Ralph Waldo Emerson – Intellect

INTELLECT.

Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands above it
in the chemical tables, positively to that which stands below it. Water
dissolves wood and iron and salt; air dissolves water; electric fire
dissolves air, but the intellect dissolves fire, gravity, laws,
method, and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature in its
resistless menstruum. Intellect lies behind genius, which is intellect
constructive. Intellect is the simple power anterior to all action or
construction. Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a natural history
of the intellect, but what man has yet been able to mark the steps and
boundaries of that transparent essence? The first questions are always
to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness
of a child. How can we speak of the action of the mind under any
divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so
forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each
becomes the other. Itself alone is. Its vision is not like the vision of
the eye, but is union with the things known.

Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear consideration of
abstract truth. The considerations of time and place, of you and me, of
profit and hurt tyrannize over most men’s minds. Intellect separates the
fact considered, from you, from all local and personal reference, and
discerns it as if it existed for its own sake. Heraclitus looked upon
the affections as dense and colored mists. In the fog of good and
evil affections it is hard for man to walk forward in a straight line.
Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the
light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the
individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact,
and not as I and mine. He who is immersed in what concerns person or
place cannot see the problem of existence. This the intellect always
ponders. Nature shows all things formed and bound. The intellect pierces
the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness between remote
things and reduces all things into a few principles.

The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. All that mass of
mental and moral phenomena which we do not make objects of voluntary
thought, come within the power of fortune; they constitute the
circumstance of daily life; they are subject to change, to fear, and
hope. Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of melancholy.
As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man, imprisoned in mortal
life, lies open to the mercy of coming events. But a truth, separated by
the intellect, is no longer a subject of destiny. We behold it as a god
upraised above care and fear. And so any fact in our life, or any
record of our fancies or reflections, disentangled from the web of our
unconsciousness, becomes an object impersonal and immortal. It is the
past restored, but embalmed. A better art than that of Egypt has taken
fear and corruption out of it. It is eviscerated of care. It is offered
for science. What is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten
us but makes us intellectual beings.

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind
that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that
spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual. Long
prior to the age of reflection is the thinking of the mind. Out of
darkness it came insensibly into the marvellous light of to-day. In the
period of infancy it accepted and disposed of all impressions from the
surrounding creation after its own way. Whatever any mind doth or saith
is after a law; and this native law remains over it after it has come to
reflection or conscious thought. In the most worn, pedantic, introverted
self-tormenter’s life, the greatest part is incalculable by him,
unforeseen, unimaginable, and must be, until he can take himself up by
his own ears. What am I? What has my will done to make me that I
am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this
connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my
ingenuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an
appreciable degree.

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot with your best
deliberation and heed come so close to any question as your spontaneous
glance shall bring you, whilst you rise from your bed, or walk abroad
in the morning after meditating the matter before sleep on the previous
night. Our thinking is a pious reception. Our truth of thought is
therefore vitiated as much by too violent direction given by our will,
as by too great negligence. We do not determine what we will think.
We only open our senses, clear away as we can all obstruction from the
fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have little control over our
thoughts. We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments
into their heaven and so fully engage us that we take no thought for the
morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own. By
and by we fall out of that rapture, bethink us where we have been, what
we have seen, and repeat as truly as we can what we have beheld. As
far as we can recall these ecstasies we carry away in the ineffaceable
memory the result, and all men and all the ages confirm it. It is called
Truth. But the moment we cease to report and attempt to correct and
contrive, it is not truth.

If we consider what persons have stimulated and profited us, we shall
perceive the superiority of the spontaneous or intuitive principle over
the arithmetical or logical. The first contains the second, but virtual
and latent. We want in every man a long logic; we cannot pardon the
absence of it, but it must not be spoken. Logic is the procession or
proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent
method; the moment it would appear as propositions and have a separate
value it is worthless.

In every man’s mind, some images, words and facts remain, without effort
on his part to imprint them, which others forget, and afterwards these
illustrate to him important laws. All our progress is an unfolding, like
the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a
knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to
the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By
trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into truth and you shall know why
you believe.

Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college
rules. What you have aggregated in a natural manner surprises and
delights when it is produced. For we cannot oversee each other’s
secret. And hence the differences between men in natural endowment are
insignificant in comparison with their common wealth. Do you think the
porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for
you? Every body knows as much as the savant. The walls of rude minds are
scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a
lantern and read the inscriptions. Every man, in the degree in which he
has wit and culture, finds his curiosity inflamed concerning the modes
of living and thinking of other men, and especially of those classes
whose minds have not been subdued by the drill of school education.

