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EDUCATION.

"Human education ought to take the side of the spirit instead of the side of nature.

"Education fails in its duty, when it brings the free-will spirit to uniformity in matter, instead of unity in the love spirit: when it gives an external straightness, instead of internal rectitude.

"Very vague ideas prevail of a truly spiritual culture, that is, a culture of spirit with spirit prior to a cultivation of mind with mind.

"The teacher must quicken spirit with spirit, and not try to quicken spirit with knowledge, or with exterior and inferior circumstances.

"A child's faith has much to encounter, having spirit for its standard, and meeting with its senses nothing but matter.

"Let a child meet spirit in every human being, that it may be quickly turned from matter to spirit, and then from spirit (individual) to spirit (universal.)"

"I ask

MUTUAL AND SELF-INSTRUCTION.

to write a sketch of what goes on within him in any twelve hours of the day, and then see if it be better to preserve or to burn it.

"If he burns it, he will be convinced by this typic illustration, that some internal burning is necessary.

"Any person may test himself in this manner, and then doctrines or arguments are unnecessary."

SPIRIT.

"Man's return is from science to conscience, and from conscience to spirit.

"Learning will not supply the place of spirit, but spirit will supply the place of learning. Spirit is the wisdom in words, and the life in practice.

"When we are with the spirit, acting with the spirit, we cannot do anything wrong, but when we are acting for the spirit, we may fail, as we may have mistaken our directions or our duty, and the more likely as the spirit acknowledges no works but those which it is present at the doing of.

"Man makes a sad mistake when he relates himself to consequences, and forgets his more precious and antecedent relation with spirit. The longer he does this, he so confounds himself in his own deeds, that he forgets he, himself, is a deed, or a work of a higher, not yet in a finished state, and which he interrupts greatly by his darkening and deteriorating measures."

PHRENOLOGY.

"Phrenology explains to us, that besides our animal organization, we have a spiritual organization, which spiritual organization needs a spirit-culture, and without which spirit-culture, man remains but a rational animal."

REFORM.

"What a nation should and ought to possess, it must not have until it has progressed to the ground for the same, or until it be acting from the permanent ground.

"The permanent change will render the outward change necessary; but the want of a change will not bring about the permanent change.

"What man has gained for himself within, from the spirit, the spirit will give him an authority to ask for without, and assist him to obtain it.

"Man's fitness is himself, not his wishes or desires. As the foot is, so should the shoe be, and not otherwise."

ASSOCIATION.

"We must agree together in some third if we are to act together; it is not two but three that are to make the two, and that which unites them.

"The thing to be done will not unite the doers."

MEMORY.

"Man is not memory: the spirit in man is memory, and is purpose. Memory is performed in spirit; and man is not spirit, but spiritual. If the spiritual be not with spirit, where is memory? If the spiritual be only with matter, memory is as little in man as in the trees.

"If memory were not spirit, how could it act in its oneness as it does? If it were spiritual, it would like spirituality be participable; but as spirit it is absolute unity. "Without the spirit there would be no oneness, and memory in man is this oneness, this spirit, this antecedent that is absolutely indivisible.

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Memory is that which carries on all the uniting processes in man. Whatsoever the faculties hold to it, it holds together; and what does not obtain hold of it, is seen by the faculty's failing. Man in some of his faculties may have worked in spirit and with spirit, and in other faculties not; and this will account for the readiness and backwardness of man's particular relation with memory."

L.

LECTURES ON THE TIMES.

[Read at the Masonic Temple in Boston, in Dec. 1840, and Jan. 1841.]
BY R. W. EMERSON.

LECTURE III. THE TRANSCENDENTALIST.

THE first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times. The light is always identical in its composition, but it falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is first revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is formless, but in theirs; in like manner, thought only appears in the objects it classifies. What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.

The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. 38

VOL. III.

NO. III.

He does not deny the sensuous fact; by no means; but he will not see that alone. He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact which nearly concerns him. This manner of looking at things, transfers every object in nature from an independent and anomalous position without there, into the consciousness. Even the materialist Condillac, perhaps the most logical expounder of materialism, was constrained to say, "Though we should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out of ourselves; it is always our own thought that we perceive." What more could an idealist say?

The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes that his life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but knows where he stands, and what he does. Yet how easy it is to show him, that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions, to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before his sense. The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house or Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to the angles of his structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot, perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither, - a bit of bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness. And this wild balloon, in which his whole venture is embarked, is a just symbol of his whole state and faculty. One thing, at least, he says is certain, and does not give me the headache, that figures do not lie; the multiplication table has been hitherto found unimpeachable truth; and, moreover, if I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find it again to-morrow; but for these thoughts, I know not whence they are. They change and pass away. ask him why he believes that an uniform experience will

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continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith in his figures, and he will perceive that his mental fabric is built up on just as strange and quaking foundations as his proud edifice of stone.

In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world as an appearance. The materialist respects sensible masses, Society, Government, social art, and luxury, every establishment, every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent of space, or amount of objects, every social action. The idealist has another measure, which is metaphysical, namely, the rank which things themselves take in his consciousness; not at all, the size or appearance. Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena. Although in his action overpowered by the laws of action, and so, warmly coöperating with men, even preferring them to himself, yet when he speaks scientifically, or after the order of thought, he is constrained to degrade persons into representatives of truths. He does not respect labor, or the products of labor, namely, property, otherwise than as a manifold symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidelity of details the laws of being; he does not respect government, except as far as it reiterates the law of his mind; nor the church; nor charities; nor arts, for themselves; but hears, as at a vast distance, what they say, as if his consciousness would speak to him through a pantomimic scene. His thought, that is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid Unknown Centre of him.

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From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, this beholding of all things in the mind, follows easily his whole ethics. It is simpler to be self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me; but best when it is likest to solitude. Everything real is self-existent. Everything divine shares the

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