is a torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the
delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and
ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us, is respectively
our image of memory and hope.
Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things?
Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful
type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual
life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and
shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its;
we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky
with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which,
intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit.
Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries,
embodies it in his language, as the FATHER.
It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these analogies, but that they
are constant, and pervade nature. These are not the dreams of a few poets, here and there, but
man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of
beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man
be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man. All the facts in
natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex.
But marry it to human history, and it is full of life. Whole Floras, all Linnaeus' and
Buffon's volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but the most trivial of these facts,
the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, applied to the illustration
of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or, in any way associated to human nature, affects
us in the most lively and agreeable manner. The seed of a plant, -- to what affecting analogies
in the nature of man, is that little fruit made use of, in all discourse, up to the voice of
Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed, -- "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a
spiritual body." The motion of the earth round its axis, and round the sun, makes the day,
and the year. These are certain amounts of brute light and heat. But is there no intent
of an analogy between man's life and the seasons? And do the seasons gain no grandeur or
pathos from that analogy? The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as
the ant's; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the
little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its
habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.
Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts, savages,
who have only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we go back in history, language
becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts
are represented by natural symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original
elements of all languages. It has moreover been observed, that the idioms of all languages
approach each other in passages of the greatest eloquence and power. And as this is the
first language, so is it the last. This immediate dependence of language upon nature,
this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never loses
its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a
strong-natured farmer or back-woodsman, which all men relish.
Thus is nature an interpreter, by whose means man converses with his fellow man. A man's power to connect
his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his
character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.
The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of
character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires,
the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, -- and duplicity and falsehood
take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will,
is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to
stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion
in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate
the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized
nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths,
who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously
on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold
primarily on nature.
But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again
to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that
he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our discourse rises
above the ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought,
it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual
processes, will find that a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind,
cotemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence,
good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous.
It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation.
It is the working of the Original Cause through the instruments he has already made.
These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses for a powerful
mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of cities. We know more from nature than
we can at will communicate. Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its
presence. The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by
their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without heed, --
shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics.
Long hereafter, amidst agitation and terror in national councils, -- in the hour of
revolution, -- these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit
symbols and words of the thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. At the call
of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and
shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy.
And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of power are put into his hands.
[...] (32-40)
Letter to Martin Van Buren President of the United States (1836)
Sir:
The seat you fill places you in a relation of credit and nearness to every citizen. By right and natural position, every
citizen is your friend.
Before any acts contrary to his own judgment or interest have repelled the affections of any man,
each may look with trust and living anticipation to your government.
Each has the highest right to call your attention to such subjects as are of a public nature, and
properly belong to the chief magistrate; and the good magistrate will
feel a joy in meeting such confidence. In this belief and at the instance of a few of my friends and
neighbors, I crave of your patience a short hearing for their
sentiments and my own: and the circumstances that my name will be utterly unknown to you will only
give the fairer chance to your equitable construction of what
I have to say.
Sir, my communication respects the sinister rumors that fill this part of the country concerning the
Cherokee people. The interest always felt in the
aboriginal population -- an interest naturally growing as that decays -- has been heightened in regard
to this tribe. Even in our distant State some good rumor of
their worth and civility has arrived. We have learned with joy their improvement in the social arts.
We have read their newspapers. We have seen some of them in our
schools and colleges. In common with the great body of the American people, we have witnessed with
sympathy the painful labors of these red men to redeem their own race
from the doom of eternal inferiority, and to borrow and domesticate in the tribe the arts and customs
of the Caucasian race. And notwithstanding the unaccountable
apathy with which of late years the Indians have been sometimes abandoned to their enemies, it is
not to be doubted that it is the good pleasure and the understanding of
all humane persons in the Republic, of the men and the matrons sitting in the thriving independent
families all over the land, that they shall be duly cared for;
that they shall taste justice and love from all to whom we have delegated the office of dealing with them.
The newspapers now inform us that, in December, 1835, a treaty contracting for the exchange of all
the Cherokee territory was pretended to be made by an agent on
the part of the United States with some persons appearing on the part of the Cherokees; that the
fact afterwards transpired that these deputies did by no means
represent the will of the nation; and that, out of eighteen thousand souls composing the nation,
fifteen thousand six hundred and sixty-eight have protested
against the so-called treaty. It now appears that the government of the United States choose to
hold the Cherokees to this sham treaty, and are proceeding to execute
the same. Almost the entire Cherokee Nation stand up and say, "This is not our act. Behold us.