This instinctive action never ceases in a healthy mind, but becomes
richer and more frequent in its informations through all states of
culture. At last comes the era of reflection, when we not only observe,
but take pains to observe; when we of set purpose sit down to consider
an abstract truth; when we keep the mind’s eye open whilst we converse,
whilst we read, whilst we act, intent to learn the secret law of some
class of facts.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think. I would put myself
in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I
blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he
meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live. For example,
a man explores the basis of civil government. Let him intend his mind
without respite, without rest, in one direction. His best heed long time
avails him nothing. Yet thoughts are flitting before him. We all but
apprehend, we dimly forebode the truth. We say I will walk abroad, and
the truth will take form and clearness to me. We go forth, but cannot
find it. It seems as if we needed only the stillness and composed
attitude of the library to seize the thought. But we come in, and are as
far from it as at first. Then, in a moment, and unannounced, the truth
appears. A certain wandering light appears, and is the distinction, the
principle, we wanted. But the oracle comes because we had previously
laid siege to the shrine. It seems as if the law of the intellect
resembled that law of nature by which we now inspire, now expire the
breath; by which the heart now draws in, then hurls out the blood,–the
law of undulation. So now you must labor with your brains, and now you
must forbear your activity and see what the great Soul showeth.

The immortality of man is as legitimately preached from the
intellections as from the moral volitions. Every intellection is mainly
prospective. Its present value is its least. Inspect what delights
you in Plutarch, in Shakspeare, in Cervantes. Each truth that a writer
acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts
lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had
littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private
biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the
day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where
did he get this? and think there was something divine in his life. But
no; they have myriads of facts just as good, would they only get a lamp
to ransack their attics withal.

We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in
art. I knew, in an academical club, a person who always deferred to
me; who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my experiences had
somewhat superior; whilst I saw that his experiences were as good as
mine. Give them to me and I would make the same use of them. He held the
old; he holds the new; I had the habit of tacking together the old and
the new which he did not use to exercise. This may hold in the great
examples. Perhaps if we should meet Shakspeare we should not be
conscious of any steep inferiority; no, but of a great equality,–only
that he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying, his facts,
which we lacked. For notwithstanding our utter incapacity to produce
anything like Hamlet and Othello, see the perfect reception this wit and
immense knowledge of life and liquid eloquence find in us all.

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or hoe corn, and then
retire within doors and shut your eyes and press them with your hand,
you shall still see apples hanging in the bright light with boughs and
leaves thereto, or the tasselled grass, or the corn-flags, and this for
five or six hours afterwards. There lie the impressions on the retentive
organ, though you knew it not. So lies the whole series of natural
images with which your life has made you acquainted, in your memory,
though you know it not; and a thrill of passion flashes light on their
dark chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit image, as
the word of its momentary thought.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure,
is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser
years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and
always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until
by and by we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish
person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature
paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

In the intellect constructive, which we popularly designate by the word
Genius, we observe the same balance of two elements as in intellect
receptive. The constructive intellect produces thoughts, sentences,
poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the
marriage of thought with nature. To genius must always go two gifts, the
thought and the publication. The first is revelation, always a
miracle, which no frequency of occurrence or incessant study can ever
familiarize, but which must always leave the inquirer stupid with
wonder. It is the advent of truth into the world, a form of thought
now for the first time bursting into the universe, a child of the old
eternal soul, a piece of genuine and immeasurable greatness. It seems,
for the time, to inherit all that has yet existed and to dictate to
the unborn. It affects every thought of man and goes to fashion every
institution. But to make it available it needs a vehicle or art by which
it is conveyed to men. To be communicable it must become picture or
sensible object. We must learn the language of facts. The most wonderful
inspirations die with their subject if he has no hand to paint them to
the senses. The ray of light passes invisible through space and only
when it falls on an object is it seen. When the spiritual energy is
directed on something outward, then it is a thought. The relation
between it and you first makes you, the value of you, apparent to me.
The rich inventive genius of the painter must be smothered and lost
for want of the power of drawing, and in our happy hours we should be
inexhaustible poets if once we could break through the silence into
adequate rhyme. As all men have some access to primary truth, so all
have some art or power of communication in their head, but only in the
artist does it descend into the hand. There is an inequality, whose laws
we do not yet know, between two men and between two moments of the same
man, in respect to this faculty. In common hours we have the same facts
as in the uncommon or inspired, but they do not sit for their portraits;
they are not detached, but lie in a web. The thought of genius is
spontaneous; but the power of picture or expression, in the most
enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain
control over the spontaneous states, without which no production is
possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the rhetoric of thought,
under the eye of judgment, with a strenuous exercise of choice. And yet
the imaginative vocabulary seems to be spontaneous also. It does not
flow from experience only or mainly, but from a richer source. Not by
any conscious imitation of particular forms are the grand strokes of the
painter executed, but by repairing to the fountain-head of all forms in
his mind. Who is the first drawing-master? Without instruction we know
very well the ideal of the human form. A child knows if an arm or a leg
be distorted in a picture; if the attitude be natural or grand or mean;
though he has never received any instruction in drawing or heard any
conversation on the subject, nor can himself draw with correctness a
single feature. A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before
they have any science on the subject, and a beautiful face sets twenty
hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the mechanical
proportions of the features and head. We may owe to dreams some light
on the fountain of this skill; for as soon as we let our will go and let
the unconscious states ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are! We
entertain ourselves with wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals,
of gardens, of woods and of monsters, and the mystic pencil wherewith we
then draw has no awkwardness or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty;
it can design well and group well; its composition is full of art, its
colors are well laid on and the whole canvas which it paints is lifelike
and apt to touch us with terror, with tenderness, with desire and with
grief. Neither are the artist’s copies from experience ever mere copies,
but always touched and softened by tints from this ideal domain.

