We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things; all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men, and events, and life, come to us, only because of that thread; they pass and repass, only that we may know the direction and continuity of that line. A book or statement which goes to show that there is no line, but random and chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a prosperity and no account of it, a hero born from a fool, a fool from a hero, --dispirits us. Seen or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes counterfeit ties; genius finds the real ones.
[Montaigne, or the Skeptic]
* * *
Under this head too falls that homage, very pure as I think, which all ranks pay to the hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear the shouts in the street! The people cannot see him enough. They delight in a man. Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! what eyes! Atlantean shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal inward force to guide the great machine! This pleasure of full expression to that which, in their private experience, is usually cramped and obstructed, runs also much higher, and is the secret of the reader's joy in literary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse the mountain of ore.
[Uses of Great Men]
* * *
All successful men have agreed in one thing, — they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law ; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things. A belief in causality, or strict connection between every trifle and the principle of being, and, in consequence, belief in compensation, or, that nothing is got for nothing, — characterizes all valuable minds, and must control every effort that is made by an industrious one. The most valiant men are the best believers in the tension of the laws. " All the great captains," said Bonaparte, " have performed vast achievements by conforming with the rules of the art, — by adjusting efforts to obstacles."
[Power]
[There's got to be even better ones than these...must keep searching. In the the third one, the important word from Emerson's point of view is compensation: "nothing is got for nothing." Got to reread that one again (there's a whole essay with title Compensation, but I didn't think of flipping through it for Barackian Tidbits). Is my obsession with Emerson unhealthy? It's not a good thing to be always thinking of how events relate to the essays of Ralph Waldo. Where's Waldo, you know.]
Comments