History

History loc: 7005

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 be-fallen 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. loc: 7020

Of the works of this mind history is the record. loc: 7024

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. loc: 7027

If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. loc: 7031

The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. loc: 7038

is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things. loc: 7045

We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; — because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for us loc: 7053

all that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. loc: 7059

world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. loc: 7070

I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the Islands, — the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras in my own mind. loc: 7082

All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, — must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. loc: 7085
Note: This certainly gives new and wider meaning to background knowledge.

must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must be. loc: 7090

inquiry into antiquity, — all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis, — is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. loc: 7096

The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance. loc: 7111
Note: Does there have to be a metaphysic to this beyond that of Spinoza? Does Emerson have to repeat Deacartes' error?

Genius studies the causal thought, and, far back in the womb of things, sees the rays parting from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters. loc: 7117
Note: Could he be talking about the big bang here?

Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. loc: 7118
Note: Obviously reference to Liebniz

Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species; through many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity. loc: 7119
Note: What would E. O. Wilson think about this?

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. loc: 7145
the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of the rock. loc: 7149
Note: I think that this is built into the neuroscience of perception, that we see similarities because that is the way we perceive things--cf Gazzaniga on edge perception or facial recognition or the orders of magnitude and rhythm that underlie our perceptions of beauty

like manner, all public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime. loc: 7200

The Grecian state is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses, — of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. loc: 7228

The Greek had, it seems, the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine. loc: 7250
Note: Is this true? Are our natures and our concerns really so similar, or are the Greeks really different enough from us that we wouldn't even have the same values. How much does time and place and circumstance and culture shape who we are, how we think, and how we feel so as to make us possibly totally alien and foreign to each other? In other words, how much of this essay is total bullshit?

in that protest which each considerate person makes against the superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the part of old reformers, and in the search after truth finds like them new perils to virtue. loc: 7278

beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of the imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities. loc: 7289

Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts, and the migration of colonies,) it gives the history of religion with some closeness to the faith of later ages. loc: 7290

so out of the human heart go, as it were, highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. loc: 7344

every history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. loc: 7387