The conditions essential to a constructive mind do not appear to be
so often combined but that a good sentence or verse remains fresh and
memorable for a long time. Yet when we write with ease and come out into
the free air of thought, we seem to be assured that nothing is easier
than to continue this communication at pleasure. Up, down, around, the
kingdom of thought has no inclosures, but the Muse makes us free of her
city. Well, the world has a million writers. One would think then that
good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of
each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good
books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years. It is true
that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in advance of
the creative, so that there are many competent judges of the best
book, and few writers of the best books. But some of the conditions of
intellectual construction are of rare occurrence. The intellect is a
whole and demands integrity in every work. This is resisted equally by
a man’s devotion to a single thought and by his ambition to combine too
many.

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention on a
single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long
time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood; herein
resembling the air, which is our natural element, and the breath of
our nostrils, but if a stream of the same be directed on the body for
a time, it causes cold, fever, and even death. How wearisome the
grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic, or
indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration
of a single topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison
also. I cannot see what you see, because I am caught up by a strong
wind and blown so far in one direction that I am out of the hoop of your
horizon.

Is it any better if the student, to avoid this offence, and to
liberalize himself, aims to make a mechanical whole of history, or
science, or philosophy, by a numerical addition of all the facts that
fall within his vision? The world refuses to be analyzed by addition and
subtraction. When we are young we spend much time and pains in filling
our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics,
Art, in the hope that in the course of a few years we shall have
condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at
which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get
no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola,
whose arcs will never meet.

Neither by detachment neither by aggregation is the integrity of the
intellect transmitted to its works, but by a vigilance which brings the
intellect in its greatness and best state to operate every moment. It
must have the same wholeness which nature has. Although no diligence can
rebuild the universe in a model by the best accumulation or disposition
of details, yet does the world reappear in miniature in every event,
so that all the laws of nature may be read in the smallest fact. The
intellect must have the like perfection in its apprehension and in its
works. For this reason, an index or mercury of intellectual proficiency
is the perception of identity. We talk with accomplished persons who
appear to be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the turf, the
bird are not theirs, have nothing of them; the world is only their
lodging and table. But the poet, whose verses are to be spheral
and complete, is one whom Nature cannot deceive, whatsoever face of
strangeness she may put on. He feels a strict consanguinity, and detects
more likeness than variety in all her changes. We are stung by the
desire for new thought; but when we receive a new thought it is only the
old thought with a new face, and though we make it our own we instantly
crave another; we are not really enriched. For the truth was in us
before it was reflected to us from natural objects; and the profound
genius will cast the likeness of all creatures into every product of his
wit.

But if the constructive powers are rare and it is given to few men to
be poets, yet every man is a receiver of this descending holy ghost,
and may well study the laws of its influx. Exactly parallel is the whole
rule of intellectual duty to the rule of moral duty. A self-denial
no less austere than the saint’s is demanded of the scholar. He must
worship truth, and forego all things for that, and choose defeat and
pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby augmented.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which
you please,–you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man
oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept
the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party
he meets,–most likely his father’s. He gets rest, commodity, and
reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth
predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He
will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations
between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the
inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate
for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his
being.

