On Intellect

Excerpts from the essay 'Intellect' by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 vitiated as much by too violent
direction given by our will, as by too great negligence. We do not
determine what we will think. We only 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.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think. I would put
myself in the attitude to look in the eye 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 government.
Let him intend his mind without respite, without rest, in one
direction. His best heed 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 come 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 wanted. 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, 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.

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 writing, 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 Shakspeare, we should not be conscious of any steep
inferiority; no: but of 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 any thing like
Hamlet and Othello, see the perfect reception this wit, and immense
knowledge of life, and liquid eloquence find in us all.

A
self-denial, no less austere than the saint's, 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.

Entire self-reliance belongs to the intellect.
One soul is a counterpoise of all souls, as a 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 Aeschylus be that
man he is 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 Aeschyluses 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, Schelling,
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 denominating.
Say, then, instead of too timidly poring 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
last it is done, you will find it is no recondite, but a simple,
natural, common state, which the writer restores to you.