Here are we. Do not mistake that handful of deserters for us;"
and the American President and the Cabinet, the Senate and the House of Representatives, neither
hear these men nor see them, and are contracting to put this
active nation into carts and boats, and to drag them over mountains and rivers to a wilderness
at a vast distance beyond the Mississippi.
As a paper purporting to be an army order fixes a month from this day as the hour for this doleful removal.
In the name of God, sir, we ask you if this be so. Do the newspapers rightly inform us? Man and
women with pale and perplexed faces meet one another in the streets
and churches here, and ask if this be so. We have inquired if this be a gross misrepresentation
from the party opposed to the government and anxious to blacken it
with the people. We have looked at the newspapers of different parties and find a horrid
confirmation of the tale. We are slow to believe it. We hoped the Indians
were misinformed, and that their remonstrance was premature, and will turn out to be a needless
act of terror.
The piety, the principle that is left in the United States, if only in its coarsest form, a regard
to the speech of men, forbid us to entertain it as a fact.
Such a dereliction of all faith and virtue, such a denial of justice, and such deafness to screams
for mercy were never heard of in times of peace and in the dealing
of a nation with its own allies and wards, since the earth was made. Sir, does this government
think that the people of the United States are become savage and mad?
From their mind are the sentiments of love and a good nature wiped clean out? The soul of man,
the justice, the mercy that is the heart in all men,
from Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business.
In speaking thus the sentiments of my neighbors and my own, perhaps I overstep the bounds of decorum.
But would it not be a higher indecorum coldly to argue
a matter like this? We only state the fact that a crime is projected that confounds our
understanding by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as
the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor
Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting
and dying imprecations our country, any more? You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair
in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy;
and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.
You will not do us the injustice of connecting this remonstrance with any sectional and party
feeling. It is in our hearts the simplest commandment of brotherly love.
We will not have this great and solemn claim upon national and human justice huddled aside under
the flimsy plea of its being a party act. Sir, to us the questions
upon which the government and the people have been agitated during the past year, touching the
prostration of the currency and of trade, seem but motes in comparison.
These hard times, it is true, have brought the discussion home to every farmhouse and poor man's
house in this town; but it is the chirping of grasshoppers beside
the immortal question whether justice shall be done by the race of civilized to the race of
savage man, whether all the attributes of reason, of civility, of justice,
and even of mercy, shall be put off by the American people, and so vast an outrage upon the
Cherokee Nation and upon human nature shall be consummated.
One circumstance lessens the reluctance with which I intrude at this time on your attention my
conviction that the government ought to be admonished of a new
historical fact, which the discussion of this question has disclosed, namely, that there exists
in a great part of the Northern people a gloomy diffidence
in the moral character of the government.
On the broaching of this question, a general expression of despondency, of disbelief that any
good will accrue from a remonstrance on an act of fraud and robbery,
appeared in those men to whom we naturally turn for aid and counsel. Will the American government
steal? Will it lie? Will it kill? -- We ask triumphantly.
Our counselors and old statesmen here say that ten years ago they would have staked their lives on
the affirmation that the proposed Indian measures could not be
executed; that the unanimous country would put them down. And now the steps of this crime follow
each other so fast, at such fatally quick time, that
the millions of virtuous citizens, whose agents the government are, have no place to interpose,
and must shut their eyes until the last howl and wailing of
these tormented villages and tribes shall afflict the ear of the world.
I will not hide from you, as an indication of the alarming distrust, that a letter addressed as
mine is, and suggesting to the mind of the Executive the plain
obligations of man, has a burlesque character in the apprehensions of some of my friends. I, sir,
will not beforehand treat you with the contumely of this distrust.
I will at least state to you this fact, and show you how plain and humane people, whose love would
be honor, regard the policy of the government, and what injurious
inferences they draw as to the minds of the governors. A man with your experience in affairs must
have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to
the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the
nature of things that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor.
For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood. The potentate and the people perish
before it; but with it, and its executor, they are omnipotent.
I write thus, sir, to inform you of the state of mind these Indian tidings have awakened here, and
to pray with one voice more that you, whose hands are strong with
the delegated power of fifteen millions of men, will avert with that might the terrific injury
which threatens the Cherokee tribe.
With great respect, sir, I am your fellow citizen,
