ESSAYS
        _First Series_
        by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 
        HISTORY
 
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        There is no great and no small
        To the Soul that maketh all:
        And where it cometh, all things are;
        And it cometh everywhere.

 
        I am owner of the sphere,
        Of the seven stars and the solar year,
        Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,
        Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain.

 
        ESSAY I _History_
 
        There is one mind common to all individual men.  Every man is
an inlet to the same and to all of the same.  He that is once
admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole
estate.  What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt,
he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can
understand.  Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all
that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

        Of the works of this mind history is the record.  Its genius is
illustrated by the entire series of days.  Man is explicable by
nothing less than all his history.  Without hurry, without rest, the
human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty,
every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate
events.  But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts
of history preexist in the mind as laws.  Each law in turn is made by
circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but
one at a time.  A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts.  The
creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece,
Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.
Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are
merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.

        This human mind wrote history, and this must read it.  The
Sphinx must solve her own riddle.  If the whole of history is in one
man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.  There is
a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.
As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature,
as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of
miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of
centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed
by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours.  Of the universal
mind each individual man is one more incarnation.  All its properties
consist in him.  Each new fact in his private experience flashes a
light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his
life refer to national crises.  Every revolution was first a thought
in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man,
it is the key to that era.  Every reform was once a private opinion,
and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the
problem of the age.  The fact narrated must correspond to something
in me to be credible or intelligible.  We as we read must become
Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must
fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we
shall learn nothing rightly.  What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia
is as much an illustration of the mind's powers and depravations as
what has befallen us.  Each new law and political movement has
meaning for you.  Stand before each of its tablets and say, `Under
this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the
defect of our too great nearness to ourselves.  This throws our
actions into perspective: and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the
balance, and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in
the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant
persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.

        It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men
and things.  Human life as containing this is mysterious and
inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws.  All laws
derive hence their ultimate reason; all express more or less
distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence.
Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and
instinctively we at first hold to it with swords and laws, and wide
and complex combinations.  The obscure consciousness of this fact is
the light of all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for
education, for justice, for charity, the foundation of friendship and
love, and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of
self-reliance.  It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as
superior beings.  Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not
in their stateliest pictures -- in the sacerdotal, the imperial
palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius -- anywhere lose our
ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better
men; but rather is it true, that in their grandest strokes we feel
most at home.  All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a
boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.  We
sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries,
the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; -- because
there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or
the blow was struck _for us_, as we ourselves in that place would
have done or applauded.