The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays, First Series, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Title: Essays, First Series

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Posting Date: December 1, 2008 [EBook #2944]
Release Date: December, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES ***

Produced by Tony Adam

ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

HISTORY.

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

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

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
befallen 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