Emerson: The Over-Soul
As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that
flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season
its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a
surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look
up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien
energy the visions come.
The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present,
and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in
which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere;
that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being
is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which
all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is
submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and
talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to
speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore
tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and
virtue, and power, and beauty. We live in succession, in division,
in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the
whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part
and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep
power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us,
is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of
seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject
and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the
sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these
are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that
Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on
our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is
innate in every man, we can know what it saith. Every man's words,
who speaks from that life, must sound vain to those who do not dwell
in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My
words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only
itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be
lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I
desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate
the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected
of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.