Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Page 11

Our school curriculum is hypocritical and sniveling. When we study history, we're conned by our imagination. Kings, generals, power, and wealth are a more impressive vocabulary than John and Mary Doe in a small house working in an office, but the stuff of life is the same to both; they're equally worthy.

Why all this deference to Washington and Lincoln and Alexander the Great? Even supposing they had some virtue, and it's worth studying, did they use up the last of it? There's as much at stake in your private act today as there was in their public and famous steps.

When ordinary people act with original views,
the glamour will be transferred
from the actions of kings
to those of citizens.

The world has been programmed by its kings, who have so hypnotized the eyes of nations. We've been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual admiration that people owe one another. With joyful loyalty, we've always allowed our leaders to walk among us exempt from our laws, to make their own living from us and our things while controlling ours, to pay for benefits not with money but with honor, and to represent the law in their own persons. This was the script by which we sublimated our awareness of our own right and magnificence, the right of every human being.

Intuition

The magnetism that all original actions exert is explained when we examine the meaning of self-trust. Who is the trustee? What is the original Self on which we might universally rely? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, that shoots a ray of beauty into even trivial and selfish actions if the least bit of independence appears?

The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, that we call spontaneity or instinct. We call this primary wisdom intuition. All later teachings are tuitions.

From that profound force,
that pure quality that cannot be further analyzed,
comes the common origin of everything.

The sense of aliveness that rises mysteriously in quiet times from the soul isn't something separate from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them. It clearly comes from the same source that gives life and being to all.

First we share
the life-giving force that creates things,
then afterwards
we call a certain set of things "nature"
and forget that we came from the same place.

That force is the fountain of our actions and thoughts. It is the lungs that inspire wisdom into us and which cannot be denied without irreverence and atheism. We lie in the lap of an immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity.

When we recognize justice, when we recognize truth, we're not really doing anything; we're just allowing a passage to its beams. If we ask where this comes from, if we try to pry into the soul that causes, no philosophy can tell us. Its presence or absence is all we can affirm.

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