Latest / The Philosophy Insights Collection / 11 - Intellect - Essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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- Intellect from essays first series by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Go speed the stars of thought onto their shining goals. The sower scatters broad his seed. The wheat thus strewest be souls. 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 the fire. Gravity, laws, method, and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature in its restless 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 graveled 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 the vision of the eye, but is union with the things known. Intellect and intellection signified of the common ear, consideration of abstract truth, the considerations of time and place, of you and me, of prophets and hurts tyrannize over most men's souls. 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 men 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 of fact the subject of thought raises it all that mass of mental lifth moral phenomena which we do not make objects of voluntary thoughts 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 the 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 embound. A better art than that of Egypt has taken fair and corruption out of it. It is ifvicible, rated 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 marvelous light of today 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 tormentor's life, the greatest part is inco gullable 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 any 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 visited as much by too violent direction given by our will as by too great noses negligence. We do not determine what we will think. We will 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 or profited us, we shall receive the superiority of the spontaneous or intuitive principle over the arithmetical or logical. The first contains a 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 precession 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 commonwealth. Do you think the porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for you, everybody knows as much as the savants. The walls of rude minds are scrolled 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 wits and culture, finds his curiosity inflame to 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 error of reflection, when we not only observe, but take pains to observe. When we are 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, intend 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 of 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 governments. Let him intend his mind without respite, without rest, in one direction his best. He 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 came 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 want it, 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, and 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 Shakespeare and Savantes, 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 garrets 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 riding, 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 Shakespeare, we should not be conscious of any steep inferiority, No, but 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 whole 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 there too, or the tasseled 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 ceases 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, sentence, its 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, And 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 exists, 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 the 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 the 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 presently, 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 draftsmen 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 meagerness 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 it paints its life like 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 doom. 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 enclosures, 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 competentjudges 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 elements 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 elements, 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 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 students, to avoid this offense, and to liberalize himself, aims to make a mechanical whole of history, or science or philosophy by a numerical edition 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 notebooks 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 encyclopedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after here 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 aggression. Is the integrity of the intellect transmitted to its works, but by a vigilance, which brings the intellect in its greatness and best states, 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 the 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 several 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 role of moral duty. A self denial, no less austeer than the saints, 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 thousand fold, 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 menixenus 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 greats and universe. 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, 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 subversive to all our opinions, tastes, and manner of living, such as Swedenborg, such as Kant, such as Coleridge, such as Hegel, or his interpreter Cousin, seem to make young men in this country take thankfully and heartily all they can give, Exhaust them, wrestle with them, let them not go, and tell their blessing be won, And after a short season the dismay will be overpassed, 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 the 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 Eschylus be that man he has 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 escaluses 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, Shelling, 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 dominating, say, then, instead of too timidly pouring 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 least ast 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 trees majicti, 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 parvenus and popular. For persuasion is in soul, but necessity is in intellect. This band of grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus and Pedoicles, Plato, Platinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Sinius, 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 rhetorican 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 scalele 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 satisfy the least displeasure or petulance at the dullness 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, And of intellect,