Essays, First Series | Page 3

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This Project Gutenberg Etext Prepared by Tony Adam
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Essays, First Series
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

HISTORY.
There is no great and no small To the Soul that maketh all: And where
it cometh, all things are And it cometh everywhere.
I am owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, Of
Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart, and
Shakspeare's strain.
I. HISTORY.
THERE is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an
inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the
right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has
thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any
time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this
universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only
and sovereign agent.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated
by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all
his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth
from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every
emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But the thought is
always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as

laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the
limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole
encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one
acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded
already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire,
republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to
the manifold world.
This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must
solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be
explained from individual