The circle of the green earth he must measure with his shoes to find the
man who can yield him truth. He shall then know that there is somewhat
more blessed and great in hearing than in speaking. Happy is the hearing
man; unhappy the speaking man. As long as I hear truth I am bathed by a
beautiful element and am not conscious of any limits to my nature. The
suggestions are thousandfold that I hear and see. The waters of the
great deep have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I speak, I
define, I confine and am less. When Socrates speaks, Lysis and Menexenus
are afflicted by no shame that they do not speak. They also are good.
He likewise defers to them, loves them, whilst he speaks. Because a true
and natural man contains and is the same truth which an eloquent man
articulates; but in the eloquent man, because he can articulate it,
it seems something the less to reside, and he turns to these silent
beautiful with the more inclination and respect. The ancient sentence
said, Let us be silent, for so are the gods. Silence is a solvent that
destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.
Every man’s progress is through a succession of teachers, each of whom
seems at the time to have a superlative influence, but it at last gives
place to a new. Frankly let him accept it all. Jesus says, Leave father,
mother, house and lands, and follow me. Who leaves all, receives more.
This is as true intellectually as morally. Each new mind we approach
seems to require an abdication of all our past and present possessions.
A new doctrine seems at first a subversion of all our opinions, tastes,
and manner of living. Such has Swedenborg, such has Kant, such has
Coleridge, such has Hegel or his interpreter Cousin seemed to many young
men in this country. Take thankfully and heartily all they can give.
Exhaust them, wrestle with them, let them not go until their blessing be
won, and after a short season the dismay will be overpast, the excess of
influence withdrawn, and they will be no longer an alarming meteor, but
one more bright star shining serenely in your heaven and blending its
light with all your day.

But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly to that which draws him,
because that is his own, he is to refuse himself to that which draws him
not, whatsoever fame and authority may attend it, because it is not
his own. Entire self-reliance belongs to the intellect. One soul is a
counterpoise of all souls, as a capillary column of water is a balance
for the sea. It must treat things and books and sovereign genius as
itself also a sovereign. If Aeschylus be that man he is taken for, he
has not yet done his office when he has educated the learned of Europe
for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master of delight
to me also. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him nothing
with me. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand Aeschyluses to my
intellectual integrity. Especially take the same ground in regard to
abstract truth, the science of the mind. The Bacon, the Spinoza, the
Hume, Schelling, Kant, or whosoever propounds to you a philosophy of
the mind, is only a more or less awkward translator of things in
your consciousness which you have also your way of seeing, perhaps of
denominating. Say then, instead of too timidly poring into his
obscure sense, that he has not succeeded in rendering back to you your
consciousness. He has not succeeded; now let another try. If Plato
cannot, perhaps Spinoza will. If Spinoza cannot, then perhaps Kant.
Anyhow, when at last it is done, you will find it is no recondite, but a
simple, natural, common state which the writer restores to you.

But let us end these didactics. I will not, though the subject might
provoke it, speak to the open question between Truth and Love. I
shall not presume to interfere in the old politics of the skies;–”The
cherubim know most; the seraphim love most.” The gods shall settle
their own quarrels. But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the
intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men
who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure
reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought
from age to age. When at long intervals we turn over their abstruse
pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few, these
great spiritual lords who have walked in the world,–these of the
old religion,–dwelling in a worship which makes the sanctities of
Christianity look parvenues and popular; for “persuasion is in soul, but
necessity is in intellect.” This band of grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus,
Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Synesius and
the rest, have somewhat so vast in their logic, so primary in their
thinking, that it seems antecedent to all the ordinary distinctions of
rhetoric and literature, and to be at once poetry and music and dancing
and astronomy and mathematics. I am present at the sowing of the seed of
the world. With a geometry of sunbeams the soul lays the foundations of
nature. The truth and grandeur of their thought is proved by its scope
and applicability, for it commands the entire schedule and inventory of
things for its illustration. But what marks its elevation and has even
a comic look to us, is the innocent serenity with which these babe-like
Jupiters sit in their clouds, and from age to age prattle to each other
and to no contemporary. Well assured that their speech is intelligible
and the most natural thing in the world, they add thesis to thesis,
without a moment’s heed of the universal astonishment of the human race
below, who do not comprehend their plainest argument; nor do they
ever relent so much as to insert a popular or explaining sentence,
nor testify the least displeasure or petulance at the dulness of their
amazed auditory. The angels are so enamored of the language that is
spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing
and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any
who understand it or not.